Carl Pei led electronics manufacturer OnePlus from being a scrappy brand for tech enthusiasts offering affordable phones to one that produces multiple lines of devices, including flagship phones that challenge Samsung and Apple. He is running a similar playbook with Nothing, a five-year-old, venture-backed hardware startup that just launched its most ambitious device, the Phone (3), earlier this month. The phone, priced at $799, is intended to compete with devices from Samsung and Apple.

While OnePlus focused on providing value-for-money specifications and experience in its early days, Nothing focused on design and software as a differentiator to stand out from other phones. The startup produces eye-catching devices with a transparent design that draws attention.

As my former TechCrunch colleague Brian Heater said, Nothing Phone (1) was cool, and the Phone (2) was a robust mid-range device while maintaining the novelty. The Phone (3), while maintaining the transparent design ethos, invokes mixed emotions towards its design.

The phone has a lot of asymmetric elements on the back, including the strangely arranged camera module. If you look at the reactions on the internet, some people liked it because it is not like other phones, while some hated it. If you can get over the asymmetrical arrangement, you might like the device.

Nothing also took away the glyph LED arrangement that was prominent in previous Nothing phones. This arrangement made devices stand out even more when they illuminated to indicate an incoming call or a message. Over the years, the company made it more customizable, allowing you to assign different patterns for different contacts. It even created an SDK for developers, which didn’t take off.

Image Credits: Brian Heater/TechCrunch Image Credits:TechCrunch/Brian Heater

With Phone (3) the LED arrangement is substituted with Glyph Matrix, a circle-shaped second screen in the top right-hand corner to display more information. It can display basic information such as time and battery level when you press the button on the back.

The company has also included mini apps such as spin the bottle, a stopwatch, and rock, paper, and scissors. This is more of a fun gimmick that you might use to show off your phone.

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Image Credits: Ivan Mehta

A second screen on a device is not a new concept, and it doesn’t solve the problem of having to turn the phone to read the message. You can assign an emoji to a contact, but it just tells you that you got a message from that contact, but doesn’t tell you what it is. So you have to turn your phone on anyway. Is the matrix cool? Kind of. Is it useful? Not by much yet.

The company is inviting developers to build tools for it, which could improve things if there’s adoption.

Hardware and Camera

The company is using a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor, built on a 4-nanometer architecture, which is a step below the Snapdragon 8 Elite used in the Galaxy S25, OnePlus 13, and Xiaomi 15 Ultra. However, in your day-to-day usage, that wouldn’t matter a lot.

The device also includes a 6.67-inch AMOLED screen with 1.5K resolution, which is protected by Gorilla Glass 7i instead of a stronger Gorilla Glass Victus. The screen is bright and has punchy colors. While it supports HDR for YouTube, Nothing said that Netflix hasn’t whitelisted its devices to run HDR content.

The Phone (3) features three 50-megapixel cameras for different purposes. The main camera has a 1/1.3-inch sensor, which is 20% bigger than Phone (2), at a f/1.68 aperture; the periscope telephoto lens offers 3x optical zoom, 6x in-sensor, and 60x digital zoom with AI Super Res Zoom; and the ultra-wide lens provides a 114-degree field of view. There’s also a 50-megapixel selfie camera with an f/2.2 aperture.

While Nothing claims that this phone is its “true flagship,” top-tier devices such as iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones have achieved distinct camera quality with years of work. Nothing Phone (3) takes good photos, but color accuracy needs work to match other flagship phones. Plus, if the lighting was not ideal, the phone produced crushed shadows and overblown highlights in dark or bright areas of images.

The phone has a 5150mAh battery for international versions, which is good enough to last you a day of moderate to heavy usage. You can charge the device through 65W wired charging and 15W wireless charging.

AI features

Nothing debuted a customizable hardware key called the Essential Key with the Nothing Phone 3a and 3a Pro. This key ports over to the new flagship and opens up the Essential Space app, which lets you save screenshots with notes. But strangely, you can’t save just notes.

The Shiny Key is the essential key. Image Credits: Ivan Mehta

The company is also debuting Essential search, which doubles up as an internet and web search using AI.

You can search for files and events by typing in keywords, or you can also ask a query like “Who won Wimbledon in 2024?” and then tap on the AI button to surface web results using Google’s Gemini models. This is akin to Apple integrating ChatGPT with Siri to search the web for certain queries.

What Essential Search Looks Like

Image Credits: Screenshot from TechCrunch

The phone also gets a meeting note transcriber, which records your meeting and also summarizes key points. You can trigger this by holding the Essential key and flipping the phone. You can double-press the Essential key to record a voice snippet with transcription. However, users don’t have a way to access these recordings and transcripts outside the Nothing phone, unless they explicitly export them.

In a chat with TechCrunch, CEO Pei said that smartphone is the best medium to distribute AI and the company wants to make AI features useful for users.

“We have to be really focused on building things [AI features] that are useful [for end users] and not just call our phones ‘Nothing AI phones’ with some having some image generation and call it a day,” he said. “[We are thinking about] how we can really leverage this new technology to help people. The idea is not to compete with people or to take their jobs away. How do we help people become better and also more creative?”

While this ambition is a good one to have, Nothing’s feature set, which also includes an AI-powered wallpaper generation tool, is in step with other phone makers.

Nothing’s positioning

Nothing is making the phone available through its website and Amazon in the U.S. In Canada, it’s partnering with Best Buy.

At $799, the device directly competes with the Samsung Galaxy S25, Google Pixel 9, and the iPhone 16. Since it is not being offered through wireless carrier bundles, the phone is still aimed at people buying unlocked phones and looking for alternatives to Samsung, Apple, and Google.

In India, the company’s biggest market, it is a different story since the phone starts at ₹79,999. Although the company offers discounts and exchanges, the prices are on par with or above the iPhone 16 and the Galaxy 25, depending on the seller. Initial reactions on social media suggested that the customers found the price high, which could impact the company’s sales.

Nothing has taken it upon itself to challenge Samsung and Apple of the world, but at the moment, rather than direct competition, the phone is a good, cheaper alternative to those devices.