Determined to stand out from the crowd, the Android-powered Nothing Phone (3a) Pro is a serious mid-range contender.
These days the mid-range Android market is hotting up, but most handsets come from the usual suspects and tend to look the same. The UK’s Nothing is determined to make a statement with its Nothing Phone range – not just when it comes to aesthetics, but also when it comes to the value that it packs into a mid-range smartphone.
Following on from last year’s Nothing Phone 2a, two new models have landed in Australia in the form of the Nothing Phone (3a) and Nothing Phone (3a) Pro. Meanwhile, a new flagship Nothing Phone 3 is set to be unveiled later this year.
Table of contents
Nothing Phone (3a) Pro first impressions
With a solid build and tech-inspired design, the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro certainly stands out – looking bold and stylish rather than slender and elegant. It’s a look that will win over some people but turn away others.
For starters, the handset features stark straight edges which, with the combination of a 6.77 inch display and 20:9 aspect ratio, make it easy to grip. The trade-off is that it’s not as elegant as the curved edges we’ve come to expect on some slender premium handsets.
Flip over the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro and you discover that the most striking design features are on the back.
The first thing that grabs your attention is the bold circular triple-lens camera array. Then you tilt the handset to catch the light and realise that the back is transparent glass, offering a glimpse of the stylish components within – reminiscent of a US subway map.
A transparent back revealing the handset’s inner workings is Nothing Phone’s trademark look and it certainly helps it stand out from the Android crowd.
That said, the black Nothing Phone (3a) Pro is not as transparent as Nothing’s product shots might have you believe. If you want a better view of the finer circuitry within, you’d be better off with the grey model.
From here the design would seem to be fairly standard, with the power button half-way down the right side of the handset and the volume buttons on the left. The power button doesn’t double as a fingerprint reader, instead it’s built into the screen.
Look closer and you discover a new addition with the Nothing Phone (3a) series: an extra smaller button just below the power button, where it’s not too difficult to reach with your thumb (or pointer finger for southpaws).
This new ‘Essential Key’ is your gateway to Nothing’s Essential Space – a place to save screenshots, voice memos and images, which you can use to keep yourself organised with a little help from AI.
Meanwhile, a double-tap on the power button quickly launches the camera app, perhaps in recognition that the Essential Key below occupies the space which some new handsets dedicate to a fast camera launcher – like the Apple iPhone 16, Oppo Find X8 Pro and others.
At the bottom of the handset, you’ve got a USB-C port, alongside a nano-SIM slot with eSIM support, but no old-school headphone jack. There’s a speaker at the bottom, with the earpiece doubling as a second speaker for stereo sound.
Nothing Phone (3a) Pro specs and price
| Display size | 6.77 inch, 20:9 aspect ratio |
| Display resolution | 1080 x 2392 (387 PPI) |
| Display technology | Flexible AMOLED, 120 Hz adaptive refresh rate, 3000 nits peak brightness |
| Bands | 5G sub-6, 4G LTE, 3G UMTS, 2G GSM |
| Chipset | Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 Mobile Platform – 8-core 2.5 GHz |
| GPU | Qualcomm Adreno |
| NPU | Qualcomm Hexagon |
| Rear cameras | 50 MP Samsung f/1.88 1/1.56” sensor 84.5° FOV OIS & EIS Autofocus dual pixel PDAF 2x in-sensor zoom |
| 50MP Sony f/2.55 1/1.95” sensor 33.6° FOV OIS & EIS Auto focus 3x optical zoom 6x in-sensor zoom 60x ultra zoom |
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| 8 MP Sony f/2.2 1/4″ sensor 120° FOV |
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| Front camera | 50 MP Samsung f2.2 1/2.76″ sensor 81.2° FOV |
| RAM | 12 GB |
| Onboard storage | 256 GB |
| microSD slot | N/A |
| Charging | 50 W wired 7.5 W reverse charging |
| Battery | 5000 mAh |
| Wi-Fi | WiFi 6,802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax, 2.4G/5G, 2×2 MIMO, TWT, 8SS, MU-MIMO, OFDMAWi-Fi Direct, Advanced Hotspot |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Operating system | Nothing OS 3.1 (powered by Android 15) |
| Security | Fingerprint reader, Face Unlock |
| Ruggedness | IP64 |
| Dimensions | 163.52 x 77.50 x 8.39 mm |
| Weight | 211 gm |
| Colours | Black and Grey |
| Price | $849 RRP |
| Warranty | 2 years |
| Official website | Nothing Tech Australia |
Features
The Nothing Phone (3a) Pro runs on the heavily customised Nothing OS 3.1, which is built on Android 15, although it’s interesting to note that the setup menus offer the option to stick with vanilla Android. That’s perhaps for the best because, like the hardware, the Nothing Phone’s stylised interface won’t appeal to everyone.
The monochrome spartan icons and widgets look rather stark compared to the colourful interface we’ve come to expect from modern smartphones. It can also be difficult to decipher the meaning of some minimalist icons at first glance, but you’d get used to Nothing Phone’s hieroglyphics. It’s perhaps telling that Nothing Phone’s own product shots rarely give you a glimpse of it.
The handset will receive three years of Android updates and six years of security updates. That’s not terrible, but a little underwhelming considering that some handsets stretch to five years of Android updates, with Samsung and Google extending it to seven for their flagships.
Considering the phone is designed to last a few years, it’s a shame it could only manage IP64 splash-proof durability and not IP68 which could survive a dunking.
Under the bonnet, you’ve got a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 Mobile Platform, accompanied by 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The chipset features an NPU which is designed to boost the handset’s AI performance.
This is one of the few areas where the Pro model steps up, with the standard Nothing Phone (3a) offering 8 / 128 GB or 12 / 256 GB for $599 or $689 respectively.
Around the back, that triple-lens camera array features a Samsung 50 MP main shooter, Sony 8 MP ultrawide and Sony 50 MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom. That’s a very good spread considering the price tag, especially when you get a dedicated telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom.
The lenses are another area where the Pro stands out from the standard Nothing Phone (3a), which only offers 2x optical zoom – but it’s still a triple-lens handset at an even cheaper price tag. To be fair, the Pro model has a different sensor with larger pixels for better images.
Likewise at the front, you’ll find a 50 MP selfie camera, whereas the standard Nothing Phone (3a) is limited to 32 MP.
One of the reasons the rear camera array sticks out so prominently is that, like many handsets which pride themselves on their photography credentials, it features a ‘periscope lens’. This uses mirrors to bounce around the light to create a longer path, allowing for greater optical zoom.
The Nothing Phone (3a) Pro is powered by a 5,000 mAh battery, which should keep you going 24 hours before recharging. You can take advantage of 50 W fast charging (although there’s no AC charger in the box) and 7.5 W reverse charging, but surprisingly you miss out on wireless charging.
Glyphs and essentials
Another thing that helps the Nothing Phone range stand out from the crowd is the secondary Glyph interface. It takes advantage of three lights on the back of the handset, wrapped around the camera array, which can convey messages when the phone is lying face down.
This might be useful if you tend to place your phone face down on the table during office meetings or family dinners, to signal to everyone that they have your attention, but you still need to keep an eye out for some important messages.
By default, Glyph is rather limited but the alerts are highly customisable. For example, you can assign unique light and sound sequences as ringtones for individual contacts. Alternatively, when selected contacts or apps send you a notification, a light shines until you’ve tapped it.
Then there’s the Essential Key, with a single-tap capturing a screenshot and letting you type or record an accompanying note. Alternatively, you can press and hold the Essential Key to automatically start recording a voice note – handy if you’re constantly leaving yourself little reminders.
These notes are automatically dropped into Essential Space, which you can call up by double-pressing the Essential Key. Essential Space has the potential to be your central repository for all those things you don’t want to forget, but it’s still early days.
If you’re an organised person, Essential Space might eventually replace the way you use something like Google Keep, OneNote or Evernote to gather your thoughts. Alternatively, it might be a better solution than haphazardly dumping things in your inbox, calendar, to-do list and photo library so you can try to find them later (although the ability for iOS and Android to search for text within photos in your camera roll is extremely useful).
That said, even Nothing Phone concedes that Essential Space is still a work in progress. You can manually sort items into ‘collections’, with auto-categorisation on the roadmap. The big selling point is that Essential Space uses AI to extract information from your notes, similar to Pixel Screenshots, from which it can generate personalised suggestions, summaries or reminders list under ‘Upcoming’. Other features are coming down the track, some of which you might need to pay for.
For now, Essential Space’s biggest drawback seems to be that there’s no way to search for content or ask it questions. Unless you want to scroll through all your notes, you’re completely reliant on it to surface the information you might need, which realistically means it’s not all that useful for most people as an on-call personal knowledge base.
Quality
The GeekBench 6 benchmarks tell a decent middle-of-the-road story, which isn’t surprising considering that the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro sports a mid-range power plant.
The handset scores 1,886 on the CPU single-core test and 3,355 on multi-core, along with a GPU OpenCL score of 3,308. That stacks up reasonably well against most rivals and won’t leave you lacking grunt for day-to-day tasks, but understandably falls short of the Android powerhouses.
| Device | CPU single-core | CPU multi-core | GPU (OpenCL) |
| Xiaomi Poco F6 | 1,899 | 4,734 | 8,762 |
| Google Pixel 8a | 1,510 | 4,232 | 5,754 |
| Motorola Edge 40 | 1,130 | 3,725 | 4,605 |
| Nothing Phone (3a) Pro) | 1,886 | 3,355 | 3,308 |
| Samsung Galaxy A55 | 1,153 | 3,428 | 3,086 |
| Motorola Moto G75 5G | 1,022 | 2,874 | 1,801 |
| Motorola Edge 50 Fusion | 1,016 | 2,937 | 1,802 |
| Samsung Galaxy A35 | 1,011 | 2,897 | 3,001 |
| Oppo Reno 11 F 5G | 905 | 2,358 | 2,372 |
If you’re after an all-rounder with a bit more grunt, you should certainly weigh it up against the similarly priced Google Pixel 8a.
As you’d expect, the camera is one area where the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro delivers solid results for the price.
Portraits offer plenty of detail, nicely blurred backgrounds and natural skin tones, all without imposing the oppressive beautification trickery which hinders many Android cameras. Likewise with the selfie camera, although it’s a shame that it couldn’t step up to offer optical image stabilisation and autofocus.
When you get outside, green trees look lush and detailed beneath vivid blue skies, without appearing overblown or over-processed. As you’d expect, that telephoto lens delivers the goods.
After dark, you get impressive detail, great colours and minimal noise in low-light conditions.
Who is the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro for?
If you’re looking beyond Android’s mid-range usual suspects like the Pixel 8a, then the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro should certainly be on your short list. It’s not the most powerful option around, but you might not care if you’d make the most of that 3x optical zoom telephoto lens.
Nothing Phone’s unique features, such as the transparent design, Glyph interface, and Essential Space, come down to personal taste. It’s too early to really consider Essential Space all that essential or useful, but those rear Glyph notifications might really come in handy for some people.
The post Nothing Phone (3a) Pro review: Nothing comes close appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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