Nothing Phone 3 Review: Nearly There
Our full Nothing Phone 3 review after two weeks of testing: measured performance, battery figures, and whether it is worth £579.
Priya Raghunathan
The verdict, briefly
The Nothing Phone 3 is Nothing's 2025 entry in a crowded smartphones market, and at £579 it is competing against some of the strongest hardware we have tested. After a fortnight of daily use, the headline is straightforward: it delivers excellent battery life.
The one-line answer: Buy it for excellent battery life. Think twice if this would bother you daily: weak low-light photography.
Build and materials
There is nothing experimental here, which is mostly to the Nothing Phone 3's credit. The detail worth calling out is that the Glyph lights have become genuinely useful as a delivery and timer readout. Against the rest of the smartphones category it feels considered rather than novel.
What it can do
Our testing runs the same suite on every device so figures stay comparable across years. The figure worth quoting is Screen-on time: 7h 20m. That places it comfortably above average for its price bracket.
| Specification | Nothing Phone 3 |
|---|---|
| Display | 6.7in AMOLED, 120Hz |
| Chip | Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 |
| RAM | 12GB |
| Battery | 5000mAh |
| Charging | 45W wired |
| Weight | 198g |
| Screen-on time | 7h 20m |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent fourteen days as the reviewer’s only phone, SIM included. Screen at a metered 200 nits, adaptive refresh left on, the same twelve apps installed on every handset, and a fixed 5G network in the same building.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Screen-on time | A scripted day — four hours of mixed browsing, an hour of video, thirty minutes of camera, the rest idle — repeated three times and averaged. |
| Sustained performance | Twenty minutes of continuous load, reporting the figure at the end rather than the peak in the first ninety seconds. |
| Charging | From 2% to 100% with the fastest charger the manufacturer sells, at 22°C ambient, timed to the minute. |
| Camera | The same eighteen scenes on every phone — backlit portrait, indoor low light, moving subject — shot in the default mode with no editing. |
| Thermals | Surface temperature at the hottest point after the sustained run, measured with a contact probe. |
We deliberately do not report synthetic benchmark totals quoted in isolation, and any figure supplied by the manufacturer.
The honest caveat: Battery results are specific to our routine. A heavy camera user will see materially less screen-on time than these numbers suggest.
What it does well
- Excellent battery life
- Clean software with almost no preinstalled clutter
- A design that still stands out
Taken together, those strengths make it a natural fit for buyers who want flagship battery and software without flagship pricing.
The compromises
- Weak low-light photography
- No telephoto lens
- The ultrawide falls apart after dark
None of these are dealbreakers on their own. Whether they matter depends entirely on how you intend to use it, which is why the section below matters more than the score.
How it compares
The closest alternatives on price are Pixel 9a and Galaxy A56. All three have been through the same tests, so the figures below are directly comparable rather than collected from different reviews.
| Model | Price | Our score | Standout | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing Phone 3 (this review) | £579 | 4 / 5 | Excellent battery life | Weak low-light photography |
| Pixel 9a | £499 | 5 / 5 | Flagship camera processing at mid-range money | No telephoto |
| Galaxy A56 | £399 | 4 / 5 | Six years of updates at this price | Middling low-light photography |
The Pixel 9a scores higher at £499, so the Nothing Phone 3 has to win on excellent battery life rather than on the total.
Is it worth the money?
At £579 the Nothing Phone 3 undercuts the category average of £845 by £266, against an average score of 4.1 out of 5 across the smartphones we have tested. Its own 4 works out at roughly £145 per point. Paying above average for a below-average score only makes sense if buyers who want flagship battery and software without flagship pricing describes you precisely.
If the budget is the binding constraint, the Galaxy A56 at £399 is the floor we would still recommend — below that the compromises stop being ones you can live with.
Daily use
Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was display — 6.7in AMOLED, 120Hz is more than adequate and you forget about it by the third day. What kept surfacing instead was that weak low-light photography, which is easy to shrug off in a spec comparison and harder to ignore at 6pm on a Friday. On the other side, the Glyph lights have become genuinely useful as a delivery and timer readout turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.
Who this is for
Buy the Nothing Phone 3 if you are buyers who want flagship battery and software without flagship pricing. Skip it if this is something you would notice every day: weak low-light photography.
Buy it if:
- Buyers who want flagship battery and software without flagship pricing
- You want excellent battery life
- You value clean software with almost no preinstalled clutter
Skip it if:
- You need weak low-light photography to be a solved problem
- The Pixel 9a at £499 already covers what you need
- You upgraded within the last two years — the gap is not worth the outlay
Verdict
Buy it for excellent battery life. Think twice if this would bother you daily: weak low-light photography.
Score: 4 / 5 · £579 at the time of writing.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the smartphones we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Nothing Phone 3 Review: Style With Substance This Time and Nothing Phone 3 vs Galaxy A56: Is the Nothing Phone 3 Worth £180 More?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
