Nothing Phone 3 Disassembly
Some might say the Nothing Phone 3 is ugly, but let me remind you that Picasso painted a bunch of paintings that look a lot like this phone and they’re worth millions of dollars. On the other hand, it’s like they dropped the original model several times during the design process and it ended up falling to the ground, but Nothing said it was the way it was and sent it to market! Everyone has their own taste, but I’m a fan. Life is short and there’s no reason to be ordinary. If you want to know what’s inside this ugly but special phone, stay with Wise Selecting until the end of the Nothing Phone 3 dissection.
In the box, there’s a super cool new card from the European Union that tells us how energy-efficient this phone is. Nothing gave it an A in the efficiency category, with some additional information about how long the battery lasts and how repairable and durable this smartphone is. Apparently, the Nothing Phone 3 got a C in the repairability category. I like this label myself. It’s like adding a nutritional table to food packaging. It’s good for consumers to know how they stack up against the rest.
The coolest and weirdest new addition to the Nothing Phone 3 is the glyph matrix in the top right corner. I won’t go into too much detail, but it can show the time, show battery level, and play little games like rock, paper, scissors with you. If the Nothing 3 were to be cut in half, we’d see how it works from the inside!
One of the things that the EU test card says is that the Nothing 3 scratches at level five on the Mouse hardness scale, which is interesting, because as we know and have seen on any screen that isn’t plastic or sapphire, tempered glass almost always scratches at level six and takes deeper scratches at level seven. The Nothing 3 is using Gorilla Glass 7i and it’s clearly scratching exactly where it’s supposed to. So, I assume that when the EU says level five in its report, it means that this was the last surface that was intact and didn’t take a scratch, in which case they’re absolutely right.
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The frame around the Nothing 3 is made of anodized aluminum. There’s a polished metal AI button that I’m never going to press, and an aluminum power button that won’t come loose. There’s also a bunch of plastic antenna lines that I hope won’t be a problem later.
The top of the Phone 3 has three holes for the top-firing stereo speakers and a small hole for the noise-canceling microphone, which is built into the antenna line. On the left side of the phone are two separate volume buttons and two more antenna lines, surrounded by, you guessed it, aluminum. The bottom of the Nothing 3 has a metal SIM tray and a Type-C 2.0 port, which is terribly old for a flagship. When you have the same specs as the iPhone, that means it’s at least 3 years behind the rest. Most real Android flagships are using USB 3.2, which is 20 times faster than 2.0. The dual-SIM tray has a rubber gasket around it, which helps with the IP68 waterproof rating.
The glass back looks real and transparent, and it’s a stylized version of an artist’s impression of what’s inside a smartphone. The top camera lens, off-center and somewhat irrelevant, is a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto lens with 3x zoom, protected by a glass lens. Not directly below that first lens is the 50-megapixel main camera. And just to the right of that is the 50-megapixel ultrawide camera, also protected by glass. But not directly above that camera, is the circular glyph matrix, which is under the glass panel and doesn’t protrude like the three main camera rings.
The three main camera rings protrude about as much as any camera bump on other popular phones. So to say this is a completely flat back is a complete understatement. If you really want a completely flat back, you should check out the Red Magic. I like that red video recording light. It has an almost old-fashioned, classic feel that reminds me of Picasso.
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Luckily for the Nothing, the rear camera lenses seem to be permanently glued to the back glass. There’s no gap between them, and they won’t come off like we saw on Samsung’s recent phone.
Back to the display; we have a 6.6-inch OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 1 billion colors, which lasted about 20 seconds under the heat of my cigarette lighter. The Nothing 3 also has a 1000Hz touch sampling rate, which is great for gaming. The only phone I know of with a higher touch sampling rate is the Redmi 10 Pro, which has a 2500Hz. Of course, burn-in on an OLED panel is permanent, so don’t try this at home.
More Information & Buy on AmazonConsidering that Nothing calls this its first true flagship, it would be a waste to cut it in half. But surprisingly, even with all the extra antenna lines crammed into the frame, the phone doesn’t bend at all. And Nothing managed to achieve iPhone-level durability on the Nothing Phone 3 for less. The Nothing Phone 3 definitely passed my durability test.
Removing the back glass reveals that the glass is actually completely transparent, leaving behind that glyph matrix display with a physical, capacitive, and conductive metal button that senses your finger through the glass.
The cameras themselves are still there, doing their thing, and the camera bump has been separated from the back cover. Six silver T5 screws are visible around the white plastic pieces, and two more are hidden under a tab in the lower right corner. After removing them, we see a few things.
One, it looks much nicer without the back cover. And two, that red diode is actually a regular white diode with a red filter. Cool. The Glyph’s capacitive button has a ribbon cable that runs through the plastic and reaches the contact pads on the bottom, which then send a signal to the charging port board, which has gold-plated pins for receiving. This is kind of cool. I should probably turn off the phone now.
And then we’ll dig deeper and remove the seven black square screws that are visible. The last screw is a very mischievous little one that’s hidden under the flash diffuser, which is where the Glyph’s matrix display is attached. The Glyph’s matrix display is about the size of a dime and has 489 individual pixels.
Interestingly, the rear wireless charging pad doesn’t have copper coils in symmetrical circles. To make room for that glyph button, the circle has a cutout that looks like Pac-Man’s mouth, or something like the gas that Apple uses to squeeze an apple, which makes me think that next year’s iPhone could do the most outrageous thing possible. Of course, they won’t, but at least now we know that wireless charging pads don’t have to be perfect circles to generate an electromagnetic field.
The Nothing battery seems to come out pretty easily. They’re all excited about this move. I pop the two charging connectors off the top like little Legos, then pull that single plastic strip to release the 5,150mAh battery. Rumor has it that India will get a special edition of the Nothing 3 with a bigger battery. So congratulations to them. Underneath the battery, we see a fairly large copper vapor chamber that extends all the way down to the motherboard.
At first glance, the bottom speaker is a bit small. I unscrew three more screws and remove the charging port board. This thing can charge at a super-fast 65 watts. It has a red rubber gasket to make it waterproof. And Nutting says it’s tested the port to last up to 30,000 times. That’s once a day for 82 years, which is more than the average human lifespan or the average age of American politicians. You can choose your analogy, because both are equally disappointing. Speaking of disappointing, this speaker is more powerful than most officials. Down at the bottom of the phone, we have our square haptic vibrator, a water-resistant grille over the speaker grille, and a tiny optical fingerprint sensor camera under the display.
Moving on to the motherboard; there’s another black square screw cleverly camouflaged in the top right. After that, the whole thing lifts up and out of the frame. The motherboard actually has a neat rectangular cutout for the 50MP telephoto periscope camera. The 50MP main camera has optical image stabilization (OIS), but the ultrawide camera doesn’t have any, which is normal. The periscope camera does have built-in optical image stabilization, but we’ll leave it alone for now.
Behind the motherboard, there’s a slanted line and a wad of thermal paste on the 4th-gen Snapdragon 8s processor. We also get a look at the 50MP selfie camera. The whole thing, of course, can dissipate processing heat via the thermal paste into a large vapor chamber and then out both into the phone’s frame and out through the front of the display. The top-firing speaker also doubles as a secondary speaker, which is pretty impressive in its own right.
Is the Nothing Phone 3 repairable?
And now we’re crossing our fingers and praying that it’s still alive. Fun fact: Notting says it used 100 percent recycled tin, 80 percent recycled steel, and 100 percent recycled aluminum in the frame of the phone. They also use 100 percent renewable energy in the final assembly process, which is a cool move.
Now it’s time to put the phone back together, and look, everything still works. Honestly, I like what Notting is doing. And next time I think they should put the cameras on the charging port board to really piss off the haters.
