Summary
- The Phone 3 is Nothing’s third-generation flagship with a distinctive external design and a unique Glyph Matrix interface.
- The Glyph Matrix provides visual notifications and interactive effects, with support for third-party plug-in ‘Toys’
- Here are some of my favorite community-crafted Glyph Toys that are currently available for the Nothing Phone 3.
With its Phone 3, London, England-based technology company Nothing has crafted a rather unique handheld package. The flagship smartphone features an eye-catching external design on its rear side, with elements of translucency, a quirky arrangement of rear camera lenses, a red recording indication LED, and, most curiously of all, a bespoke Glyph Matrix display.
Nothing’s new Glyph Matrix display is a small, circular dot-matrix screen made up of 489 individual micro-LEDs. With a resolution of 25 x 25, the panel is monochromatic, and it’s controlled via the dedicated pressure-sensitive Glyph Button found just a few inches below the Glyph Matrix panel itself.
The Glyph Matrix offers a variety of use cases that are supplemental to the Phone 3 experience, many of which are ported over from Nothing’s previous Glyph Interface array of lights found on earlier-generation Phone models. Among these features are programmable ringtone and notification lightshows, a makeshift flashlight, a volume level indication HUD, a camera timer countdown, and various status-related updates.
While I wouldn’t describe Toys as groundbreaking or revolutionary, they do envelop Android’s ethos of open. geeky tech fun.
However, unlike the older Glyph Interface, the Glyph Matrix is far more extensible by nature of being an actual secondary display. Nothing is leaning heavily into this flexibility, encouraging third-party developers to create their own tools, applets, and micro-games which it calls ‘Glyph Toys’ for the platform.
With a public-facing Developer Kit SDK available now over on GitHub, a number of community-developed Toys have already hit the scene. Some of these can be found on the Google Play Store, while others are floating around GitHib and other software developer platforms.
The Nothing Phone 3 is available for purchase in North America, at an starting price of $800 USD / $1,180 CAD for the base model. This configuration ships with 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM — a more expensive 512GB + 16GB variant is also available.
For the most part, Glyph Toys remains a fun and quirky way to inject a bit of personality into the Nothing Phone 3 experience, though, admittedly, they also stray into gimmick territory. While I wouldn’t describe Toys as groundbreaking or revolutionary, they do envelop Android’s ethos of open, geeky tech fun, and for that reason I appreciate their inclusion.
Here are five Glyph Toys that personally put a smile on my face every single time I press my Nothing Phone 3’s capacitive Glyph Button.
Glyph Beat
Show off your favorite album artwork, micro-LED style
Glyph Beat is a fun Glyph Toy applet for the Matrix display that places animations on screen while playing media on the Phone 3. Animation themes include a spinning vinyl record, shapeshifting cover art, waveforms, pulses, and, my personal favorite, an adorable dancing duck that bobs his head to the beat.
Glyph Beat is entirely free to download and install from the Google Play Store, and it fully integrates into the Glyph Toys section of Nothing OS’s Settings application. As an added bonus, Glyph Beat offers playback functionality in the form of Shake to Skip, with configurable options for shake sensitivity, haptic feedback, and skip delay.
Glyph water toy
Simulate the ebbs and flows of a pixelated pond
Glyph water toy is a free Glyph Matrix display plug-in available on GitHub. In short, it functions as a pixelated water flow simulator, allowing you to tilt your Phone 3 for responsive control over the water’s physics. Configurable options include sliders for the amount of water displayed, the simulation speed, the size of individual particles, and the viscosity (resistance to flow) of said particles.
Sure, Glyph water toy doesn’t exactly offer much practical utility, but it’s a fun tech demo that leverages the Phone 3’s Glyph Matrix display and gyroscopic in a novel fashion. I find it to be a fun Toy to play around with when, say, I’m waiting in a cued line, and it makes a great fidget toy as well.
Nothing Glyphify (Ball Maze)
A virtual labyrinth with gyroscopic tilt controls
Nothing Glyphify offers a host of utilities and extensions for not only the Phone 3, but also for previous-generation Nothing Phone models that feature the Glyph Interface array of lights. Available on the Google Play Store for a small one-time fee, Glyphify offers several Glyph Toys to play around with, including Glyph Dial for browsing contacts and initiating phone calls, as well as a rendition of the classic Magic 8 Ball game.
Personally, I’m most fond of the included Ball Maze game, which tasks you with maneuvering a small, pixelated ball through a micro-LED labyrinth of sorts. Like with Glyph water toy, interaction is controlled via tilt, and it’s a fun micro-game that I enjoy as much as I did when I played PC Flash variants of the game during my childhood.
Glyph Toybox (Affirmations)
Inject some monochrome positivity into your day
Glyph Toolbox, which can be purchased on the Google Play Store for a small single-time fee, provides access to a collection of community-crafted Glyph Toys. These include a Pomodoro Timer for focusing in on tasks, Sound Mode control, and a Battery Amperage status indicator.
For me, it’s the Affirmations Toy that I find myself gravitating back to. This module displays various positive statements and feel-good phrases on the Glyph Matrix panel, with a quick shake motion used to cycle between phrases. It’s clever, it’s cheerful, and it adds a dash of humanity to the mix.
Dot Hub for Glyph Matrix (Coin Flip)
Sometimes a coin toss is all it takes to settle a dispute
Similar to Glyphify and Glyph Toybox, Dot Hub for Glyph Matrix is a single app that compiles various Glyph Toys under a single, unified roof. Some of these plug-ins are more powerful versions of pre-installed Toys from Nothing, including Counter and Compass. Other Toys include the Glyph Beat-style Music Visualizer, Dice, Breathing (which aims to create a sense of calm by enabling Do Not Disturb mode and displaying lungs on screen), and Tea Time (which slowly brews a cup of tea over time).
Dot Hub’s Coin Flip is the included Toy that I’ve made the most use of so far — a simple coin toss helps with solving disputes, it helps with indecisiveness or decision paralysis, and it’s simply a fun fidget toy that gives my hands something to do during times of idle. The Entire Dot Hub collection is free to download and install from the Google Play Store.
This device was provided to Pocket-lint by Nothing.
