Nothing Phone 3 arrives July 15 with a tiny dot matrix rear display

Nothing, a startup from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, has announced its first flagship phone since 2023. The company bills its new Nothing Phone 3 as a “true flagship” device, but it doesn’t have the absolute best hardware you can get in a mobile device. Neither does it have the highest price, clocking in at a mere $799. That’s shaping up to be a good value, but it’s also the highest price yet for a Nothing phone.

A few weeks back, Nothing teased the end of its trademark Glyph interface. Indeed, the Nothing Phone 3 doesn’t have the illuminated panels of the company’s previous phones. Instead, it has a small dot “Glyph Matrix” LED screen. It’s on the back in the upper right corner, opposite the camera modules. Nothing has a few quirky games and notification icons that will flash on the screen, and it can be used as a very low-fi selfie mirror. Nothing is committed to the new Glyph screen, going so far as adding a button on the back to control it.

The rest of the design maintains the Nothing aesthetic, featuring a clear glass panel with a visible mid-frame and screws. The phone will come in either black or white—Nothing isn’t really into colors. However, the company does promise the Phone 3 will be a little more compact than the 2023 Phone 2. The new device is 18 percent thinner and has symmetrical 1.87-millimeter bezels around the 6.67-inch OLED screen. That panel supports 120 Hz refresh and has a peak brightness of 4,500 nits, which is competitive with the likes of Samsung and OnePlus.

Nothing’s first “true flagship”?

Nothing has continued releasing budget phones during its break from high-end devices. While the Nothing Phone 3 is supposedly five times faster than the Phone 3a, it probably won’t be able to keep up with the fastest phones on the market today. Rather than the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite, the Nothing Phone 3 has a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, which was released earlier this year to expand premium silicon features to slightly cheaper phones. It doesn’t have Qualcomm’s new Oryon CPU cores, and the GPU is a bit slower. However, it’ll be faster than most devices in its price range. The specs are rounded out with 12GB or 16GB of RAM and 256GB or 512GB of storage.