Nothing Phone 3a review: Redefining value

Sure, a $459 midrange phone with several premium features like the Nothing Phone 3a Pro is cool. But you know what's even cooler? An even less expensive phone that still boasts many of those same features — or so the argument goes for the Nothing Phone 3a that's also arriving around the same time as the Pro version.

There are some key differences between the standard Nothing Phone 3a and its Pro counterpart, most of which involve the phone's cameras. And while the Nothing Phone 3a may be able to point to a superior telephoto lens, the fact that the Nothing Phone 3a offers a dedicated zoom lens at all — again on board a phone that costs less than $400 — is pretty remarkable.

But do remarkable specs in theory make for a remarkable phone in practice? That's what I aim to find out in this Nothing Phone 3a review, which considers how much value Nothing packs in to an entry-level device that looks to compete with the best cheap phones under $500.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Specs

Nothing Phone 3a review: Price and availability

At $379/£379/AU$689, the Nothing Phone 3a costs slightly more than its predecessor, which debuted last year at $349. As we'll see, the upgrades in the newer phone easily justify the $30 increase, though this model features the same 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage as before.

To put that price in context, the Nothing Phone 3a costs a little bit less than the $399 Galaxy A36 that Samsung just announced. It's a little bit more than some of the latest Motorola G series phones like the $299 Moto G Power (2025). However, in both cases, you could argue that the Nothing Phone has better specs on paper, starting with a telephoto lens you don't typically find on phones for less than $400.

The challenge, as it always is with Nothing's devices, is getting your hands on a 3a — at least in the U.S. Nothing isn't selling the device through retailers or carriers at this time. Rather, you'll have through Nothing's U.S. Beta program. It's not that big a hassle in the greater scheme of things, but it does limit availability.

Pre-orders for the Noting Phone 3a begin March 4, with sales getting underway March 11. Customers in the U.K. and Australia can opt for a cheaper model featuring 8GB of memory and 128GB of storage for £329/AU$599.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Design

"What's with the Blade Runner phone?" my daughter asked when she caught sight of the Nothing Phone 3a on my desk, and if you don't speak Teenager, she meant it as a compliment. Outside of recent Google Pixel phones, you won't find many handsets that look anything like the ones Nothing produces with the lit-up glyphs and swooping lines on a phone that looks a lot more stylish than a $379 device has any right to be.

To my eye, the glyph patterns on the back of the white Nothing Phone 3a make it look like I took it ouf ot the box before it was fully assembled. (In addition to white, U.S. shoppers can also opt for a black version of the phone.) My daughter finds the design much cooler, and I don't think it's to easy to guess which demographic Nothing is hoping to target.

I do think the camera module is a little plain compared to the circular array found on the Nothing Pro 3a. there's a circle on the standard 3a's cameras, true, but it's really just a raised strip of three vertical lenses, which means the phone won't lie flatly on a table.

You do get a pretty durable phone for the price. The Nothing Phone 3a comes with an IP64 water resistance rating, which is an improvement over the Nothing Phone 2a's IP54 rating. Still, the $399 Galaxy A36 and $299 Galaxy A26 feature IP67 ratings, meaning they can get dunked in water; the Nothing Phone 3a can survive a spray from multiple directions.

Probably my biggest quibble with the Nothing Phone 3a's design is the position of a new Essential Key, a screenshot and voice memo capture tool that supports a new software feature which we'll discuss a little bit later. The Essential Key is right below the phone's power button — indeed, it's where I would imagine the power button would mean, which means I captured a lot of screenshots when what I wanted to do was put the Nothing Phone 3a to sleep. I imagine those incidents would decrease the longer I use the phone.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Display

You get plenty of screen with the Nothing Phone 3a, as Nothing uses a 6.77-inch AMOLED panel with a refresh rate that ranges between 30Hz and 120Hz depending on your on-screen activity.

It also happens to be the brightest screen Nothing's ever used, according to the phone maker, which claims a peak brightness of 3,000 nits.

We didn't get close to that number when we measured the screen's brightness with a light meter. Using our standard set up, we recorded a maximum brightness of 1,194 nits, and fiddling around with different instruments, we got a reading as high as 1,370 nits.

It should be noted that most peak brightness metrics are recorded under conditions you're unlikely to experience in the real world. And the numbers we were able to measure were in line with the 1,350 nits we measured on the Pixel 8a.

The bottom line is that in daily usage, I never had a problem seeing the Nothing Phone 3a's display, even when it was bright and sunny out. And I certainly didn't need to crank up the brightness to make out details on the screen.

In its default setting, the Nothing Phone 3a captured more of the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts than either the Nothing Phone 2a it's replacing or the Pixel 8a it's hoping to go up against.

The Pixel 8a's Delta-E reading of 0.24 suggests more accurate colors than the Nothing Phone 3a and its 0.29 rating, but switch to standard mode, and color accuracy improves dramatically on Nothing's device. (Numbers closer zero mean more accurate colors.)

Certainly, whether I was watching "Real Pain" or the "Fantastic Four: First Steps" trailer, everything looked colorful and bright, even from different viewing angles. I also appreciated the sound quality emanating from the stereo speakers on either end of the phone.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Camera

The cameras on low-cost phones aren't usually the thing I'm looking forward to trying out first since that's the area where a lot of midrange and budget devices cut corners in an effort to keep a lid on prices.

You can't accuse Nothing of that practice, though, as the Nothing Phone 3a includes a dedicated telephoto camera. No, it's not the periscope-style lens found on the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, but show me another sub-$400 phone with this kind of setup. The iPhone 16e, which costs $220 more than the 3a, only gives you one rear camera for crying out loud.

The telephoto lens — a 50MP sensor that supports a 2x optical zoom — is one of three rear cameras. Joining the party are a 50MP main lens and an 8MP ultrawide camera. A 32MP front camera handles selfie duties.

Since I just finished reviewing the Moto G Power (2025), I used that phone for camera comparisons with the Nothing Phone 3a, even though the former camera phone offers a macro sensor instead of a telephoto camera.

That said, the Power costs just $80 less than the Nothing Phone 3a, so I want to see if there's a noticeable difference thanks to Nothing's more impressive hardware and its TrueLens 3.0 photo processing engine. I'm also looking as to whether the Nothing Phone 3a's output can compare to what you'd get from the less expensive entries on our best camera phone list.

This image of a frittata looks very good when handled by the Nothing Phone 3a. You get a balance of both warm colors — as seen on the frittata itself — juxtaposed against the cooler blues of the blueberries in the background.

The text on my coffee mug looks a little softer in the Nothing Phone's shot, with the Moto G Power producing sharper edges. Still, I really can't find fault with the Nothing Phone 3a here.

When reviewing the Moto G Power, I found that it turned out decent pictures in friendly conditions, but quality dipped as the lighting dropped. You can see that happening in this public artwork shot on a cloudy, drizzly day where the Moto photo looks lost in a shadow. The Nothing Phone 3a doesn't fall in that trap, keeping everything bright and colorful, especially that oversized red Adirondack chair in the background.

I was generally impressed with how the Nothing Phone 3a performed in low lighting. Take this shot of some flags right before sunset. There's some blur around the edges of the California and U.S. flags, which were getting whipped around a bit in the wind, but the colors look good, even with the diminishing light in the sky.

Speaking of the sky, the Nothing Phone 3a does a very good job highlighting the purple clouds of the sunset, a detail that's overly dark in the Moto G Power photo.

Not every photo shot in dark conditions by the Nothing Phone 3a turned out well. The Nothing Phone's photo of some skeleton decorations in my unlit basement pumps more lighting into the sene than the Moto G Power manages.

But that's at the expense of sharpness — the skeletons have more refined edges in the Motorola photo, even if a lot of those are covered in shadow.

I think that basement photo was a one-off, though, as most of the other Nothing Phone 3a photos I took at night, like this lone shot outside a local bar, turned out just fine. Even the distortion around the lightbulbs dangling from the store's awning is kept to a minimum.

In other camera modes, we see a return to the brighter, more colorful images you get from the Nothing Phone 3a. There's a little fuzziness in this ultrawide shot of a busy city street — I snapped the Nothing Phone photo just as traffic began to move — but it's a warmer shot than what the Moto G Power manages. (That said, credit to the Moto's ultrawide camera for making the patches of blue sky look a little bit more distinctive.)

Trying out a 4x zoom on a clock tower, the clock face looks much brighter in the Nothing Phone 3a image. Even better, there's no loss of clarity, even though I've pushed the zoom past its 2x optical limit.

If there's one mode where I didn't care for what the Nothing Phone 3a produced, it's the phone's portrait mode. Neither shot by the 3a or the Moto G Power is a keeper, but at least Motorola's phone manages to get some color into my skin tone. I'm too pale in the Nothing Phone 3a shot, as the image looks pretty over-exposed.

We'll note that the Nothing Phone 3a manages to retain the parts of my beard that are a little unkempt, while they become lost in the background blur of the Moto G shot. But overall, this this is weakest photo I took with the Nothing Phone.

Switching to the front camera, the Nothing Phone 3a redeems itself. This time, my skin tone is warmer, as opposed to the overly reddish cast the Moto G Power gives me. Background colors are a bit more accurate in the Motorola photo — the window frame should look more red than it does in the Nothing Phone image — but I think the overall image looks best in Nothing's hands.

Clearly, the Nothing Phone 3a can top other budget phones on a consistent basis. I plan further testing against the Pixel 8a and Galaxy A36 — two phones that cost a little bit more — to see how it fares in head-to-head comparisons, though these initial shots are promising.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Performance

Instead of the MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro chip found in last year's phone, Nothing has turned to a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 system-on-chip for the 3a. That's a slightly less powerful version of Qualcomm's standard Snapdragon 7 silicon, and that's reflected in the modest gains the Nothing Phone 3a posts over its predecessor when we tested its CPU using the Geekbench 6 test.

In Geekbench's single-core test, the Nothing Phone 3a's result of 1,165 was only 5% better than what the Nothing Phone 2a produced on that same test. Multicore scores improved a bit more, jumping 27% to 3,288.

Those results were much better than the numbers produced by the Moto G Power (2025) and its MediaTek Dimensity 6300 chipset. The more expensive Pixel 8a posted better results than the Nothing Phone 3a, though.

If you're looking for something to puzzle over, the Nothing Phone 3a showed very little improvement over the Nothing Phone 2a in 3DMark's Wild Life Unlimited graphics test. The Nothing Phone 3a churned out 25.1 fps on that test, which was essentially the same as the 25.5 fps result that its predecessor posted.

My colleague John Velasco criticized the 2a for choppy graphics on some games, though that's not something that cropped up when I played PUBG Mobile on the Nothing Phone 3a. It's also worth noting that the 3a's result was much better than the meager 8.1 fps produced by the Moto G Power.

I don't think the Nothing Phone 3a is a powerhouse, which you wouldn't expect a sub-$400 phone to be. But in my time with the phone, I think it's more than capable of handling everyday tasks without a hiccup.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Battery life and charging

Nothing kept the same 5,000 mAh size for the Nothing Phone 3a's battery, relying on the switch to the Snapdragon silicon to help its new phone run more efficiently. And the Nothing Phone 3a is up to the challenge, posting a better result than the Nothing Phone 2a on our battery life test.

We test how long batteries can last by taking a fully charged phone, setting its display to 150 nits, and having the device surf the web over cellular until it runs out of power. The Nothing Phone 3a lasted 15 hours and 24 minutes on this test, beating out the Nothing Phone 2a's time by a modest 15 hours. In both cases, the phones' displays were set to their default adaptive refresh rate.

While the Nothing Phone 3a beat the average smartphone's time on our test by 5 hours, its result won't land it on the best phone battery life list that shows the longest-lasting devices we've tested. That's less a reflection of the Nothing Phone 3a's longevity and more on how overall phone battery life has improved dramatically overall. These days, phones need to last 16 hours on our test to land among the best of the best. The Moto G Power (2025) topped 17 hours, for example.

When it's time to charge the Nothing Phone 3a, you can count on 50W charging with a compatible charger — an improvement over the 2a's 45W charging support. After 30 minutes of charing the Nothing Phone 3a, we got a drained device to a 72% charge, which is a very good result.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Software

Nothing's new phones feature the company's Nothing OS 3.1, which is built on Android 15. As before, you get a very distinctive interface that I feel confident in saying looks like no other implementation of Android on mobile devices.

If you're a devoted Nothing phone user, there's nothing here to surprise you, but if this will be your first time seeing the dot-matrix style font and interpreting the circular icons to figure out what app you're summoning, there's a bit of a learning curve involved. Certainly Nothing OS is an acquired test, and I'm not sure that I've fully acquired it in my time with the phone.

Another new feature that will take some getting used to is the Essential Space capability that's tied to the Essential Key I mentioned earlier. Essential Space is a place for storing whatever you capture with that key, whether it's a screenshot (one press of the button) or a voice memo to capture an idea on the fly (a long press).

Remember to keep pressing that button as you're recording your thoughts, or the recording will stop. When your done with the recording, the Essential Space feature will use AI to transcribe it. AI also provides a quick summary of any screenshots you've taken with the Essential Key. And you can organize related screenshots into folders, making Essential Space a valuable research tool.

I inadvertently press that Essential Key a lot, as I noted, so I spent a lot of time in Essential Space deleting unintentionally captured screens.

I do appreciate Nothing's attempt to put AI to practical use, but I'd have to spend a lot more time with Essential Space to see if its approach to storing ideas fits into my workflow. I'd like a way to create and write a note directly in Essential Space, for example, and that capability doesn't seem to be included in this early version.

Nothing promises three years of Android updates and six years of security updates for the 3a. That security support is certainly extensive, especially for phones in this price range.

The Moto G Power (2025) has only three guaranteed years of security updates plus two Android OS updates, just for context. Of course, the newly announced Galaxy A36 and A26 have six years of software and security updates, so Nothing's not quite on the leading edge here.

Nothing Phone 3a review: Verdict

The Nothing Phone 3a turns out to be as solid a device in practice as its impressive spec sheet would have you believe. For $379, you get a long-lasting phone with a unique design and a gorgeous display. The cameras produce consistently high-quality shots, and you can even zoom in on subjects with a dedicated telephoto lens — a feature a lot of competing devices can't offer.

There are nits worth picking. The Essential Space feature is promising, but needs a little bit more polish to become an integral part of your digital life. I would have liked to see bigger performance gains over the Nothing Phone 2a. And there's no ignoring the fact that, in the U.S. anyhow, it's a little more complicated getting a Nothing Phone 3a than it would be a device from more established phone makers.

On that last point, though, the Nothing Phone 3a is worth the effort to track down. It's hard to find a phone with a better value-to-price ratio, which is pretty impressive given how feature-rich a lot of midrange phones are becoming. But even those devices will have a hard time measuring up against the latest phones from Nothing.