Nothing Ear 3

Introduction

Nothing is back with its fourth pair of flagship wireless earbuds, confusingly called Nothing Ear 3. 

After taking a break from its numerical naming for the previous version, the latest returns with a more premium design, an intriguing Talkboy-type feature and advanced noise cancelling. 

I’ve been using the Nothing Ear 3 buds to see if these new additions actually add anything to the experience, or if it’s just feature creep with no real purpose. Let’s dive in. 

Design

• Transparent look
• Black and white
• Metal case

For as long as we’ve had personal tech, there’s a been surefire formula for making a product look and feel more premium. You add a smattering of glass or solid metal, or both, and the experience is immediately elevated. For the Nothing Ear 3, that’s the first thing you’ll notice.

There’s no glass here, it still uses clear plastic for its transparent shell. But elsewhere, you will find aluminium. The base of the charging case is now enclosed in metal, which gives it a bit more of a reassuring – albeit colder – feel. Inside the buds you’ll find a few more slivers of aluminium, all designed to make it look and feel like the flagship model in Nothing’s range. 

There’s more to it than just trying to give it a premium glow-up, though. Nothing cares a lot about its cohesive design language. The phones, headphones and earbuds have to look like they belong together, and when you look at these new Ear 3 buds next to the aluminium-capped Headphone 1 and the flagship Nothing Phone 3 they all complement each other perfectly.

That combination of silver, matte aluminium with the white accents marries up with the same combination of materials and colours on the other premium products in Nothing’s device catalogue. Of course, you can also get the Ear 3 in black, which features a darker aluminium case. 

Otherwise, from a shaping and design perspective, little has changed since the last version. Each bud snaps easily into place in the charging case without much effort, with red and white dots indicating where the red-dotted right bud and white-dotted left bud sit.

The transparent case lid still has that dimple in the surface, giving you a convenient thumb-hole while simultaneously helping to keep the buds held securely in place while on the move. Just like the last model, there’s a raised area on the underside housing the wireless charging coils, so you can place it on a charging mat or on the back of your phone to charge them. 

Look closely though and you will spot the addition of a couple of small, black grills. These are for the microphones that power the headline feature, but I’ll get into that in the next section.

Otherwise the buds themselves look like the previous ones. There’s that typical retro futuristic transparent stem, the bulbous bean-shaped casing around the audio drivers, and the soft oval silicon ear tip, which is easily removed and replaced with a different sized option (there are three additional tip sizes). 

The fit is generally pretty comfortable and secure. You might find them slipping a little with excessive movement like running or working out. Even while walking at a modest, relatively slow pace they’d slip ever so slightly, which can affect sound, reducing the levels of bass you’ll hear. So I did find once or twice during an hour’s walk, I’d need to adjust and secure them back in their optimal position. 

Features

• New Super Mic feature
• Nothing app support
• Adaptive ANC

When Nothing told me about the new Super Mic feature built into the Ear 3 and case, I couldn’t help but picture Kevin McCallister in Home Alone 2 getting into all sorts of shenanigans with his Talkboy. 

The idea is a little wacky but cool. In essence, there’s a built-in ‘talk’ button on the case as well as the microphones. When you press and hold the talk button, by default – when paired with a newer Nothing phone – it records a voice memo and saves it to your Essential Space. This is then analysed by AI, and you get an almost immediate transcription.

Think of it almost like a personal Dictaphone, but one that stores the voice recording and a transcription in a dedicated space on the Nothing phone. 

Double press the button and it activates the mics in scenarios like phone calls and the voice recorder app, and it switches away from your earbud or phone mic. There’s an LED on the case that lights up green when in use, then press the button to deactivate and switch back to your phone or earbuds microphone. 

Because you can hold the case right up to your mouth, you can speak in a quieter fashion, with audio clearer and cleaner than using the earbuds’ mics stuck near your ears.

It doesn’t work in every single feature in every app, but you can use it for recording voice memos, or during phone calls, even WhatsApp and Zoom calls. It won’t, however, work for the voice note feature in apps like WhatsApp, due to limitations in the various apps and the platform they’re running on. 

There’s a little bit of a learning curve to begin with, but once I’d figured out how to use it, it soon became pretty easy. Personally though, there weren’t many instances where I felt like I’d ever need to use it. 

I’m rarely in loud environments. But I definitely noticed that when I used the Super Mic versus the earbuds or phone mic, it was much better at cleaning up any background noise or music, so if you want to record messages or speak in louder environments, using that Talk button and the ‘Super Mic’ feature will help get that voice over much more clearly, without lots of background interference.

The only real issue I had with it, is that it’s quite easy to activate it accidentally. Particularly if you have the case in the same pocket as something else – like a phone. I found a couple of times the phone would lean into the Talk button and kick the Super Mic Essential Space recording into action. 

Other features are pretty much mainstay features in this day and age. In-ear detection can be enabled or disabled, allowing you to pause music automatically just by removing one of the buds from your ears. And there are pinch controls on the stems, so you can pinch once to play/pause, pinch twice or three times to skip forwards or backwards through your album or playlist. Pinching and holding skips through the noise cancelling and transparency modes. 

You can customise these controls, of course. For instance, you can set different sets of controls on the right bud or the left bud, so they each do different things. And the list of options for long pressing includes activating your chosen voice assistant, or adjusting the volume. There’s lots of customisation available here if you want it. 

Noise cancelling in its highest setting is decent, but not market-leading. It’ll cut out droning loud noises like busy road traffic or train engines pretty effectively. I never felt like I was locked in a silent bubble though, and so I always felt it could be doing a little more work to cut out noises in the higher frequencies. 

Battery Life

• Wireless charging support
• 22 hour battery life 

Nothing promises about 5.5 hours of music listening with ANC enabled from a fully charged pair of Ear 3. In one of my listening tests I listen to just shy of 100 minutes of music in one session and lost 30% of the battery. This was with the ANC either in its adaptive, high or medium setting. Do some quick maths and that makes it about 5 hours from a full pair based on my listing. 

It’s far from the longest you’ll get from a pair of wireless earbuds. Compared to Apple’s latest AirPods Pro 3 – which promise up to 8 hours from the buds when they’re full – it’s some way behind. Still, the combined 22 hours of playback from the buds and the case are enough to be convenient and should easily last you through the work week as long as you’re not smashing them through more than three hours of music listening every day.

Charging up again is pretty simple when empty too. You get the choice of using the Type-C port and charging with a cable or using the wireless charging. 

Sound Quality

• Customisable EQ
• Spatial Audio support

Sound is always a subjective thing. For some, nothing else matters. For others, as long as you can hear the lyrics, who cares.

We all like different sounds and mixes and – what’s more – no two pairs of ears have the exact same sensitivities to the same frequencies. And so one of the best capabilities Nothing has implemented in recent years is the Personal Sound feature.

Using the Nothing X app the Personal Sound test plays a series of frequencies at different volumes and asks you to indicate if you can hear it, or if it’s just the sound of silence. 

Granted it’s not as quick or convenient as the sensitivity test developed by Nura (now owned by Denon) that runs automatically using dedicated microphones, but I did find that I preferred the EQ mix after enabling the feature. And – when I did fancy a bit more bass – I can enable the ‘Enhanced Bass’ feature at any time in the app. 

Despite that – I found the sound profile very hit and miss. Similar to when I reviewed the Headphone 1 – it’s difficult to find the sweet spot where I’m happy with how the high frequencies sound. 

With particularly higher impact elements like the hi-hat or snare on a drum kit, or in the vocals when letters like ‘P’, ’S’ or ’T’ are emphasised – I often found them to sound quite harsh. But it wasn’t consistent across the board.

It varied quite a lot depending on the level of noise cancelling or whether Spatial Audio was enabled, and to my ears, it was clear that without the Personal Sound enabled, the sound was definitely muddier and less clear. 

My preferred balance came when I switched the Personal Sound on, disabled any Spatial Audio and switched the noise cancelling to its medium setting. Spatial Audio makes the sound feel more expansive, like it fills more space, but similarly makes the sound a little muddier and warm. The Transparency mode seems to make the trebles a little harsher, and bass less prominent. 

Still, the Ear 3 is an adept pair of earbuds for music listening. You’ll get a wider scope of frequencies delivered cleanly – almost sounding studio-like in its mix. It’s less muddy and warm than a lot of similar buds.

But the beauty is in the fact that with some tweaking in the app – you can find your own preferred sound mix either using the 9-band EQ sliders or the simpler sound picker where you can choose between bass, vocal enhancement or neutral mixes. 

Bass – for the most part – is good. The buds’ drivers cope really well with even very low frequencies, giving them the presence, feel and texture you’d want without crumbling apart. 

Should you buy it?