We finally have a base price for the upcoming Nothing Phone 3, but that price could be a major disappointment for many.
Revealed in a YouTube video released as part of Android Show: I/O Edition, Nothing CEO Carl Pei stated that the phone will cost £800. As it also recently confirmed that the Nothing Phone 3 would be coming to the U.S, which could mean we’re looking at a $1000-plus price tag on the other side of the Atlantic, although regional pricing is rarely 1:1. Pei also says that the Nothing Phone 3 will be the company's first “true flagship smartphone,” which is presumably the primary excuse for increasing the cost this much.
The Nothing Phone 2 price topped out at $799 for the highest configuration, and started at a more humble $599. Meanwhile, the Nothing Phone 3's $1,000 price tag sounds like it's for the basic configuration, which would make it noticeably more expensive than the iPhone 16 and the Galaxy S25's standard models. As such, it’s going to need to be a pretty impressive phone when it does release.
We don’t know much about the Nothing Phone 3's specs, but Carl Pei states that the “Phone 3 is coming this summer, and we’re going all-in—premium materials, major performance upgrades, and software that really levels things up.”
What would we expect for this price point?
In the past, Nothing aimed to offer a near-flagship experience but at a lower price point, and it did this by using older hardware. For instance, the Nothing Phone 2 launched with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 back in 2024. At this time, this chip was already two years old, but it still easily outperformed models like the Pixel 7a, which was released within the same period and at a similar price to the Phone 2. However, at $1000, we would expect the Phone 3 to come with the very best silicon available, which would likely be the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
We would also like to see some pretty major camera and image improvements. The majority of Nothing phones have featured the same two 50MP lenses for wide and ultrawide shots, which isn’t a bad layout overall. The Nothing Phone 3a did add a telephoto lens, so we’d hope the Nothing Phone 3 will feature one too.
But the problem is we've seen generally poor camera performance from Nothing phones. That can't be the case if the Phone 3 costs $1,000, or else users will look past it.
Hardware is only half the battle to be one of the best phones, as there is a lot of focus on AI. Carl Pei announced in the video that the upcoming NothingOS 3.0 is the company's vision for “how AI should work, not just bolted on, but built in.” There isn’t much detail on what this means, but it could indicate either a Nothing-made AI or deep Gemini integration into the device.
At this point, there are more questions than answers regarding Nothing’s next phone. However, it seems we won’t have to wait long for the official release. In the meantime, Google I/O is just around the corner and will likely feature a lot of news about Gemini and Google’s future plans.
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