Hello fellow community members! My name is Khushal Jain. Having used the Nothing Phone (1) for over two years, I was thrilled to test the Nothing Phone (3a) through the Community Review Program. Today, I’ll be sharing my experience, so buckle up for a ride! 🎢

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Unboxing

The unboxing experience was great, the packaging has improved, unlike the older box which would easily get damaged on opening the seal, this one doesn’t. it has a nice peeling sticker on the back.
You can unbox it without damaging the box.

The phone comes with a C-C data cable, Sim Ejector Tool, however charger is not included in the box.

I really like the transparent Sim Ejector tool, which comes with the Nothing Phone

However, I was put down a little when I got to know that the C-C cable was a normal one and not the transparent one like its predecessor Phone (2a) had.

You can watch my unboxing experience here.

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Design

The Phone follows the same Nothing Design Philosophy, with transparent back, with some funky elements, Visible screws, all protected with a glass.

I really appreciate Nothing using glass back this time around, which will be less prone to smudges and scratches.

Also, the bezels on the screen of Phone (3a) are bigger than the ones found on (2a), and no - longer even from all sides. the corner radius has also changed from its predecessor.

The phone is quite big with its 6.77″ display, coming from Phone (1) which I have been using for more than 2 years. It took me quite some time to get used to the new phone, initially I felt uncomfortable holding it but eventually I got used to it.

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Battery and Charging

The Phone supports charging speeds up to 50W. Since I didn’t have a power brick that supports 50W I used the Nothing Power (45 W) to charge the device, and it always took 65-67 minutes to go from 1-100%

Here are some metrics for charge time:

10m -> 25%
20m -> 46%
30m -> 61%
40m -> 75%
50m -> 91%
60m -> 97%
67m -> 100%

Battery backup is really great I got around 8-10 hrs. of Screen on Time with (3a) on mixed use of social media (Instagram Reels, X), Office Meetings (Teams calls), Web Browsing, Camera etc.

I remember one day when I had taken my Phone (3a) on a photo walk, where I used the camera for around 1hr 30m, and still the Phone (3a) gave a screen on time of 9hrs 23m

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Cameras - Telephoto, Presets and lots of fun

I’m going to go ahead and say it, Nothing did a great job with the cameras this time

I really like the compression you get with the 2x telephoto lens, now I am someone who is used to shoot at higher focal lengths, I hardly ever used the 1x lens or the ultrawide for that matter. The 2x is just so good. and 4x under good lights also works perfectly. Here are some images I shot during my time with the Phone.

2x vs 4x

The cameras work great most of the time, only thing I noticed was when you are shooting with the 2x lens, and if there is harsh sunlight hitting the subject it tends to overexpose the whole scene and the picture comes out to be washed up.

I am leaving behind links to my two X thread on my Photo Walk with Nothing Phone (3a) here and here, so you can have a look at all the pictures.

Manual Mode

Now I really wanted to test out the manual mode for astrophotography, since there is a lot of Light pollution where I stay, and I wouldn’t be visiting my village for another 1 month. I didn’t get to test that.
However, I was able to get some good panning shot of moving vehicles.

SS: 1/100
ISO: 50
EV: -2

Presets- Endless Possibilities

The Phone (3a) also supports LUTs, if you prefer to shoot in one particular look/ setting. You can make your own preset; you can also share your preset with others. The phone also comes with some custom Presets, Like Soft Focus and B&W Film

And here are some samples shot with the inbuilt Presets.

Although the other day I was trying to get a particular look for my preset, the normal mode was not flexible enough for me, so I chose the Expert Mode, Turns out the Expert mode gives less control over the Normal mode (Normal mode lets you choose the EV value) while the Expert Mode doesn’t even let you control EV let alone SS/WB.

Hopefully Nothing will give us more control over it, with the future updates.

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Glyphs

Some say it is useful some just calls it a gimmick, so which one is it? I will be sharing how I have been using it personally.

Essential Glyphs: - I have set up my important notifications as essential ones, so I never miss their notification. One of the strips stays on until I don’t read that notification, the light being the visual cue of “There’s an important thing waiting for you, that you wouldn’t want to miss”

Glyph Progress: -

This was one of the tools I found the most useful.

I used it at least once in a day to set reminders to turn off the machine/Gas.
Also, whenever I need to focus, I would set a timer for 45 min while working and finish my task.
Now one might ask, hey Khushal, why not just use the regular timer? Well… One thing is that there is no way to know how much time is left for the timer to end without unlocking the phone. which again can distract you from the task that you were doing in the first place. Glyph Timer removes the need of unlocking the phone while the timer is on, to check the remaining time.

Feedback: -

I wish nothing gave us an option to set essential glyphs based on the keywords for notification,
while some apps let us select specific contact you had want to be essential others don’t.
(In WhatsApp you can select one specific contact as your essential, meanwhile if you are using signal, there is no way to select one essential chat, and the essential glyph ends up turning on for even unimportant chats.)

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Essential Space-Your Second Memory

This is an interesting Feature, during my usage I found some interesting use cases for this.

The idea is when you have something important on your screen, that you would need in the future. You click the essential key once you do. It takes a screen shot of the screen and you can give it any command you had like, for e.g. extracting important parts from a mail. setting a reminder to perform certain action.

It can come super handy, when you are travelling, you can take a simple SS of the mail and ask it to extract train/ seat information, since I had no upcoming journey, I used an old mail from my inbox.

I did discover other use case as well you can check out the X thread on it here.

Over all this is a great tool, and has lots of potential. It will be interesting to see how nothing takes it from here.

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Software and performance

I have been using the Nothing OS 3.1 on Phone (3a). No bloatware’s whatsoever. Just a clean software experience. Nothing promises 3 Years of Android Updates and 6 Years of Security updates for the (3a) series

The phone is powered by Snapdragon 7s gen 3, now I’m not someone who does gaming. For my day-to-day use, which consists of Slack chats, telegram, X, doom scrolling on Instagram, Image editing on Snapseed, and making reels on Instagram. The software feels fast and smooth for most of the time. It is when you are doing heavy task, like editing something on Cava, or even while I was editing a reel with the footage shot on DSLR, it did stutter a bit, not something alarming it was okay after a while. I’m however a little concerned, with the use of UFS 2.2, the phone is well optimized for now. It’s on Nothing now how well they improve the optimization in future.

NOS

I really like how well thought the entire OS is and everything is just intentional and useful while also being aesthetically pleasing.

One Feedback: Let us use the media player widget and Nothing X, widget or option to add Widgets from third party apps.

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Conclusion

So overall it Nothing Phone (3a) is a well-balanced phone, hitting all the right spots.

✅Phone with a Unique design Identity
✅Great Software optimization
✅Cameras Improved a lot (although it does need a bit of fine tuning)
✅Battery lasts for over a day and a half with SOT of 7-9 hrs., with normal usage.
✅3Ys of Android Updates and 6 Ys of Security Updates.

Now UFS 2.2 was a bit of a letdown, when I think about how future proof this device will be, so it depends on Nothing how well they keep their software optimized to keep the phone fluid as it ages. But seeing Nothing’s track record on software optimization I wouldn’t break a sweat, worrying about it too much.

That’s it from my end. I hope you all found this write-up helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments. Stay connected with me on X (@the_techwizard_) where I will be posting more about the (3a) while I have this device, and feel free to connect with me on Instagram (@khushaljainphotography) where I will be posting all of the pictures I shot with the 3a.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you!