Nothing Phone 3 News! The Great and The Damn I Hate to Wait
If you’re new to visiting Tech & Nonsense you might not know that I am a big, big fan of the Nothing Phone 2, from Carl Pei’s Nothing company. Here are a couple links that will give you an idea why:
The short story is that with all the great smartphones available, the Nothing Phone 2 stands out for being The Most Fun and The Most Different - from showing off the internals of the phone on the back of it, to a gorgeous UI and the fun and usefulness of its glyph interface.
Recently the Nothing Phone 2 added some very clever, useful, and fun widgets for ChatGPT. There is one for text input or uploading files to ChatGPT, one for using the camera to interact with it, and one for voice input.
Since I’m more than a little fascinated by ChatGPT and several other GenAI tools, I’ve been hoping every day to see news on the next gen, the Nothing Phone 3 and what further AI integration it might bring. Today we got that news straight from Carl Pei and one of his team members in London, in a post and video on Twitter/X. It’s a BIG reveal on what Nothing is exploring and looking to do with the Nothing Phone 3. After watching it, I’ve gone from two words to four - it looks Different, Fun, and Super Exciting.
Just before I share a few of the quotes from the video that got me the most pumped up, I’ll share one more previous post where I talked about what I think are visionary words from Carl Pei:
This is the bit in that post that grabbed me, where Pei talks about a new metaphor for smartphones:
Then there’s an answer from Pei’s that is a great take on where smartphones have become stale and a new metaphor is needed:
Like, okay, it’s an app machine right now. It’s an app launcher that actually hasn’t changed since the Symbian days, right? If you want to remove that metaphor, you need to create a new metaphor that’s way more efficient than before and easy to understand and easy to use.
Finally, there are his words on what that new metaphor could look like:
I think it needs to slowly augment away the apps. Today, we’re using some really simple, mindless-scrolling apps, right? What if we wanted to accomplish more complicated tasks like 3D modeling or photo editing, or I don’t know what? It’s actually quite difficult to learn how to use these new apps. Maybe we can just tell the phone what we need to do, and it would use those apps for us without the apps even being visible in the foreground. Right. I think that could be enough utility to transition to a new metaphor.
The new metaphor immediately resonated for me and seemed like an ideal fit for any of (all of us?) who will be relying on GenAI tools more and more. So the great news in Pei’s video is all about AI integration, that new metaphor fleshed out a lot more, and keeping the fun factor.
Here are quotes from the video and some screenshots of the Nothing Phone 3 in development shared in it:
I still think that smartphones are going to be the main form factor when it comes to AI first hardware, because people love their phones.
I’ve bought into this for a while now; I think smartphones will prevail here over carrying an extra device or wearing AR sunglasses or other wearables.
Here’s that metaphor getting fleshed out:
On the smartphone, however, the user experience hasn't really changed for a really long time. In the last 10 or 15 years of smartphone development everything has gotten faster and more beautiful and more fluid, but the fundamental experience hasn't changed and what's exciting about what's to come is that we're entering the post app world.
In the future there will be no more apps, the operating system knows everything it needs to know about you and it will call on all the services and string them together to make your day easier.
Pei recognizes that users will not want to give up apps overnight and has some praise for Nintendo linked to how Nothing are thinking:
The challenge for us is to build a bridge from today's app-based user experience to tomorrow's post app world.
We should apply that same idea, how do we make it more fun, how do we make it more personalized. I think there's a lot of potential to make the experience way smarter ... Like today, the different apps don't even talk to each other. But the device can potentially have all the information it needs about you to make the experience really seamless and smart.
Then words from Pei’s colleague in London (an engineer I think or team lead):
We have been exploring ways of integrating AI deeply into the system, to give every single person a highly personalized experience. For instance here we tried to reimagine the home screen. We wanted to move away from it just being a launcher for different ops and services for different apps and services to becoming more of a hub for contextual relevant information.
> We're exploring, providing every single person with a highly personalized companion that is almost like a best friend. We've also been thinking about ways to give proactive like capabilities to this companion, and allow it to step out of the boundaries of specific apps or containers.
Images in the video show the Nothing Phone 3’s reimagined home screen being dynamic and context aware:
And then fluid and multi-modal (able to accept input via text, images, files, and voice)
This is all fantastic news and I am hyped as can be to see this phone, to get this phone - and of course this is where the Damn I Hate to Wait news comes in … the Nothing Phone 3 will be release in 2025. It was expected/rumored to be released in June/July of this year.
Given that I am impatient as heck when it comes to smartphones, I am now an imperfect mix of psyched and sad - but doing my best to try to be a grown up and go with just psyched :)
Check out Carl Pei’s words and video on the Nothing Phone 3 here.