I’ve been using the Nothing Phone 3 for over 40-ish days now & I like this phone but there are some other things that makes me SAD & it’s not just the price.
Let’s dive in with a long thread 🧵 (Much deeper thoughts)
1. Unboxing:
The box has an imprint of the phone with the same colour as your phone. Black coloured phone gets a black colour box & the same goes for the white one.
The in-box contents are ~
1. Phone
2. Transparent cable (Only reserved to Flagships)
3. Paper work
4. Transparent sim ejector
5. Case (Surprising)
- Tho’ I’ll say that the in-box case is of poor quality, but it gets the job done & for early Phone 3 buyers. They atleast get some protection until a 3rd party manufacturer makes some great cases.
Like, Spigen did make some mad quality case for the Phone 3 & the phone looks damn good.
2. Build & Design:
The back glass is protected by Gorilla glass Victus, mid-frame is aluminum & the front is Gorilla glass 7i
Tho’ most people use their phones with screen protectors using the 7i for the screen at this price isn’t good & also for that phone which will be faced down more often
Design is something that I had mixed opinions on even in my impressions thread & TBH it’s still the same
I don’t like how the camera lenses are placed, even tho’ I know it happened because of space constraints
I like the design apart from the camera placement & this is the first time I felt confident rocking a phone without a cover.
3. Display:
Won’t go into specs again as I did that with my impressions thread but the display has been very satisfactory except 4 things
The colour tuning is good, the contrast management is also done well
The display is bright enough to be seen well in a sunny day.
But but but..
1. The brightness does feel a little bit lower from what my OnePlus 13s is capable, but both are HBM 1600 + the bezles are a little bit bigger than what the competition gives it’s symmetrical tho’
2. LTPS, At this price I was expecting LTPO. So, No going as low as 1hz but 30 here. Used on Dynamic & the switch was quite smooth always
3. Lower PWM - 960hz. Even the 20k CMF Phone 2 Pro had 2160hz. This will be very problematic for some people who are sensitive to this stuff.
4. Lastly, It’s not having atleast HDR 10+ on Netflix, Come on Nothing.
4. Performance & Gaming:
It runs on Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, LPDDR5X RAM & UFS 4
General day to day performance is great without any hiccups & it’s quite normal for this processor to behave like this.
Here are the latest scores of Antutu & Storage tests after the latest update if you find that important -
But, Thermals on this are quite average even tho’ it does have a 4300 mm vapor cooling chamber.
The only times I’ve seen higher temps are while playing Genshin impact on highest graphics but other than that it stays warm under heavy loads (like 4k video recording) just like other phones.
These are the temps after a Genshin session attached above.
5. Cameras:
Let me brush you up with the specs first before we dive in with our camera breakdown ~
Selfies ~
The front camera has improved a lot after updates.
(Selfies without portrait mode)
But sometimes it captures a lot less details under low and artificial lighting scenarios.
(Happens 3/10 times now)
Selfie portraits ~
These do well with good skin tone processing, background bokeh & overall scene optimization.
BUT, it still messes up the subject’s edges MOSTLY because of the default BOKEH value being much higher that it is vey easy to spot the mess-up. i.e., f/2.8
Reduce that & the problem goes away nearly 95%
Main Camera~
It does capture a lot better after the recent update, So definitely the feedback given to the team are being valued.
BUT, it’s not all flowers in the garden.
It does capture some not so great shots as well, Which in the end lowers my love for the main camera.
Like ~
- Lack of textures in the image even with decent lights around.
- Highlights have a haze to it.
Portraits ~ Main Camera
1x portraits tho’ I feel very uneasy shooting them as an amateur photographer I feel 1x portraits lack that depth that makes portrait mode photos beautiful. Nice to have the 1x mode as an option tho’.
But, I’m not here to speak all positive here.
Hare are a few examples where it does mess up
Tho’ I’ll say that under my testing these specific issues happened very rarely.
Ultra-Wide camera ~
This lens has been my least used one.
The FOV is big, Yes. But the image quality is very okayish with the default point & shoot algo.
We can make the images from this look much much better with the use of LUTs or post-edits tho’.
Periscope camera ~
I was very sad when I heard that it’s a smaller sensor compared to their Phone 3a Pro
But how does it perform in the real life scenarios despite having that limitation?
Black & White (LUTs)
Normal scenarios ~
Under normal scenarios it does capture good enough photos.
Portraits ~ Periscope -
I feel it does take very good portraits except the occasional edge detection mess-up.
Videos ~
I feel the video quality is quite good, but I did see some exposure fluctuations while recording & the low light footage had a lot of noise so Nothing should work on that for the future Nothing phones.
6. Charging:
USB 2 for the port (2 means slower transfer speeds) look into this Nothing, please don’t repeat this in your next flagship
It takes 1hr 4/8 mins on an average & it doesn’t get uncomfortably hot or anything while charging.
65 - watt wired charging
15 watt wireless charging
There’s also, 5 watt reverse wireless charging that usually helps you in emergency topups IG.
7. Battery:
5,500 mAh for India & it’s Si-Carbon but TBH battery life has been very average on this.
It falls in between 6-8 hrs of SOT depending on what usage I do different. But the usual work included roughly 1 hr of calls, 3-4 hrs of hotspot use & Glyph Matrix always on with essential notifications enabled.
8. Speakers & Haptics:
Speakers on this are pretty good not that we see any problems with speakers in this bracket.
Also they’re quite loud as well.
Haptics are tight and strong but Nothing OS lacks with the deeper integration.
9. Software:
It runs on Nothing OS 3.5 as of now & the experience has been quite stable while also being very smooth to function all around.
Beit opening apps, using the camera under the sun, WhatsApp PIP video calls etc.
I love Nothing OS. The way they pay attention to small details in the UI, unique Control center, widgets, dot-matrix, clean software & that monochrome style
But, It lacks quite a lot of things that I use, I can’t make a collage in the gallery (GPhotos suck) editing photos doesn’t remove the watermark automatically in the gallery app, I can’t draw on already taken photos nor I can mosaic them, can’t lock apps in the RAM etc
Hopefully NOS4 does bring at least some of these features.
10. Essential Key:
Essential Key has always been my goto memory bank when I’m using a Nothing phone. I use it to remind me of my tickets, my events or sometimes jot down ideas for threads and work
It’s more helpful now with better voice transcription & the fact that we can edit them later as well.
Quite a good pace of improvements but it still needs more to convince more people to use it.
11. Glyph Matrix:
It’s definitely more expressive than the Glyph lights but those lights had an identity which separated them in the crowd even at night. Matrix doesn’t do that quite yet.
The Matrix as a lot of potential & people are building a lot of toys for it. I even shot for Nothing showcasing various Glyph toys for Nothing India which was showcased by @Deepanshu_Saini_ (Community Program Manager, Nothing India)
From being able to play/pause my music while also seeing a cute graphic on the display that I can customize to talking selfies while framing angles with the help of the matrix there are a lot of things that I can do with the Glyph Matrix. Some are fun, some are very useful and some are just for the aesthetics.
For the pressure-sensitive button, It was definitely weird & very finicky to work in the early days of my using it but with time I understood that it has different pressure activation points based on the position of the phone (on the table/on the move)
After that it was always very easy to scroll and activate the matrix with that button. Takes a learning tho’.
Misc:
1. Updates are 5 + 7 now (Security patches are Bi-monthly)
2. Ingress Protection is 68
3. Weight is 218 grams (On the heavier side)
4. Fingerprint Scanner is OPTICAL (No Ultra-Sonic here & as per the brand it was too expensive for a brand with a small sale numbers)
5. NFC is present
Verdict:
So,
Is this a MUST BUY? - Nope
Price is the only thing wrong about this phone? - Nope
Is this a perfect smartphone - Definitely not
The Nothing Phone 3 is not a perfect phone & that’s the point here, I feel the phone has a lot of potential & the brand now needs to address the mistakes they did with this & work towards solving this.
Some issues like getting hot while gaming, some bugs like - Replying to conversations via the notification panel scrolls up the notifications so I don’t know what I’m writing or like the fact that the phone is heavy, the battery life isn’t the CRAZY one that we always saw with Nothing’s “a” series of phones etc.
The ride with the Phone 3 felt like a roller-coaster one but I enjoyed my time with this. I hope the brand listens to the feedback people gave them & work on that to give us better products & services.
Until next time ~
Anshu.
