Nothing Phone 3 hands-on: A tiny, playful dot-matrix screen in the company's most expensive phone yet

With the third generation of its smartphone series, Nothing made the unusual move to launch the cheaper ‘a’ line first, unveiling the Phone 3a and 3a Pro in March. Now, it’s time for its latest flagship. The Nothing Phone 3, starting at $799 (with a $899 option with 16GB of RAM) goes up against giants like the Google Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 — a competitive slice of the smartphone world. Once again, though, there’s nothing in the market that quite resembles a Nothing, as the company attempts to balance distinctive design with flagship (and some not-quite-flagship) components.

The big change this time around is that Nothing is swapping the flashing lights of its Glyph Interface for a tiny dot-matrix display on the rear of the device and is calling it the Glyph Matrix.