With Nothing CEO Carl Pei hinting that the Nothing Phone (3) will be expensive, the expectation is that it will use a top-end chip like the Snapdragon 8 Elite. To people’s surprise, Nothing revealed that it will instead use a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, which is the same chip powering the POCO F7. That may sound disappointing given how the Nothing Phone (3) is positioned as a flagship, but it’s still the most powerful chip to ever be used on a Nothing device.

While we have yet tried any phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, early performance figures put it between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Snapdragon 8 Elite, making it a powerful chip fitting for a flagship device. We speculate that it will be at par with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400, so there’s no issue on the performance side of things.

However, with the Nothing Phone (3) expected to be more expensive than the POCO F7, what can it offer to justify its premium pricing? Aside from rumors of a dot-matrix display replacing Nothing’s Glyph LED lights, we’re expecting the Phone (3) to use LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 and a triple rear camera setup that’s better than what’s found on the Phone (3a) Pro. That being said, we expect at least a periscope camera and 50-megapixel sensors for the main and selfie cameras, along with a premium aluminum frame.