Hi everyone, I’m Anshu, a tech and photography enthusiast. Recently, I got the opportunity to review the newly launched Nothing Phone (3a) series as part of the Nothing Community Review Program. Here’s my experience with it. Let’s dive in and uncover the reality.
What’s in the package ~
📱 Phone
🔌 Charging cable (Generic)
🛠 Sim ejector
📰 Paperwork
🗃 New Box
The new box is much better now as it doesn’t have to be torn down now, which is a very nice touch. This will be a huge help when people buy this phone via Flipkart and open-box delivery won’t mess this up. Plus 2nd hand buyers will be happy.
Design ~ Beautiful 😍
But, it has a Flat screen, Flat glass back with a matte plastic frame with metal buttons and the essential key. Even the camera slope in this white colour doesn’t attract dust around it.
Display
The 6.7 inches 120hz AMOLED display with 1300 nits of HBM & 3000 peek brightness touches a sampling rate of 480 Hz, which goes up to 1000hz in Game Mode. The display is very bright, and the calibration icon is done well. But, Bezles this time around are thicker than the Phone 2a & it is very noticeable for the starting week. After that, it becomes normal.
Speakers
The speakers are loud and are detailed for the price but I found the BASS to be a little lacking.Also, the Stereo separation is the usual 40-60 I believe because it does feel like the majority of the sound is coming from the bottom.
Performance
This has a SD 7s Gen 3 with UFS 2.2 which may not sound that bright compared to what the competition has to offer. Which is true to an extent. The Phone 3a runs smoothly with all the daily tasks you throw at it. The whole OS just compliments the smoothness and works nicely as it should despite not having powerful hardware.
But sometimes it does show slowdowns like in the camera app when switching focal lengths; when exiting a heavy app like a game (Genshin Impact), this app thing doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen often.
Cameras
Evaluating this was tough. 3a series comes with a new algorithm and it shows beautifully.
Main Camera: 50 MP Samsung sensor, F/1.88, 1/1.57 with OIS-EIS. The 24mm shots are detailed and have good colours; in short, the main camera shoots well in daylight.
But when the light starts to drop, The main camera does hold up well but sometimes it does mess up highlights.
2x Telephoto: 50 MP Samsung sensor, F/2.0, ½.74 with just EIS. I love the 50mm focal length on the 3a. The perspective it gives is quite nice. We can also do 4x In-Sensor crop with the telephoto which gives decent results in good lighting.
But the thing here is that 1x and 2x cameras have colour shifts, and sometimes the gap is huge. The default exposure mostly remains high only to underexpose when Tap-to-focus is done. So, little optimisation is needed there.
Ultra-Wide camera: The Ultra wide camera is nothing extraordinary; it works with a good amount of daylight, and the results are the same as other 8MP Ultra wides generally perform.
Selfies: Selfies on the 3a have been good for the most part. They’re colour-accurate, have good HDR, skin tones are nice and even the portrait mode works well mostly (Sometimes it messes up with the subject separation). But whenever the lights fall short it shows. It has an F/2.2 aperture, and with that, low-light shots are tough.
BUT, LUTS CHANGE IT’S FATE.
See, the issues I mentioned with the camera are very much visible with the default setting, but as soon as you start using the LUTs on the phone, which, By the way, even you can custom make and share, it completely makes these shortcomings shallow.
Also, The new camera app is beautiful & functional to use. But I did notice some slowdowns and
jittering with the portrait mode section, So Nothing needs to fix it. The shutter speed is not that fast, so if you are capturing a moving subject, it will have motion blur.
Videos
I found the video performance to be quite good. It’s nothing extraordinary, but it does well in most scenarios.
RAM management
I have the 8/256 variant of the 3a & RAM management has been quite good except for one particular thing. Apps stay in RAM mostly but there is this thing I noticed. Around 5 apps stay in the RAM easily, but as soon as I open the camera app and start clicking pictures etc.. the last 5 apps that were in the RAM are now just 2, sometimes 1 as well.
Battery life
Battery life on this has been phenomenal. Without gaming, it easily touches 10 hrs, sometimes 11 hours of SOT. My usage- Mobile data, Brightness more than 50%, Youtube, X, WhatsApp, Slack, Calls (Around 1.5 hrs Avg), Camera, YouTube music and small other stuff like payments, RCS chats, etc.
Charging
This supports 50-watt charging, but I didn’t have a PD charger around me, so I wasn’t able to rigorously test this; my phone got charged in around 1hr 10/13 mins, mostly with my POCO 90-watt charger. There was no abnormal heating while charging, which is a good thing.
Connectivity & Mics
The Mic quality on this is pretty solid; it catches sound well & the AI noise cancellation while on call also works quite well.
Connectivity, on the other hand, was good, No problems there. I did face some 4G-5G switching a while back but it didn’t happen again. So I guess that’s on Jio.
Essential Key
I wasn’t quite confident when Nothing released this as a game changer Ai feature, but it was a matter of time before I understood the real deal. So, For me, Essential Space has been a lifesaver. Now my thoughts and screenshots are managed and stored in such a manner that it isn’t a mess. Previously, I always did the Google Keep way, which was time-consuming, and I had to take a screenshot & then copy and paste it there, which wasn’t a smooth process.
It automatically scans the screenshot & makes pointers to go through.But, Yeah I do understand this is quite limited in the current version. Like the transcription with the voice does have typos & there’s no way we can edit that. For a first step thing, this is quite useful & I hope this becomes more practical in the future.
Software & Glyphs
It runs on Nothing OS 3.1. It’s smooth, fast and responsive. Nothing OS has been one of my favourite skins & combined with the Glyphs it was a delight to use. The animations, Widgets, and typography (I like Dot-Matrix) were very good. I did find some bugs that I have reported & some glitches that were ironed out with a restart (Like haptics being soft, but after the restart, it got fixed). This supports 3 Major Android Updates & 6 years of security patches, Which is very very good. Got 2 updates on the Phone 3a till now.
Conclusion
I quite like the appeal of the Phone (3a) . The cameras, though not perfect, do very well in most scenarios.The battery is very well calibrated, but I feel charging is a little on the slower side. A person who is accustomed to faster charging speeds will feel that more compared to a normal person. Everything else just works and the 3a does that pretty well.I guess optimisation paid off for the experience. But do I feel it should have that UFS 3.1 storage? Yes. It’s for future-proofing & getting less impacted by filling up data over the period.
A person who is looking for a phone with one of the cleanest software, Glyphs and this design that is a big head-turner & a conversation starter should consider this. Not to mention that 2x lens & those LUTS do have a big impact if you are patient with the camera.
That’s all from my side on the Nothing Phone (3a). Thanks for reading this to the end.
