The Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro offer excellent mid-range value, though I’m still not in love with the Nothing Glyph,and the Essential Key isn’t quite essential yet.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Eye catching design | Nothing Phone 3a Pro is a little underpowered for its price point |
| Telephoto at the Nothing Phone 3a’s price point is an excellent inclusion | 30x zoom isn’t excellent at all, predictably |
| Essential Key has some potential… | … but it’s potential waiting to be fully utilised. |
Score: 4/5
 |
Buy The Nothing Phone 3a! | Buy On Amazon |
 |
Buy The Nothing Phone 3a Pro! | Buy On Amazon |
In this review
Specifications
Design
Camera
Performance
Battery
Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro used in this review were sent to me by Nothing. That gets them reviewed, nothing more, nothing less. All editorial statements and opinions are 100% independent. You may well have known that already, but I feel like this kind of disclosure gets buried far too often. For more on Alex Reviews Tech’s ethics policy, read here.
2024’s Nothing Phone 2a was an interesting device and a very decent challenger in the mid-range phone space – and I dearly wish I could link you to the review I wrote of it last year, but sadly it vanished into the trash bin of the Internet when Gizmodo Australia got shuttered last year.
Damn, drat, blast and other, possibly stronger curse words. Nonethless, it was a good phone, so my interest was piqued when JB Hi-Fi announced it was going to range the Nothing Phone 2a’s successors.
I expected to like the Nothing Phone 3a Pro more (and, spoiler, I do rather like it), but honestly there’s no way I can’t recommend the Nothing Phone 3a over its Pro sibling for most users given the price difference and the fact that the primary difference between the two largely comes down to camera features.
Design
From the front, there’s little to tell the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro apart. Both are built around 6.77 inch 1080x2392 pixel AMOLED displays with support for up to 120Hz refresh rates. These aren’t fancy LTPO displays capble of dropping down as low as 1Hz, though Nothing does give you the choice of fixed 60Hz, 120Hz or a dynamic setting to pick from, which some makers don’t.
Flip them around, however, and it’s easy to pick the Nothing Phone 3a from its pricier sibling, because the cheaper phone opts for a simple camera bar, almost Pixel style, while the Nothing Phone 3a Pro has a far more prominent circular camera bump to house its lenses.
The 3a variant comes in black, white or blue finishes, while 3a Pro owners only get black or grey finishes to pick from. Like prior Nothing phone models these are more clear tints than outright colour choices, with internal componentry very much on display as a style choice.
I will say that I do rather like the blue Nothing Phone 3a in this respect; I think it looks great, though were it my daily driver on a continuous basis, I’d want to throw it into a case anway, because I’m me.
The Nothing Phone 3a Pro in Black. Not quite as sexy as the Blue, I think.
Nothing’s signature design piece remains its light-up Glyph interface that can be used to show variable volume, notification alerts or as a “fun” light up display when music is playing.
I’ve been reviewing phones long enough that I can well recall when lots of Android phone designs played around with notification lights of varying types – HTC, back when it was a more significant player in the phone space absolutely loved a weird notification light design – but nobody’s quite taken it quite as far as Nothing has with the Glyph setup.
That being said, I’m still not sold on the Glyph being much more than a conversation starter/party piece outside of very basic notifications. If you’re concerned by the way about light sensitivity and flashing patterns, you can 100% disable the Glyph interface, and much of it is disabled by default.
Both phones have a lot of controls across both sides, which can be a touch confusing. On the left hand side there are two volume buttons, while the right hand side houses a power button (or assistant button depending on your configuration) above what Nothing is calling the “Essential” key. More on its functionality in the performance section, but from a design standpoint I hit two distinct issues here.
Firstly, all of the buttons are fairly similar in terms of spacing if you’re not looking at them. The volume buttons are a little closer together, but if you’re fumbling around to just adjust volume with the phone in hand or pocket, good luck getting that right first time.
There is a trick to this; the Essential Key is a little smaller, but on both phones it’s also weirdly loose, almost as if it’s not properly installed relative to the other buttons. If the button you feel moves just a little bit, then the volume’s on the other side. I’m not sure that’s a good way to tell the difference, but it certainly works.
The Nothing Phone 2a was only IP54 rated, and here Nothing has upped its game, offering IP64 protection across both phones. If you’re not au fait with IP ratings, I’ve got a full guide to "waterproof" phones here, but the quick practical takeaway is that either phone has better dust resistance than previous models, but they’re still not suitable for immersion in water.
Inside the box for both phones you’ll find a USB-to-USB cable, but no charger, as well as a SIM tool. I don’t usually comment on SIM tools, because typically they’re small metallic pins with a loop end, but Nothing clearly thinks a little different here. Its SIM tool resembles a tiny clear handled screwdriver, which is quite cute.
A quite cute SIM tool is not a sentence I expected to write today, but here we are.
Camera
The difference in rear camera design between the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro does highlight that these are phones that offer different camera setups, though not quite in the way that you might expect.
Typically between a regular and “Pro” model phone you’re likely to see the existence and absence of telephoto lenses, but in fact both phones have telephoto on board.
To get into the specifics, the Nothing Phone 3a has a 50MP Wide sensor, 8MP Ultra-Wide and 50MP 2x Optical Zoom Telephoto sensor at the rear, plus a front-facing 32MP sensor for your personal selfie shots. The Nothing Phone 3a Pro kicks that up just a small notch, featuring a 50MP Wide, 8MP Ultra-Wide and 50MP 3x Optical Zoom Telephoto sensor, plus a front-facing 50MP selfie sensor.
I am someone who appreciates having a higher degree of telephoto zoom; I genuinely find it useful for capturing shots especially when I can shoot within the native optical length of a given lens, though typically less so with extended zoom and the sometimes ridiculous levels of hybrid digital zoom that some phones offer.
The Nothing Phone 3a can push its 2x telephoto lens up to 30x zoom, while the Nothing Phone 3a Pro can manage up to 60x digital zoom. So what does that look like?
Rather predictably not good, though you can push the Nothing Phone 3a Pro a little further than the Nothing Phone 3a before it all starts to fall apart. To give that some context, here's a shot taken with the standard lens on the Nothing Phone 3a of some chickens in the far distance.
It was a rainy day, but the Nothing Phone 3a's primary lens took this shot without too many problems.
I wish I could get close to the chickens, but maybe they're feral, so I'll just use the 30x zoom.
The Nothing Phone 3a at 30x zoom is, predictably, not great.
The Nothing Phone 3a Pro takes much the same standard shot to nobody's surprise, but its 30x shot, while still flawed, is better.
Nobody's calling this good, but it's better than the 3a manages at the same distance, thanks to the 3a Pro's improved telephoto lens.
Taking it to 60x does allow me to intrude even further on the chicken's privacy, but not with a result that's particularly good:
Extreme hybrid zoom. Just say no.
While I do appreciate the extended zoom on the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, I suspect the bigger play here is that at the Nothing Phone 3a’s $599/$689 price point, it’s one of only a handful of phones to offer telephoto at all, and it’ll probably be enough for most users in most situations.
Outside telephoto, both phones operate well enough within the limitations of mid-range phones for more challenging situations such as low light or fast action.
One final note here, because it's one I've not hit with other phones I've tested to date.
Nothing’s camera app is slightly more fussy about having a clean lens than most phones, reminding me a couple of times when pulling it from my pockets that the lens needed a quick clean. My pockets aren’t full of that much detritus, I think…
Nothing Phone 3a Sample Photos
Are ducks not in fact birds? And if so, what are they?
A more regular 4x zoom shot on the Nothing Phone 3a works well, though this possibly-not-a-bird does not look impressed.
Regular daytime shots are fine, but that's to be expected from every smartphone these days.
Decent colour reproduction on this shot, though darker areas are a challenge. This isn't a premium cameraphone.
Portrait shots work nicely.
Nothing Phone 3a Pro Sample Photos
Mmm. Wine. Quite a lot of wine. Hat tip to Horner Wines, where this shot was taken.
Portrait mode doesn't have to just be for people.
The Pro variant is reasonable for low light shots, but its price point does start to shift towards true premium camera phones that do a lot better.
Performance
Both the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro share the same internal processor, but where the Nothing Phone 2a opted for a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro, they’re both packing in a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, along with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM on the Nothing Phone 3a and 12GB of RAM on the Nothing Phone 3a Pro.
The Nothing Phone 3a ships in 128GB and 256GB variants, while the Nothing Phone 3a Pro ships in Australia with 256GB of fixed storage only. There’s no microSD expansion on either model, which I still don’t like. It’s becoming less common over time, and I’d much rather have the ability to boost internal storage rather than have to offload content to other devices or the cloud necessarily. For what it’s worth, the model of the Nothing Phone 3a sent my way was the slightly higher-spec 12GB RAM/256GB storage variant.
Some years back a phone series that jumped from MediaTek to Qualcomm usually saw a boost in performance as a result – though often with a hit to battery life, more on that later – so how has Nothing’s new phone duo fared? There’s a slight challenge here due to the range in pricing, so I’ve tried to include a number of phones across both price brackets to give you a more complete picture of likely performance:
There’s a pleasing performance bump there over the Nothing Phone 2a, though you should never upgrade year-on-year for your smartphone really.
It’s also undeniable that you can get more performance a similar-ish prices to these two phones, though there’s really enough power here for most everyday users. It also highlights that while the Nothing Phone 3a competes well enough in its price space, the Nothing Phone 3a Pro can't help but feel a little underpowered.
On the GPU front, here’s how they compare against the same group of mid-range handsets:
The Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro perform about where I’d expect to see mid-range phones, though rather obviously it’s disappointing to see a downgrade in GPU performance relative to the older Nothing Phone 2a here. Equally it’s not a great look for the more expensive Nothing Phone 3a Pro, because you can get better GPU performance within that price bracket for sure.
Synthetic benchmarks never tell the full story, and the reality is that either phone would be a fine little workhorse for your everyday Android app needs. You can’t push the highest end AAA mobile games at them at full speed, but they’ll handle most apps without sweating too hard.
When I received the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro, the Essential Key on the side basically acted like a combination dictaphone and note taking app; a single short press allows you to capture a screenshot and add a text note to it, while a longer press allows for the capture of voice notes.
All of this data gets saved in Nothing's "Essential Space" app, and the idea here is that over time it'll expand out to other features and AI-led optimisations to help you organise your thoughts and workflows.
Nothing is planning to expand the utility of the Essential Key over time, and indeed during my review period it added the ability to use the Essential Key as a camera capture button, for example. That's a fine idea in theory, but its placement high up the body of the phone makes it a pretty poor shutter button if you're shooting in landscape mode.
The Essential Key isn't a terrible selling point, and clearly lots of phones are going to start playing with this kind of utility button -- not that it's a new idea, anyone else remember the dedicated "Facebook" button on select HTC phones back in the day? -- this year, but I wouldn't entirely call it "Essential" yet.
In terms of upgrades and updates, Nothing promises three year of OS upgrades and four years of security updates for both the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro. That’s not bad, but it’s a little behind the pace of the likes of Google or Samsung in these price ranges. At the time of writing this review in late March 2025, both phones were sitting on the February security update, which is reasonable tracking to keep them secure.
Nothing puts its own NothingOS launcher on top of Android 15, and obviously it needs to do so in order to use features like the Essential Key, but, like it did with the Nothing Phone 2a, it also has its own distinct monochrome visual style for the UI.
I’m not a big fan of it, because it makes app discovery a little harder unless you’re really au fait with the shape of your app icons, and it looks horribly discordant as soon as an app is installed that doesn’t follow that colour scheme.
You’re not stuck with it, however; I’ve got a guide that I created for the Nothing Phone 2a that applies just fine to the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro that covers off how to change this UI detail up:
Both the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro are 5G capable, though as you might expect we’re playing only in the sub-6Ghz bands here.
One point of difference between the two in network terms is that while both are dual-SIM capable, only the Nothing Phone 3a Pro also offers eSIM support. Reading around, apparently the Japanese market Nothing Phone 3a also has eSIM, but nowhere else, which is an unusual choice.
Neither phone really bucked the trend I see with network performance here in Sydney; testing on the Telstra network saw download speeds of between 200-400Mbps, entirely on par with what I see from other Android handsets.
Battery
Nothing’s approach to battery power for the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro is both identical and 100% in line with what you see on any Android phone right now that doesn’t fold.
If you’re guessing that they pack in 5,000mAh batteries (or perhaps if you didn’t read the specification table above), reward yourself with a gold star and a pat on the back, though possibly not both at the same time. That might be tricky to pull off.
There’s nothing wrong with a phone with a 5,000mAh battery, but there’s equally nothing that exceptional about it either. As always battery life is what matters, and everyone’s usage is different, which is why I use a mix of anecdotal testing and my own three hour YouTube battery test to give some kind of comparative picture of battery life.
Also read:
Why you shouldn’t always trust mobile phone battery tests (not even mine!)
Here’s how the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro compared using that test:
On the plus side there, they did manage above 90% for the first tested hour; phones that fall below that mark often struggle to make it through a single day of battery testing. It’s disappointing however that they’re worse in that hour than the older Nothing Phone 2a is, and clearly there’s a host of phones that do better than they do within their price range, too.
On the more anecdotal side, they’re certainly capable of that single day, and I could see if you were light user making it into a second day without too much fuss.
Both phones ship in quite slender boxes with no space for a charger, so you’ll have to supply your own. Both phones only support wired charging at up to 50W, but there’s no support for wireless charging on either phone. They do offer the ability to charge other gadgets at up to 7.5W, but only via a wired connection, which is an unusual choice to say the least.
Nothing Phone 3a / Nothing Phone 3a Pro: Alex’s Verdict
Nothing has made some interesting choices across the Nothing Phone 3a and Nothing Phone 3a Pro that definitely make them stand out in the hotly contested mid-range space.
Neither has stellar battery life, and I would have liked to see a little more GPU grunt, but conversely they're one of the few phones in the mid-range space to throw in telephoto lenses alongside ultra-wide ones, and that's especially a selling point for the Nothing Phone 3a at its lower price point.
I can see the utility in the Essential Key, though it's clearly a work in progress right now unless you need that kind of quick note jotting capability on the go.
Nothing Phone 3a / Nothing Phone 3a Pro : Pricing and availability
The Nothing Phone 3a retails in Australia for $599/$689, while the Nothing Phone 3a Pro retails at $849.
|
Buy The Nothing Phone 3a! | Buy On Amazon |
|
Buy The Nothing Phone 3a Pro! | Buy On Amazon |
About the Author
Not a comment, but a question.
I have a ZTE T86 (Telstra) running Android 9. I use “super backup” from Google play store to back up my contacts, messages and call history.
Can I do the same with the Nothing phones?? I’m more concerned about restoring from my ZTE to a Nothing phone.
Thanks in advance.
It… should. From what I can see that app is available for later versions of Android (such as the versions running on the 3a/3a Pro) so there’s no evident problem of availability. I’m not using that app myself so I can’t speak to its capabilities or how well it runs and so on, but there’s no obvious barrier in place for shifting up from the ZTE T86 (and that would be quite the performance jump — I reviewed that phone way back when and rather liked it, but phones have moved on quite a bit from then!)