TinkerStinker

This giveaway is now closed! Winners incoming…

We’re back once more for a peek at the internals of our latest smartphone! Phone (3a) Series brings a host of upgrades over the Phone (2a) Plus, so what better way to visualise those than to lift the lid and see some of that new hardware. In this post, I’m digging into Phone (3a) Pro in Grey.

As you probably already know, smartphones are built in layers, almost like a sandwich, so let’s look at the 3 biggest components before focussing in on the internals that fit between them.

Display
On the front of (3a) Series you’ll find a FHD+ AMOLED flexible LTPS display. At 6.77” this is our largest to date, delivering a 91.43% screen-to-body ratio.

With an adaptive 120hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling and a 1000 Hz touch sampling rate (+316% faster than (2a) Plus), Phone (3a) Pro brings near instant responsiveness when gaming. There are improvements to brightness too, with 3000 nits peak, (3a)'s display is up to +131% brighter compared to (2a) Plus.

Just like the (2a) Plus display, you can see that the rear of the screen features a large heat spreading copper surface. Near the top you’ll spot the selfie camera and proximity sensor cutouts and the slanted square cutout near the bottom is for the in-display fingerprint sensor to see through.

The long black flexible printed circuit (FPC) is how our screen receives a display signal; it trails to the top of the device via a hole in the midframe and connects to the motherboard.

Midframe
On (3a) Pro, the midframe and buttons are produced using 100% recycled aluminium, a more premium material that is equally elegant and durable. As with our (2a) Series, (3a) devices have antennas embedded around the midframe to ensure great reception. In addition, (3a) Series features an additional high-performance gaming antenna in the middle of the frame. This means that when holding horizontally for gaming, the signal won’t be blocked by your hands, ensuring stable and smooth gaming network connectivity. Compared to the (2a) Plus this improvement can reduce lag by over 50% when using a mobile network.

The big rectangular space in the middle of the midframe is for our 5000mAh battery, with the space above perfectly shaped to house the motherboard. The long, thin space at the bottom is where the daughterboard sits, along with the speaker, optical fingerprint reader and SIM tray.

Rear Cover
The premium materials found on the midframe continue onto the rear of Phone (3a) Pro where we find a 2.5D rear glass panel, a significant change from the plastics used on our (2a) devices. Integrated at the top is the housing for our triple rear camera system along with the LED flash - let’s zoom in a little closer to this part, there’s lots to see…

Above, we get a great look at the space inside the camera bump of (3a) Pro. The lenses of each camera are positioned as close together as possible and positioned precisely to ensure a smooth transition between them when you’re zooming in and out. At the very top is a small diffused aperture for the flash LED to fire through. Speaking of cameras, we have some macro shots of the sensors themselves:

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Phone (3a) Pro Camera System
(3a) Pro hosts our best camera system to date, featuring a versatile array of lenses for portraits, macro, long zoom shots and more - it’s super versatile. Paired with our new Camera app which enables sharable, Personal Presets and even allows for the use of LUTs via the .Cube format, there’s infinite possibilities to explore. Take a look at some of our recent community reviews from Palmix, Juse and Bubi for some example images.

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Primary - 50 MP Samsung, f/1.88, 1/1.56” sensor, 84.5° FOV, OIS & EIS
Ultra Wide - 8 MP Sony, f/2.2, ¼″ sensor, 120° FOV
Periscope Zoom - 50MP Sony, f/2.55, 1/1.95” sensor, 33.6° FOV, OIS & EIS
Front - 50 MP Samsung, f/2.2, ½.76″ sensor, 81.2° FOV
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Phone (3a) Pro Periscope:
(3a) Pro features a flagship periscope zoom, a first for any Nothing smartphone. A prism, paired with a horizontally stacked lens assembly, is able to offer 3x optical zoom and up to 60x ultra zoom. In the above image, you can see how much larger this component is compared to a regular camera module - our teams worked hard to implement these segment-leading zoom capabilities with the least possible impact on overall device thickness.

Prism - reflects light towards the lens assembly and shifts to deliver OIS
Stacked assembly of 4 lens elements - directs light to the sensor and shifts to attain focus
Sony LYTIA 600 sensor - turns light into a digital signal which informs the image
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BTS image showing the periscope alongside (3a) Pro’s camera system housing

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(3a) Series Chipset
We heard our customers asking us to bring a Snapdragon chip to our midrange lineup, so for (3a) Series, we used the 7s Gen 3. A powerful chip that can handle gaming or multitasking with up to 33% faster CPU and 11% graphics improvement compared to (2a). It’s also more efficient, meaning there’s an overall improvement in battery life.

We’ve cropped in to the motherboard in the image above, as a bonus, you can see the proximity and ambient light sensors at the very top, helping to illustrate where these chips sit within the device. Shoutout to our photographer David Wilman for removing all of the thermal material so we can get a good look at these components in all their glory!

Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 5G (SD7635) - Up to 2.5 Ghz built on TSMC’s 4nm process.

• 8-cores: 1× 2.5GHz (Cortex-A720), 3× 2.4GHz (Cortex-A720), 4× 1.8GHz (Cortex-A520)

• GPU: Adreno 810

• NPU: HTP2

UFS2.2- Storage + LPDDR4X RAM - learn more about this in a recent post by @Raymond

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‎The underside of the Glyph Interface
And finally, the eagle-eyed fans will have spotted that (3a) Series has had a Glyph update, with an adjusted arrangement, all 3 of the Glyph segments are now addressable, with a total of 36 zones. Below we look at the rear of the top left Glyph (Internal notation: Glyph ‘C’), used for our Glyph Progress feature - counting the dots you’ll find 20 addressable segments for a smooth progress animation.

We hope you enjoyed diving into Nothing Phone (3a) Pro’s fresh look and internals with us - as always I had a lot of fun peeking inside our latest product to bring a fresh perspective to you all!

EDIT: Giveaway now closed. Like this post and drop into the comments below and tell us your favourite spec or feature of Phone (3a) Pro for a chance to win one! Click through to view the full entry requirements and giveaway terms and conditions. Entries close April 3, 2025, at 11:00 GMT.

Why change the password dialer to this from what it used to be on OS 2.

This feels like every other cheap android phone with lazy skins with zero design identity.

Please fix it back to how it was!

The round key targets were more user friendly with clearly defined targets, and looked way better and in line with the overall aesthetic..

Why strip it down to these naked digits??

Hope it’s a bug!

Coming soon.

A new world of possibilities.

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What do you think this new product could be? Comment below your guesses. Or if you’d like to get creative, you could create a render, sketch or image of what you imagine the product to look like…

We’ll choose one member who has ‘liked’ and commented under this post with their suggestion to win the product when it is eventually released!

T&Cs:
The giveaway will end on Thursday, 19 September 2024 at 12pm BST. One community member who has ‘liked’ and commented on this discussion according to the criteria above will be selected at random and sent one (1) unit of the nominated upcoming product. A member of the Nothing team will be in touch via DM here on nothing.community to notify the winner. The winner must respond to this DM within 48 hours to claim, or will forfeit their prize and a new winner will be selected. Please note, there are some regions we may not be able to ship to. Nothing staff and members of their family are not eligible to participate or win. Any spam accounts or accounts that we deem suspicious will be excluded from the random selection process. Nothing reserves the right to adjust the giveaway and its terms and conditions and entry requirements at any time.

The winner will need to provide some personal data to claim their prize. Read our privacy policy for more information. You can familiarise yourself with our privacy practices, and contact us at privacy@nothing.tech if you have any questions.

I have been using the Nothing Phone 1 for more than a year. I really love the hardware designing as well as the operating system. The Nothing OS provides a minimal and premium experience for sure. They have some unique widget styles and concepts. Inspired from the weather widget, I made this responsive widget for the Nothing OS. Keeping almost the same design language, I made a collapsible widget for a more minimal and clutter free home screen. In the collapsed state, it will just show the nothing styled dotted icons depending on the current weather. And with just one click, the widget will expand, showing the necessary details you need. I hope you guys will surely give your opinions on this new concept. And I will try to bring more such concepts with time. ( I know that the defined space of the widget will be the space required in the expanded form. So even in the collapsed state, it will use the whole space. But still I believe it will look less cluttered for the human eye. )

Hello!

After seeing a few of your comments here on the community site, we’re pleased to inform you that support for external USB mics was added to our Camera app as of Nothing OS 2.5.5, meaning Phone (1), (2), (2a) and CMF Phone 1 users can now benefit from additional video capture versatility!

Thank you to all of the community members who shared their wish for this feature! We’re excited thats it’s finally here for you to try.

Whether you’re attaching a wireless lav or mini directional mic to your phone, capturing audio with a dedicated microphone is one of the best ways to make your mobile videography even better.

To celebrate, our friends over at RØDE hooked us up with three of their Wireless PRO kits to give away. These kits are super handy - we use them regularly here in the Nothing office for meetings and for filming!

For your chance to win one of these kits plus your choice of Ear or Ear (a), simply like this post and drop into the comments below to tell us what video project you will use these mics for!

We will randomly select three winners to win a Wireless PRO kit and a Nothing audio product.

T&Cs:
The giveaway will end on 30th July at 10am BST. Three community members who have ‘liked’ and commented on the post according to the criteria above will be selected at random and sent 1x Rode Wireless Pro kit, and 1 x Nothing Ear product (either Ear or Ear a) in the colour of their choice. A member of the Nothing team will be in touch via DM here on nothing.community to notify the winners. The winners must respond to this DM within 48 hours to claim their prize, or will forfeit their prize and a new winner will be selected. Please note, there some regions we may not be able to ship to. Nothing staff or members of their family are not eligible to participate or win. Any spam accounts or accounts that we deem suspicious will be excluded from the random selection process. Recipients of RØDE equipment will need to contact RØDE’s customer support if they experience any issues with Wireless PRO. Nothing reserves the right to adjust the giveaway terms and conditions and entry requirements at any time.

Winners will need to provide some personal data to claim their prize. Read our privacy policy for more information. You can familiarise yourself with our privacy practices, and contact us at privacy@nothing.tech if you have any questions.

Ian_H_Simmonds You deserve it. I wish you win this stage and I hope the win helps you land some big freelance client projects as you were mentioning.

RohithTony bro it’s been less then 2 hours, how did you have time to measure that?

TinkerStinker The CMF Watch Pro doesn’t link with any other health services, unfortunately. It is its own standalone product and the app is on its own. Sorry.

ghumnewala 2a doesn’t have a mic on the back, hence the lack of cutout. To my knowledge it’s a vent hole.