Nothing Phone 3a Pro reviewed: a phone that stands out

The era of same-same mobiles is truly upon us, with little in the way of differences. And then there’s the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, which stands out on features, camera, battery, and value.

Design

Phones don’t typically offer a lot of deviation in design, with most brands offering something sleek, shiny, or just matt. Glass and aluminium are normal in the high-end, while plastic and vinyl can be found in the lower ends of the market.

Regardless of how much you spend, the aesthetics are pretty consistent: shiny with colours and a slick matt frame.

And then there’s Nothing, a brand that does things like nothing else out there. Its earphones are see-through, allowing you to see the components underneath, and its phones are, too. We saw that with the Nothing Phone 2a last year, and this year it’s also a thing with the Phone 3a and 3a Pro.

Both are largely transparent on the back, or at least more translucent, allowing you to see through to the hardware inside and creating a really clever look that stands out. This isn’t your regular iPhone clone, nor is it like any other mobile out there.

Nothing further cements this with some extra LEDs that sit at the back forming part of its “glyph” feature, which can act as a light-based ringer, a light-based music visualiser, light-based timer for the clock and Uber, and light-based alerts, as well.

Features

Inside this uniquely transparent phone is a decent amount of storage, memory, and some other bits that definitely make it a mid-range phone.

For starters, there’s a Qualcomm processor, the firmly mid-range Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, a chip that supports AI and is paired with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage. Google’s Android 15 appears on the phone out of the box, with three years of Android updates and six of security patches.

Three cameras are found on the back through a circular extrusion, offering a 50 megapixel F1.88 wide camera, a 50 megapixel F2.55 3X optical, and an 8 megapixel F2.2 ultra-wide. That camera setup supports macro images and 4K videos, while the front sees a 50 megapixel F2.2 selfie camera.

It’s a phone, so you can expect a decent assortment of wireless connections, even if there’s only one wired connection with the Type C USB port at the bottom for charging and data. Wireless, however, offers 4G and 5G, GPS, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC for Google Pay, and WiFi 6’s 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax.

You’ll also find an IP64 water resistance rating and an in-display fingerprint sensor, plus a 5000mAh battery supporting 50W high-speed charging or 7.5W reverse charging if you happen to want to use that battery to recharge another device over a USB-C cable.

All of this sits under a 6.77 AMOLED display sporting a 120Hz refresh rate and running the Full HD+ resolution of 2392×1080.

Nothing does include a little bit extra in the phone, with LEDs found on the back, allowing you to choose how and when they light up, usually with apps notifications and ringtones, though they can be used with a timer, as well.

In-use

Every phone tends to be pretty similar these days: a touchscreen with a few physical buttons. There’s nothing complex there, and the Nothing phones keep that going.

Android is Android, running mostly stock, though there are some changes and tweaks, with a choice of either the standard look or something more specifically focused on Nothing’s serif-based approach to design and typography.

It means the look of the Phone 3a Pro is either standard Android or a little bit different, which won’t change how you use the phone, but may change how the whole thing looks for you.

The in-screen fingerprint sensor is easy to use, as is the camera for unlocking the phone using your face, or you can just stick to punching in that PIN, because that’s fine, as well.

You’ll even find a few buttons — power and volume, mainly — but there’s also an extra button that does something different, loading up a bit of AI Nothing calls your “Essential Space”.

AI and “Essential Space”

Like pretty much all phones this year, artificial intelligence is a part of the package, complete with AI wallpaper generation, which is probably one of the more fun aspects. Credit goes to Nothing here because the approach creates fun and unique wallpapers with ease.

But Nothing has gone a little deeper with its AI approaches, delivering something genuinely different: an AI journal of sorts.

“Essential Space” is essentially an AI-connected digital journal that takes moments of your life and uses artificial intelligence to join the dots. There’s a physical button on the side of the phone to trigger the whole thing, and depending on what you’re doing, it’ll grab that moment and store it with a message. It could be screenshots of what you were doing on your phone at the time, or messages you were saying, or audio from that exact time.

Once Essential Space has collected those moments, it uses AI to analyse what’s going on, and provide it all as a sort of journal. It’s a little like an evolution on Google’s screenshots collection app on the Pixel 9 Pro XL, but with a purpose.

And the purpose is a bit of mental health, a sort of nod to how busy and crazy the world can be. We’re not entirely sure it’s a feature we’d keep using even if we stuck with the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, but it’s clever all the same.

The button can’t be changed, though, so you’re either using it with Essential Space or not using it at all. Either way, it’s definitely an out of the box experience that no other phone maker has considered, that’s for sure.

Performance

Upon using the phone for the first couple of days, we noticed the performance immediately. Not necessarily in a good way, either.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip inside isn’t quite as high-end a processor used in other phones, though it will let you handle most of what you need a phone for. Apps run fairly well, likely complemented by the 12GB RAM in the 3a Pro, and we had little to no lag.

However the synthetic benchmarks from the phone weren’t stunning, giving you a gauge as to where the phone will land when it comes to gaming performance.

On benchmarks alone, the Nothing Phone 3a Pro is marginally faster than last year’s Phone 2a, and yet still under where Google’s 2024 Pixel 8a landed. Simply put, it will work, but other phones may deliver a better performance bang for the system buck.

At least mobile performance is capable by comparison. Like most phones today, support for 5G is found here, meaning your mobile should be able to hit high speeds provided the network is playing nice.

Testing the Phone 3a Pro in Sydney, Australia using the Telstra 5G network (by way of Mate Mobile), we found speeds as high as 411Mbps throughout our speed testing.

That’ll be plenty fast for getting music, streaming TV, and the occasional cat video or AI dream kitchen on TikTok, for sure.

Camera

One of the more interesting aspects is the camera system, which with three cameras on board, is more interesting than most mid-range models. Better, they’re not just your typical wide, ultra-wide, and meh-tastic 2 megapixel macro camera, but rather something that goes wide, ultra-wide, and close. It’s more like having a Galaxy S flagship, but in the body of something less expensive.

Specifically, you’ll find a 50 megapixel wide, a 50 megapixel close (3X), and an 8 megapixel ultra-wide, and it is a surprisingly formidable combination.

The standard wide offers clear and bright shots, providing crispness and sharpness (all the ‘ness), while the ultra-wide gets you a little further back and the zoom understandably the opposite, bringing you in.

The speed of the cameras is a little on the slow side, however, and you may find the results can be blurry at times, so make sure to hold that hand steady.

You’ll also find support for portrait shots, and mode that like other phones blurs the background, creating a separation between the subject and everything else. It’s fine for the most part, but doesn’t exactly hold a candle to what either Google or Apple can do with their technology, and can separate the background peculiarly at times. In one shot, we found the left side went blurry, while the right stayed sharp.

Macro images are a surprising win for Nothing, however, offering detailed and almost over-sharpened image of up-close details. The lines of a leaf, the seeds of a strawberry, and other sharp shots from the macroscopic world are yours to glance at. Again, just make sure you have a steady hand, because the speed of the cameras can leave something to be desired.

There’s also a little bit extra for in the camera for you to play with.

That comes in the way of some extra filters for more retro-inspired photography, while a glassy look makes images feel like you’re viewing them through art deco glass.

It’s an odd filter we doubt many will use, but if you’re after a style that will make your image pop, or at the very least become a mystery of sorts, it’s here in this phone for some reason or another.

Battery

One area that sees a definite win is the battery, which from our tests delivered near six hours of screen time, and more or less two days of battery life, provided you charged it the second night.

With less screen time, we suspect you could actually hit the two days, but we suspect most people will charge nightly, even if this phone can survive a full 24 hours and need a charge.

Charging is easy, of course, thanks to the Type C connection available on every phone, tablet, laptop, headphone, speaker, camera, and video game system — it’s a standard! — but you won’t find wireless charging on the 3a Pro at all.

That’s a bit of a shame, especially given the moniker that the 3a Pro is a “pro” phone. It’s not as if wireless charging is entirely new, and we’ve seen it on less expensive phones in the past. It might have just been an extra cost that Nothing couldn’t swallow at this price point.

Value

However, at $849 in Australia, Nothing is reaching into an interesting place with the Phone 3a Pro.

It’s not quite as inexpensive as the standard $599 Phone 3a, but you also get more in this model. For $250 more, you’ll find more memory, more storage, and a better camera system, more than making up the difference.

For $849, that’s not a bad package at all. The pricing works, coming in under the $999 iPhone 16e and offering an Android equivalent with a little more grunt in the camera, and much the same with the Pixel 9a, which only offers a two camera system compared to the Phone 3a Pro’s three-camera setup.

What needs work?

There are ways Nothing could improve things: wireless charging would be appreciated, as would a better processor. But outside of these, the complaints are minor.

You might not use the AI features included on the Nothing Phone 3a Pro at all. You mightn’t touch the glyph interface at all. You mightn’t use any of the minimal extras it comes with, but simply saying “you might not” use something barely dampens our enthusiasm.

What we love

While the performance can be a little slow at times, and the lack of wireless charging is a bit of a ho-hum vibe, what we love about the Nothing Phone 3a Pro is just how different it is. It’s unashamedly different in the best way possible.

This ain’t your regular iPhone clone. This is something more clever, more creative, and much cooler than other mobiles we’re looking at.

The look is creative, the feature set thought out, and the style of Android is different enough to know that this isn’t the same Android phone as every other model out there.

There’s no other iPhone, but there are plenty of Androids. And yet, there’s also nothing like a Nothing. It just stands out, on design, features, battery life, and even value.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

Make no mistake, there are things Nothing could improve, and there are features we’d love the phone to have. The performance could be improved, the camera could be a little faster, and the lack of wireless charging is a little ho-hum.

But beyond the misses, most of what Nothing gets right about the 3a Pro, it does so in the best way possible. This is a phone that stands out for all the right reasons.

Versatile, playful, and distinct, the Nothing Phone 3a Pro is one of the year’s most intriguing phones. It could be better, but for the price, it’s still pretty damn compelling. Recommended.