Nothing Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Pro hands-on review
Nothing OS 3.1 on top Android 15
The Nothing Phone (3a) and (3a) Pro are both running on the latest Android 15 with Nothing OS 3.1 on top. Nothing promises three years of Android updates and six years of security patches for both phones.
It has that clean yet very distinct Dot Engine look with unique apps and widgets. The Gallery app and Camera app have specifically been updated.
Looks are just one aspect of the available customization, though. Smart Drawer is available which can intelligently and automatically organize your apps into categories and serve your most used apps first.
Nothing OS 3.1 also has advanced behavioral learning algorithms. These work in the background, boosting load times and read and write speeds by managing the file system while the phone is idle. Multi-tasking performance is said to be optimized as well.
The Essential Space is an AI-powered hub for daily organization. At least as far as we understand it. You can send screenshots or photos to it with a single click of the new Essential Key and annotate those accordingly. Or, you can double-tap the ley and do a voice memo that gets automatically transcribed for you. You can also set reminders for yourself; everything is automatically and intelligently categorized and organized for you. It sure sounds like a nifty idea.
Benchmarks
Both the Nothing Phone (3a) and (3a) Pro are running the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip. It is a modern 4nm part from Q3 2024 that offers great features and connectivity. Both devices come with dual Nano-SIM slots with simultaneous SA/NSA Sub-6 5G support, plus eSIM support this time around. You also get dual-band Wi-Fi ax, Bluetooth 5.4 and NFC.
In the CPU department, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 delivers one "big" Cortex-A720 core, clocked at up to 2.5GHz, another three Cortex-A720 ones, working at up to 2.4GHz and four "small" Cortex-A520 cores, rated for up to 1.8GHz. The onboard GPU is an Adreno 810, and there is a powerful NPU for AI tasks.
Nothing says that the Phone (3a) and (3a) Pro are 33% faster in CPU tasks than the Nothing Phone (2a), 11% faster in GPU tasks, and a whopping 92% better at AI tasks. Nothing thinks that the latter makes them particularly futureproof, and has already put the NPU horsepower to good use in the TrueLens Engine 3 photo processing pipeline.
The Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 is paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of non-expandable storage in the international version of the Phone (3a) Pro. India also gets an 8GB/128GB variant and an 8GB/256GB one. As for the vanilla Phone (3a) - it comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of non-expandable storage by default and is also available in two other options: 8GB/256GB (India only) and 12GB/256GB (excluding India).
Looking at some actual benchmark numbers, the Nothing Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Pro hold up well against their peers. Also, they have the same performance characteristics.
GeekBench 6
- Multi-core
- Single-core
Poco X7 Pro
Xiaomi 14T
Nothing Phone (2)
Galaxy A55
Nothing phone (3a) Pro
Nothing phone (3a)
Redmi Note 14 Pro+
AnTuTu 10
Poco F6 Pro
Honor 200 Pro
Nothing Phone (2)
Motorola Edge 50 Pro
Nothing phone (3a)
Nothing phone (3a) Pro
vivo V40
3DMark - Wild Life Extreme (2160p)
Poco X7 Pro
Motorola Edge 50 Pro
Nothing Phone (2a) Plus
Nothing Phone (2a)
Nothing phone (3a)
Nothing phone (3a) Pro
Redmi Note 14 Pro+
Reader comments
- Anonymous
- 6 hours ago
- XRx
as if using ufs 2.2 wasn't bad enough they even had to use a samsung main camera sensor ..............
- SathishKannan
- 8 hours ago
- fCF
Nothing's claim for battery cycles seems to be incorrect mostly.. My 2a battery down to 90% after 340 cycles and that too with conserved charging pattern (not topping up above 80% and calibrations time to time)
- Anonymous
- 9 hours ago
- XRx
who cares about the design, the real issue is the anemic performance