Forget Apple Intelligence — Nothing Phone's killer AI feature just got better

London-based phone maker Nothing has taken a gamble with its latest device, the Nothing Phone 3. By pricing it at $799 and proclaiming it a true flagship, it's going toe-to-toe with established players like the Google Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 — also both $799.

Aside from the divisively eye-catching design (I like it, but others may disagree) the standout feature of Nothing's handset is the "Essential Space". You can tell the company thinks the feature is important, because it gets its own hardware button.

What's the Essential Space? Well, it's yet another implementation of AI. Before you groan and stop reading; hear me out. In theory, Essential Space is a centralized repository of information that can then be indexed and analyzed by AI. At the moment, it's bare-bones — screenshots and recordings — but there's a lot of potential there to make it a killer feature. As long as Nothing doesn't start charging for it.

For instance, with the Nothing Phone 3, Nothing added a new Flip to Record feature which lets you start a voice note from anywhere (using that hardware button called the "Essential Key") and store it in the Essential Space, where it's transcribed and summarized.

Now, Nothing has just announced a major upgrade that includes three new functionalities: Google Calendar integration, Editable Memory, and Essential Recorder.

Let's pick through them one at a time.

Google Calendar integration is pretty self-explanatory; any task or event created in the Essential space can be automatically synced over to your Google Calendar without you needing to manually do anything. If the AI gets it wrong (if it mis-hears for example) you can still go in and edit the event yourself.

That's the "Editable Memory" part — and while I've not seen these features in action myself, I'd hope the AI learns from your edits to make less mistakes in future.

Finally, the "Essential Recorder" option takes that Flip to Record feature and takes it to the next level. The AI will turn any recording into an image, PDF or Markdown, that can then be shared anywhere, like a group message or email chain.

If you're one of the people that uses a Nothing phone — like my colleague Anthony Spadafora — and you've got auto-update enabled, you won't need to do anything. The Essential Space will update automatically via the Google Play Store.

According to Nothing, these updates are live now on Nothing Phone (3), and will come to Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Pro "soon".

AI used the right way

AI on phones is something of a tricky sell right now. How much value consumers are actually getting for it isn't fully realised yet.

But for my money, Nothing is taking a different approach than just shoe-horning in a bunch of AI overviews around the OS. It's giving users a centralised point of focus for their AI experience with hardware to back it up. It's far from fully realised yet and might not be enough of a reason to tempt people away from a Pixel 9 or Galaxy S25, but I still value the concept.

Speaking of the S25, Samsung recently confirmed it would be making its "default" Galaxy AI features free to all users indefinitely while Google's Gemini just got a feature even ChatGPT can't match.

The AI arms race on phone features is certainly getting interesting right now.

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