Essential Space: everything it can do

adbo · 2025-10-10T11:24:03+00:00

I’ve seen people asking about Essential Space capabilities and being surprised by features they didn’t know existed. So whether you’ve just picked up your brand new Nothing phone with an Essential Key, or you’re a long term user wanting to know what’s new, I’ve put together this thread to highlight all of the different Essential Space usages! Essential Space debuted with the Phone (3a) series in March 2025, the first phone to feature an Essential Key. Since then, we’ve seen CMF Phone 2 Pro and Phone (3) released with Essential Keys too. You can access Essential Space by double pressing the Essential Key. Capture Memories While on any screen, press the Essential Key once. This will take a screenshot, and prompt you to add an optional written note or voice note, then send straight to Essential Space. Alternatively, press & hold the Essential Key to capture a screenshot and voice note simultaneously. Let go of the Essential Key once you’re done speaking and it’ll head straight into Essential Space for processing. This can also be used while your camera app is open, to capture real-world images instead of screenshots. There is also an Essential Space widget to display last captured memories. While capturing a screenshot, you can crop by either dragging the edges or circling the content you wish to crop into, so that only the content you want is saved and recognised by Essential Space. You can also tap on the screenshot to completely remove it from the capture, so that only the text or voice memo is saved and processed. You can review, edit, and refine summaries within Essential Space. You can also link captures together for better organisation and navigation. If a capture contains an event, it’ll automatically be added as an Event to Essential Space. Collections Create collections to organise your saved Essential Space memories. Long press on a memory, then press the 3 dots in the top right and select Add to collection. Add to an existing collection or create a new one. Set Reminders In a similar fashion to above, adding a note or voice memo with a specified date/time will create a reminder. Say you come across your favourite band’s touring dates and want to remind yourself to check your friends’ availability later today, you could say “Remind me to ask my friends about this later”, or specify a desired day, date and/or time. This goes hand-in-hand with the Essential Space reminders widgets you can add to your home screen. As of December 2025, when you create a reminder, you’ll now receive a notification asking you to confirm the creation of the To-do, before it’s actioned. You can also sync these reminders with Google Calendar by opening Essential Space, tapping Settings, Google Calendar and selecting a Google account to sync with. Essential Recorder Introduced in August 2025, you can now record whole conversations and let AI create smart summaries, key topics and action items. Simply flip your phone face down, then press and hold the Essential Key to start recording. Alternatively, you can start from the Quick Settings tile. During a recording, single-press the Essential Key when you hear something important to highlight it in the final summary. Once an AI summary is ready, you can then manually fix and complete them if required, so nothing important slips through. You can send your Recorder moments to anyone, anywhere – as an image, PDF, or Markdown. Copy from Clipboard / Share to Essential Recorder From September 2025, you can copy a URL, text or an image, open Essential Space and tap the prompt under “From clipboard” to instantly create a collection based on your copied item. You can also use the “share” button on any web link, Google News article, file, etc. and select “Essential Recorder” to add the item to Essential Space directly. Call Recording As of October 2025, long press the Essential Key while in an active phone call to start a recording. Currently available on Phone (3), Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Pro in Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, South Korea and Japan. Source Essential Memory An upcoming, optional feature that brings everything together by learning your habits and surfacing forgotten details when you need them most. It will allow you to delete individual memories, and fully disable the feature if desired. Source Exporting Memories Export your daily Essential Space content as images, PDFs, or Markdown files. One tap, fully packaged, ready to share. Source Essential Voice A new voice transcription feature accessed by a software button on the bottom left of the keyboard, or by pressing and holding the Essential Key while the keyboard is active. Essential Voice removes filler words, cleans up small mistakes and helps structure thoughts into clearer writing. It can also format speech into lists, step-by-step instructions or automatically translate words and sentences by saying, for example, “translate this into Spanish”. Essential Voice auto detects over 100 languages, or you can set regional variants such as Latin American Spanish. You can add Personal Mappings to create custom shortcuts for phrases you use most often. E.g. “My email” would automatically transcribe your email address. Supported on Phone (3) and Phone (4a) series. The Essential Voice button on your keyboard can be disabled by going to Settings > Intelligence Toolkit > Essential Voice and disabling “Show keyboard button”. Source Essential Key optimisation Within your phone’s Settings > Intelligence Toolkit > Essential Key Settings menu, you can choose two options to help avoid misclicks of the key: Disable the Essential Key while phone screen is off or locked. Activate with a Single Tap before use - meaning you must tap the Essential Key once to activate it, then perform another action (such as a capture, or opening Essential Space), within two seconds. Cloud sync / backup As of April 2026, you can enable Cloud Backup to back up and sync captures between devices. Open Essential Space, tap your user icon and enable Backup. The sync status will show above. There is currently a 2.15 GB cloud storage limit. Source Summary This thread will continue to be updated as new Essential Space features are released, so please keep checking back or follow the thread using the button at the top to know what’s new! Be sure to also follow @Essential on X for the latest news.

Nicouschulas

Bouncer71
Only with third party apps

Bouncer71

Nicouschulas

Thanks for the hint…

Found the solution 👍

But it would be nice if Nothing would provide an option themselves to remap the button…

Nicouschulas

Bouncer71
Yes but they won't do that. At least they haven't done it yet, even though it's in high demand. It's not very hard for them to implement this, I think they want you to use this feature

Bouncer71

Nicouschulas

They can want whatever they want…

The customer decides.

If it doesn't fit my workflow why should I force myself using it just because Nothing thinks it's the best way..

Probably gonna use it to toggle "do not disturb" or something like that…🤷‍♂️

Nicouschulas

Bouncer71 They can want whatever they want…

Never said something else. I only said that they probably won't do it

I would also offer that option. I'm on your side

ankit_sharma

It would be really helpful if there were options to crop, highlight, underline, or add markup directly after capturing the screenshot using essential button.

Sometimes we just need a small portion of the screen to be save, not whole screen.

RobIgo

so I’m really hoping the next update will allow us to search our memories (and only our memories) by keyword, it’s a basic feature that’s lacking.

SafowanMuhid

Yeah, it’s useful

To make reminders or just remembering stuffs

Just push and note ai does everything else

adbo

Some nice quality of life features coming in!

Smarter To-dos
Receive a notification to confirm the reminder before it’s created.

Swipe between captures
A navigation update to allow you to swipe left and right on the detail page to see the previous & next captures.

Cropping
When capturing a screenshot with the Essential Key, you can now crop it before saving. You can do this by dragging the corners or simply circling the content you wish to crop into.

Essential Key optimisation
Choose to disable the Essential Key while your screen is locked, and whether to activate the key with a single tap before use.

Adding all of these to the main post!

RobIgo

Great update @adbo I didn’t know about the circle to crop etc. - another great feature!. I’m using Essential Key daily, and can’t wait to see what’s next (hopefully the ability to search captures AND manually add a capture to a todo).

2026 is going to be Nothing but Essential!

DipanshMoorjani

Great work guys. Keep’em coming

ankit_sharma

Cropping was essential. Thanx 😊
I know essential space is going to be great in future. Initially it was nothing but now it is something 👍. Slowly it will grow🔥.

megatomic

Anonymous931 yeah, if I could access my Essential Space from Chrome on my computers that would be awesome. I’d feel like I could commit to this feature set.

RobIgo

megatomic I agree, if it could back up (maybe using our Google Drive space like Whatsapp does?) but allow a web portal to use it as well, I’m on a laptop 8 hours a day and often send things to Google Keep, so being able to send to my Essential Space would be great.

megatomic

RobIgo I do the same thing. I’ve even found myself sending things to my son or wife just so I can find it again in my messages. There has got to be a better way and I’d love it if Nothing were the ones to fix this disconnect for me and others.

Louis ☕️

RobIgo I think this will really take Essential Space to the next level, and I hope it is something that is being worked on in the background. It would essentially (pun intended) bring together the ecoystem even further.

megatomic

Louis ☕️ sooo, I do know someone who was recently empowered to intercede on our behalf. This person could find out if this work is being done… 😉 Seriously though, maybe you could ask for us?

RobIgo

Is there any beta testers for the Essential Space? I’d love to be involved as somebody coming from Google Keep daily user (and now Essentials Space multiple times a day)

Nicouschulas

adbo
Looks like nice feutures, let’s see when I upgrade to a phone that has essentials space
But why does nothing don’t give us an option to remap the button?

RobIgo Is there any beta testers for the Essential Space?
You can look at the playstore page. There should be an option to join the beta if it’s available

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