July 15, 2025. The Nothing Phone (3) is on sale today at £799, $799, and €799. Pre-orders opened July 4, the announcement came July 1, and the reviews that started publishing this morning share a consistent position: this is the best Nothing phone, and for the first time Carl Pei is not hedging when he calls it a true flagship. He is calling it that, the specifications support the claim, and the Glyph Matrix makes the case in a way no previous Nothing product has.
The Glyph Matrix is 489 individual LEDs arranged in a circular disc pattern that can render arbitrary dot-matrix content. It can display the time in digits. It can show simple animations. It runs what Nothing calls Toys: mini-applications that developers can build for the Matrix through a public SDK. At launch, Nothing has shipped a Magic 8-Ball app, a Leveler, and a Spin the Bottle game, all rendered on the back of the phone through the Glyph Matrix. The SDK is available today for community and third-party developers to build their own Toys.
The hardware case for “true flagship”
Snapdragon 8s Gen 4. IP68 water resistance, the first time any Nothing phone has achieved full submersion certification after years of IP53 and IP54 ratings. 65W wired charging, 15W wireless. 6.73-inch LTPO OLED at 1-120Hz adaptive refresh, peak brightness above 3000 nits. Five years of Android OS updates and seven years of security patches, matching Apple and exceeding Samsung’s current standard Android guarantee at a price £230 below the Galaxy S25. The Essential Key from the Phone (3a) carries forward. Essential Space now has the full AI assistant layer that March’s launch had been building toward.
The IP68 is the specification that removes the last credible objection to recommending the Phone (3) to a general audience. IP53 was fine for careful users. IP68 means the phone survives the situations where phones actually break: dropped in a sink, caught in rain without a case, left in a wet pocket. Flagship durability at last.
£799 against the market
iPhone 16 standard: £799. Galaxy S25: £799. Nothing Phone (3): £799. Nothing is priced as a direct equal to the two most dominant smartphones in the world for the first time. The company is betting that the Glyph Matrix, the Essential Key, the Nothing OS philosophy, and the design identity are worth the same money as what Apple and Samsung sell. The camera system and processing performance do not quite match Apple’s and Samsung’s best: that gap has always been real and today it is still real. But the question the Phone (3) is asking is whether the things it does better (the interaction design, the identity, the software clarity) are worth £799 to a significant enough audience. We will know more about the answer when first-month sales data emerges. Today, the product is everything Nothing has been building toward since July 2022.
Part of Nothing Company: The Complete Story, my running diary of Nothing from founding to global expansion.