you know there is something kind of refreshing about a budget phone from a company that doesn’t have a bunch of more expensive phones in their lineup to protect huh so this is the new nothing phone 3A which starts at $379 and the phone 3A Pro which is $459 the naming is a bit confusing but all you really need to know is both of these phones do a shockingly good job of feeling like $1,000 Flagship phones with just a few small asterisks the pro phone for those wondering is basically the same as the
3A but just with a better camera system we’ll get to that in a minute but I feel like I have no choice but to start with the way this phone looks cuz there’s still nothing that looks quite like a nothing phone and that is still true I mean look at this blue this blue is sick it’s still got the split design with the glyphs at the top around the cameras but you know they’ve tweaked a few things too they’ve moved some screws around changed up some of the shapes and the details I think this is fire to be
honest still got the little red square too the 3A Pro is similar but basically a monochrome version and then with a way bigger camera Cliff like a camera Plateau now some people were already ragged on the camera design cuz it already leaked everywhere so we’ve seen it and to be fair it’s definitely unconventional and not symmetrical at all but I still think it’s nice the gigantic bump even becomes a nice place to rest my index finger when I’m holding the phone so if the goal is still to be the budget phone with an interesting
aesthetic or to just be a unique looking phone in general I think mission accomplished like find me a more interesting phone design out there right now I’ll wait exactly so once it comes to using this phone uh like I said it is impressive how close this $379 phone gets to feeling like a 000 Flagship like I feel like I can see a lot of nothing’s growing maturity here too you know they’re a little bit bigger of a company now they can afford to get more premium parts and from better suppliers and it’s a paying off with a
bunch of little improvements that stack up to feel really nice like this phone 3A has a glass back now instead of the plastic from before it’s also now ip64 rated instead of ip54 it even has a much brighter AMOLED display now that gets up to 800 nits normally but up to 3,000 nits Peak for HD R which is one of the highest numbers I’ve ever seen on paper but forget the numbers though this just like I said feels like a flagship it’s an enormous phone first of all even bigger again than the 2A it’s now a 6.77
in jumbo siiz display with even bezels all the way around it’s a high refresh rate it just feels like other flagships do now yes it’s not quite as bright as the actual Ultra phones and yes the optical fingerprint reader under the display is a little slow sometimes but those are small prices to pay when you’re reminded of well the price you’re paying and then they are back to a Qualcomm chip again on this phone from a mediatech chip last generation so it is a Snapdragon 7s gen 3 chip with 12 gigs
of RAM now some budget phones are trying to be the spec monster on paper for the price this phone’s not trying to do that it is a lot of ram but that’s not what this is I think this is an appropriate mid-range chip for this phone especially because whatever they’re doing with their software is super impressive and it really elevates the value of the thing like this budget phone feels as quick and smooth most of the time as the spec monsters so hey shout out specifically to nothing software team
this is running nothing OS 3.1 on top of Android 15 they do up to six years of software updates with these phones and so many things like these little animations things like swiping down the notification bar or expanding a folder from the home screen or even swiping between recent apps so many of these little animations have been optimized to feel super smooth every time and you can feel it now it’s not immune to hiccups like you sometimes feel the mask slip off a little bit and you’re moving through some heavy apps or you’re gaming
for a while and the stuff that’s stressful on the GPU you can absolutely find a way to get this phone stuttering a little bit but I cannot be mad at the performance of this phone despite it not being a spec monster it is so smooth and I like a lot of features they’ve been adding to nothing OS too the lock screen customization is yet another one that’s taken obviously a big queue from IOS but you can see now you can long press and dive in and mess with the clock and drop in a few widgets on your lock screen if
you want to so the software is great but you might be wondering about AI because I don’t know if you’ve noticed but nothing is one of the last bigname smartphone companies that isn’t heavily pushing a ton of AI stuff in their new phones they don’t have an AI image generator they don’t have have a whole bunch of writing tools or AI summaries for notifications or gen Emoji or anything like that there is no object removal from photos nothing but there is one really interesting big new AI feature so you see this here they’ve
added a single button to the side of the phone it’s actually a different shape than the other buttons it’s kind of Dome shaped instead of flat and it’s right under the power button so it’s super reachable and you can’t miss it this is the AI button if you double press it it opens up the essential space and this is an entire separate area of the phone just focused on making the AI helpful to the user so here’s what that means basically you just save a bunch of stuff in here in the form of screenshots and
you can always come back here for referencing this stuff or finding information from the screenshots or even setting reminders about that stuff so kind of think of it like the pixel screenshots app but on steroids so from anywhere you want on the phone you can press that button once and it’ll capture whatever’s on your screen and SA save it but then if you hold down that button it will also start a voice recording that gets attached to that screenshot so you can say something you want to remember
like this is the lawnmower Andrew told me about or remind me to buy tickets to this concert tomorrow and then that recording gets transcribed and summarized and it will even detect and set actual reminders for you to do stuff with that information at a later date I think that’s an awesome start to something that could be really cool someday it’s it’s still kind of being built out I have this personal rule where I won’t dump my life into something if it’s not multiplatform and this isn’t it’s just
on this phone so there’s no web version of this I can’t access this on my computer or tablet or anything else like that so I’m not going to dive all in on something like this but maybe someday in the future could be cool or I could just ignore it completely and pretend it doesn’t exist you could too although I will say you are going to press this button accidentally a whole bunch of times now both the 3A and 3A Pro have the same 5,000 mamp battery and excellent battery life both have 50 wat charging now which
is a little faster than last year but basically that’s 0 to 100 in an hour and they are both still missing wireless charging so that that’s one of the stings that for me someone who’s used to wireless charging on a bunch of phones that’s a tougher trade-off but this is one of the things that they’ve decided to stick with for nothing phones although it is still pretty fast wire charging so at least you have that so the only difference you really need to know about is the cameras the 3A Pro is the one theoretically you should want if
you care more about cameras and if you don’t then the 3A should be fine for you that’s on paper anyway so I shot a bunch with the 3A and the 3A Pro cameras and what was interesting is I didn’t find a whole lot of difference in most situations between the primary cameras on these phones even though the sensor on the pro is slightly bigger they’re both 50 megapixels but the pro has a little bit better autofocus in general the pictures from both of them are passable you know the sensor is big enough to get you a soft background for
close-up subjects the colors aren’t too overpress although you might get some fringing and overexposure but generally they’re pretty decent looking photos the 8 megapixel Ultra wides are also identical which is to say pretty meh but the 3x Periscope telephoto lens on the pro definitely gives you a more usable far range and macros uh than the 2x on the 3A so I love a good Periscope Zoom I just think I was expecting to notice more of a difference between these two given how dramatic of a difference this
huge camera table makes uh but it’s not actually that big of a difference from my experience so the more you know so here’s my final thoughts on this nothing phone uh refresh first of all as someone who just came from reviewing the iPhone 16e this spec sheet on paper makes the Iphone 16e spec sheo on paper look terrible this looks loaded obviously it’s triple cameras it’s a much bigger brighter AMOLED display it’s high refresh rate it’s also a massive battery and great battery life while you have 60
HZ in a smaller phone and you know the single camera on the 16e and it’s way cheaper so just a lot of value here in general which is what we expect from nothing from the a series but my other thought is I am now way more curious about a nothing phone 3 like a a genuine Flagship from this company because if they’re able to make this for this value I kind of Wonder What A snapdragon Elite and a silicon carbide battery and maybe even wireless charging and a whole bunch more specs loaded into a phone like this
could be because they’re so good at software already I kind of hope we see something like that hopefully soon but speaking of soon shout out to this video sponsor Ridge because they are running a 12-year anniversary sale right now that depending on when you’re watching this could be over pretty soon so link below so for the sale now you can get discounts up to 40% off 40% off on wallets but also key cases and travel gear like luggage it’s all stuff that I’ve been using lately so I can vouch for its quality so head over to
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