Nothing Phone 3 leak reveals it’s not a full-blown flagship after all

Nothing is gearing up to launch the Nothing Phone 3 on July 1, and we’ve already seen leaked renders and confirmed pricing for one market. Now, a leaker has apparently disclosed the phone’s chipset.

Tipster Yogesh Brar claimed on X that the Nothing Phone 3 would be powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor. That’s a notable step down from Qualcomm’s best chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This should still deliver a flagship-level experience in some ways, but there are notable compromises here compared to the Elite processor.

The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 has a novel CPU consisting of one Cortex-X4 (3.2GHz), three Cortex-A720 cores at 3GHz, two Cortex-A720 cores at 2.8GHz, and two Cortex-A720 cores at 2GHz. In other words, this chip has no little cores. This suggests better multi-core performance than last year’s top-flight Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but we’ll have to wait and see. However, the processor doesn’t use Qualcomm’s powerful Oryon CPU cores, so it’ll likely lag far behind the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

This new processor also sports an Adreno GPU with the “sliced” architecture that debuted on the 8 Elite, albeit with two slices instead of three. Other notable specs include an NPU that’s apparently 44% faster than the 8s Gen 3 chip, 4K/30fps low-light video, real-time segmentation for images and video, Bluetooth 6.0, Wi-Fi 7, and XPAN. The latter allows you to use compatible earbuds and headphones over Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth for improved range and quality. So our fingers are crossed that the Nothing Headphone 1, which will launch alongside the Phone 3, has XPAN support.

Unfortunately, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 lags behind the Snapdragon 8 Elite and last year’s 8 Gen 3 in a few areas. More specifically, the chip lacks 8K video recording, 4K/120fps slow-motion capture, and mmWave 5G. So don’t expect these features on the Nothing Phone 3. These aren’t must-have capabilities, but the omissions drive home the fact that the phone won’t be on par with many high-end phones in theory.