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The steady flow of teasers and information about the Nothing Phone 3 continues to flow, as the latest offering from the company gives us our first insight into the rear camera setup on the handset.
Nothing has revealed the Phone 3 – its upcoming flagship smartphone set to launch on July 1 – will feature a 50MP periscope camera. It’s unlikely to be the only camera on the device, but it’s the first one it’s confirmed and it even provided us with a picture (at the top of this article).
We were also given a look at a quartet of images, presumably shot using the aforementioned camera on the Phone 3, although it’s not clear if they have been edited in any way or if these are shots straight from the camera roll.
For the Nothing fans among you, this camera may sound familiar. And you’d be right. The Nothing Phone 3a Pro which launched earlier this year also packs a 50MP periscope camera on its rear, alongside a 50MP main camera and an 8MP ultrawide snapper.
On the Phone 3a Pro, the 50MP periscope camera provides users with a 3x optical zoom – allowing you to get closer to subjects without any loss of image quality. It can also be utilized for macro photography, which it appears the camera on the Phone 3 has in the sample shots we’ve been shown.
In our review of the Phone 3a Pro, we were impressed with the capabilities of the camera setup (disappointing ultrawide aside), but this is a phone almost half the price of what the Nothing Phone 3 is set to launch at.
We’ve already been told the new phone will be around £800 (with rumors suggesting it’ll be $799 in the US), which is raising questions around the flagship credentials of the handset.
Is it still a flagship?
Nothing is talking a big game when it comes to the Phone 3, describing it as the company’s “first true flagship smartphone” and claiming “premium materials, major performance upgrades, and software that really levels things up.”
With recent confirmation of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset being used, there were some people questioning why Nothing hadn’t gone with the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite found in several flagship Android rivals.
Add to that a camera potentially taken from a device almost half its price, should Nothing fans be worried about the Phone 3 not living up to the increasing hype?
The chipset isn’t Qualcomm’s most powerful offering currently on the market, and it’s predominantly aimed at mid-range phones rather than flagships.
Yet, the 8s Gen 4 is certainly no slouch. It outperforms Qualcomm’s former flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip which featured in high-end flagships including the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and OnePlus 12.
That should translate into plenty of performance for most Nothing Phone 3 users (although we’ll have to test it before making a final verdict).
And while there could be some alarm bells around the new camera information, we’d expect the Phone 3 to have at least three rear cameras. There’s also no guarantee the sensor on this handset is the same as the one found on the 3a Pro.
Plus, with a more powerful chipset versus the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 in the Phone 3a Pro, there’s bandwidth for more advanced camera processing and software features to further enhance the photography functions on the Nothing Phone 3.
We’ll still need to wait for the July 1 launch to find out just how Nothing’s new flagship stacks up with the competition, but there are still plenty of signs it will be competitive.
