Nothing Phone 3 Review: Style With Substance This Time
The first Nothing phone where the hardware lives up to the presentation. It is also the first one we would recommend without caveats about the price.
Maya Okonkwo
The Glyph interface grows up
What began as a gimmick has become genuinely useful — a progress indicator for deliveries, a volume readout, a timer you can read face-down. It is still not a reason to buy the phone, but it is no longer a reason to roll your eyes at it.
Performance for the money
The mid-tier Snapdragon is the right call. It runs everything smoothly, stays cool, and contributes to a battery result of 7h 20m screen-on time — better than either flagship we tested this month.
Cameras are the compromise
Good in daylight, mediocre after dark. The ultrawide in particular falls apart in anything less than good light, and there is no telephoto at all.
Specifications
| Spec | Detail |
|---|---|
| Display | 6.7in AMOLED, 120Hz, 2412 x 1080 |
| Chip | Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 |
| Memory | 12GB RAM, 256GB storage |
| Cameras | 50MP main, 50MP ultrawide |
| Battery | 5000mAh, 45W wired |
| Weight | 198g |
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.
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 readers who want excellent battery life 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.
Living with it
Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was display — 6.7in AMOLED, 120Hz, 2412 x 1080 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, excellent battery life turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.
What we liked
- Excellent battery life
- Distinctive design that has stopped being a gimmick
- Clean, fast software
- Strong value
What we did not
- Weak low-light photography
- No telephoto
- Ultrawide is a step behind
Verdict
The best phone under £600 right now, as long as photography is not your first priority.
Score: 4 / 5 · £579 as reviewed (256GB)
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 vs Galaxy A56: Is the Nothing Phone 3 Worth £180 More? and Nothing Phone 3 vs OnePlus 13: Is the OnePlus 13 Worth £320 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.
