Nothing Phone (3) camera samples show what's possible with the new periscope lens

The Nothing Phone (3) will be launching on 1 July and the firm is well into teasing this device. The latest reveal gives us a little more information about the camera on the back of the phone.

While we long suspected this would be a three-camera device, we now know that there's a 50-megapixel periscope camera in the mix. Sharing an image displaying the camera, along with some sample images, suggesting they came from the phone.

There are few other details about the camera, although this isn't the first Nothing Phone to feature a periscope lens. There's also one on the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro, which is a 1/1.95in Sony Lytia 600 sensor, f/2.55 with 3x optical zoom and out to 60x digital zoom.

If it's the same camera, we previously found it to be pretty good, with a doubling-up on macro skills too.

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The sample images don't tell us much: they're all very arty and pretty close, so the inferred message here is about detail. Besides the images shared by Nothing, Carl Pei has also shared a selection of images, which appear to be taken from the Tate Modern in London and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

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As for the official image of the camera unit on the Nothing Phone (3) that was shared, it seems that it has been rotated 90-degrees. We already know the top right-hand corner will house the Glyph Matrix and I suspect this camera should be top left.

We were generally impressed with the performance of the camera on the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro and the expectation would be that the Nothing Phone (3) takes that to a higher level. That's going to mean it needs to focus on consistency across the lenses to make it more competitive against rivals.

The Nothing Phone (3) is expected to be powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, so it's a sub flagship device and with a price tag around the £800 mark. It's therefore going to compete with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S25, Google Pixel 9 or iPhone 16.

We're already expecting big things from the design of the phone, with the refinement of Nothing OS smoothing out the user interface, where we're expecting to see more useful AI integration.

There's not long to go until the big reveal.