Nothing Phone (3a) + (3a) 2025 Pro Let’s see should you buy or not ?

Nothing Phone (3a) + (3a) Pro 2025 So I calls up my bud, Carl Pan. I says, hey, I need a new phone. What do you got for me? And he goes, nothing.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Get it? Today we’re gonna be taking a look at the Nothing Phone 3A and 3A Pro. Two more entries in Nothing’s utterly confusing product lineup.

These are successors to the 2A, but in spite of the Pro moniker on the 3A Pro, it is a lesser phone compared to the Nothing Phone 2, which still hasn’t gotten a three replace. No, my God. Look at the size of that camera bump.

Good gravy. Any who, let’s take a look at the packaging first. We’ve got a C2C cable and little cute SIM removal tool.

So clear. And that’s it. Nothing advertises up to 50 watt charging on these phones, allowing each of them to top up their 5,000 milliamp hour batteries in less than an hour, but you will have to BYO charger.

Let’s take a look at these devices, starting with the similarities. On the bottom, a USB-C port, speaker, and SIM tray. On this side, we get a volume rocker.

On the top side, we get a little microphone port for noise cancellation. And finally, on the right-hand side, we get the lock button and that’s right, the AI button. But it might not be that stupid.

The idea here is that it gives you quick access to Essential Space, a beta app that is included with all 3A and 3A Pro phones that’s meant to be kind of a repository for your thoughts, journal ideas, or just reminders, things you wanna deal with. Say, for example, I were to hold it down and say, I finally thought of that rhyme for dinglehopper, jinglebopper. That is gonna head into my Essential Space, which, oh, I can also access by double clicking.

A little bit of AI analysis happens in the background, and then it creates one of these little cards that tells me what exactly it was that I was thinking in that moment, eventually. While we’re waiting for that, oh, hey, there we go. Transcription and a little summary of what it was that I did.

Look at that, you can play the audio, too. I finally thought of that rhyme for dinglehopper, jinglebopper. Nice.

I really like this mouse pad. I’ll have to figure out where to get it later. I could see myself using this if it was more like a photos app.

Like, if I just, every time I took a picture, I could just yickety-yack at my phone for a second, and then it would just store that audio clip with it. I could see myself using it for that. A lot of the time, I’d be more likely to just open up Google Lens or use the Google Assistant, like, hey, I would like to buy this mouse pad.

Nothing Phone (3a) + (3a) 2025

Useless. Essential Space, then. Why don’t we talk specs? Because the 3A is more of a sequel to the 2A, it actually has a less powerful Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor compared to the Nothing Phone 2. In practice, this resulted in lower performance pretty much across the board, but especially in gaming, coming in at around half the performance of the already not class-leading Nothing Phone 2. The good news is that outside of gaming, things don’t look so bad, and nothing is committing to six years of security updates on these phones, even though they’re only providing three years of full Android upgrades.

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Both of these phones ship with up to 256 gigs of storage and up to 12 gigs of RAM, though the regular 3A can be available with 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage, depending on your region. Another big difference, as I teased before when I showed these camera bumps side-by-side, is that the 3A has a 50 megapixel 3X optical zoom, optically image-stabilized periscope lens built in. They both have the same 50 megapixel main shooter, the same eight megapixel ultra-wide, but it’s that telephoto that’s really the difference.

Oh, and also the selfie camera. On the regular 3A, it’s 32 megapixels, while on the 3A Pro, it’s 50 megapixels. Although I have to say, I do wonder if that’s gonna make a significant difference.

also read Xiaomi Pad 7 Quick Review and the best tablet under Rs.25000

Let’s take some selfies, shall we? I love selfies. Wow, those skin tones are very different. Is there much more yellow I look in that one? Oh yeah.

Oh yeah, bud. Look at the detail in the eyelashes. If you really get in there.

Yeah, that’s more megapixels, all right. Man, seriously, how does this thing even wirelessly charge with like, oh, do they not have wireless charging? That’s a downer. Yep, no coils.

And there’s some more downers. They both support Wi-Fi 6, which is okay, but not exactly the latest standard, and both have support for only IP64 water resistance. So they’re dust tight, but I wouldn’t do any more than get an incidental splash on them.

Certainly do not submerge them. Okay, my classic picture of Belle in the dark. That is very similar, which makes sense, given that they are supposed to be the same camera.

But if we switch to our telephoto, it will all change. Oof. Oh, dude.

Dude, the skin tones. Um. He does not look like that.

Can you confirm that’s not what I look like? Yeah, see, that’s not, yeah, that’s the right one. This one looks really good, though. Like, dude, considering that you’re sitting in the dark, like, that’s freaking sharp.

It is possible that part of it is differences in the screen. We did notice the tint was a little bit different when we were comparing them in the labs, but we can resolve that by just opening up the YouTube and maybe firing up some HDR footage. That’s not bad on the 3A.

Okay, we’re gonna give it a sec, and we’ll do crab rave after, but yeah, first impressions, not bad. Here’s another difference we noticed. While both are supposed to have exactly the same 6.77-inch display, the 3A Pro consistently was anywhere from 100 to 200 nits brighter in our testing.

Speaking of brightness, nothing claims up to 2,000, 2,000, right? 3,000 nits peak brightness? We were not able to measure anywhere near that in any kind of real-world usage, either with auto-brightness enabled and SDR and HDR, nowhere. Oh, right, the speakers. Do you think they’ll both be the same? I mean, the cutout looks the same.

Let’s try the Pro first. Amplified earpiece speaker, always love to see that. Get that stereo sound.

A little muddy mids, not the most defined bass I’ve ever heard, but certainly acceptable. It gets nice and loud. Another amplified earpiece speaker, this time on the 3A.

I’d bet money those are the exact same speakers. Something we wouldn’t notice in Blogs, but that feels nice when just using the devices, is both of them support variable refresh rate up to 120 Hertz on their displays, but not all the way down to one Hertz, so you won’t get any power savings there. But it is worth noting that the power efficiency of these phones, and this seems to mostly come down to the new processor, is pretty darn good.

While we didn’t reach the claimed, what was it, like 28 hours of YouTube Blog playback that nothing said, we did get about 19 hours on both of these phones, which is a pretty solid showing. All right, so all that remains then is to talk about the design. It’s been a little bit polarizing to say the least, but quite frankly, if nothing’s designs didn’t already put you off, then I don’t really see how this is gonna push you over the edge.

It’s got their same glyph interface thing that’ll kind of light up when someone calls you. Actually, we should probably play around with that a little bit. It’s still cool, honestly, and it comes at a pretty reasonable price, especially when you consider Apple’s charging $600 for the iPhone 16E.

So the regular 3A is 379 bucks. That’s the 12 gigs, 256 gig version. And then the 3A Pro is gonna cost you about another $80 for the better camera and better other camera.

I mean, that’s about it, right? It really is a better telephoto camera. I’ll say that much. Part of me is tempted, right? Like it’s good enough.

Although if the reason that I didn’t switch to the S25 Ultra was that they ditched the Bluetooth remote capture for the selfie camera, then I can’t very well justify switching to a phone that also doesn’t have that and doesn’t have a stylus at all. Oh, there’s some other colors to consider before I make a decision whether to switch to this or not. So we’ve got black and blue and gray, white, and black.

Wow. Oh, wait, no, there we go. So bold.

Even with all the cool colors, I’m not sure if I’m ready to commit to switching to this right now. Maybe the Nothing Phone 3 will woo me because their OS actually does seem really clean, really thoughtful. Just wouldn’t mind Gorilla Glass instead of Panda Glass.

Better processor, a little bit more of a semi-flagship experience. Subscribe to Blog

So I calls up my bud, Carl Pan. I says, hey, I need a new phone. What do you got for me? And he goes, nothing.