Nothing Phone 3 Reveal - Thoughts
The Nothing Phone 3 was unveiled on July 1 in a quick 30 minute live stream that featured Carl Pei (the CEO and co-founder of Nothing) chatting about the phone with one of the engineers that worked on creating it.
As some of you may already know, I’m a big, big fan of the Nothing Phone 2. I’ve been using it as my daily driver or Number 1 backup phone since 2023. I wrote once about it stealing the Pixel 7 Pro’s job. One of the reasons I like the Nothing Phone 2 so much is that it is so different and so fun to use. It’s tough to think of any Android phone that the words different and fun apply to over recent years. And fun, well that’s at the core of Nothing’s culture, as this slice of their website home page highlights:
So you could say that I’ve been looking forward to seeing - and getting my hands and grubby fingers on - the Nothing Phone 3. And that would be an understatement; I wrote this just over a year ago:
Now the waiting is almost over. I ordered the Nothing Phone 3 yesterday, and it ships on July 15. Here are some of the things I like and feel hopeful/confident that I will like about the Nothing Phone 3:
Big value for money. Nothing have described this as their first true flagship phone, and the specs support that. I purchased the black model with a crazy 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for $799. It’s got a 6.7 inch OLED 120 Hz supporting display, a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor, great battery and 65W charging, and more. You can see the full specs here.
The dot matrix Glyph Matrix at the top right of the back of the phone, which is a “monochrome micro-LED display that replaces the previous Glyph Interface, offering various functionalities like customizable notifications, app interactions, games, and camera countdowns”. One of the uses I’ve seen talked about for the Glyph Matrix is creating customized patterns for particular people calling you - and other fun uses.
Essential Space - the primary AI feature on the Nothing Phone 3. There’s an ‘Essential Key’ button on the side of the phone to invoke it. It’s described as “AI-powered hub designed to help you capture, organize, and recall information effortlessly.” Here are some of its features touted by the Nothing community and various mobile tech sites:
Quick Capture: With a single press of the Essential Key, you can instantly take a screenshot of whatever is on your screen. A long press allows you to take a screenshot and record audio simultaneously, providing quick voice context.
AI-Powered Organization and Summarization: Once content (screenshots, voice notes, photos) is saved to Essential Space, AI automatically transcribes and summarizes it. This makes your captured information easily searchable and digestible.
Personalized Suggestions and Actions: Essential Space aims to remove the friction from recalling content by generating personalized suggestions, summaries, or action points based on your captures. For example, it can analyze voice notes from meetings to create detailed to-do lists and even schedule time slots for tasks.
Reminder Creation: You can use Essential Space to set reminders, whether by capturing content or by voicing your ideas. It can extract information like dates from screenshots or notes to help you stay on top of things.
Smart Collections (Coming Soon): Future updates are expected to include "Smart Collections" that will automatically organize your captured content, further streamlining the organization process.
"Flip to Record" Feature: A new feature allows you to long-press the Essential Key and turn your phone over to start recording, which then gets transcribed and summarized in Essential Space.
Essential Space sounds promising, but I think it’s something I really need to spend time with to see how useful, or not, it. Same goes for the Glyph Matrix, though that’s more about fun and somewhat useful.
Are any of you fans of the Nothing phones? Planning to get the Nothing Phone 3?
The Glyph Matrix would make a good movie. You could play the part of Keanu