Nothing Phone (3a) and Nothing Phone (3a) Plus to have some intriguing hardware changes

The Nothing Phone (2a) and Nothing Phone (2a) Plus are both powered by MediaTek chipsets, but their successors have already once been rumored to switch to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7s Gen 3.

Now a new report seemingly confirms this move, based on clues found inside the latest Nothing OS 3.0 builds running on top of Android 15. The Nothing Phone (3a)'s codename is "asteroids", while the Nothing Phone (3a) Plus' codename is, fittingly, "asteroids_plus".

The CMF Phone 2 is also coming in 2025, and it has the codename "galaga". This will apparently keep using a MediaTek chip.

Intriguingly, the Nothing Phone (3a) may come with a telephoto camera, while the Nothing Phone (3a) Plus could take things up another notch with a periscope zoom camera. If this pans out, then it would be the first ever Nothing phone to have a periscope telephoto camera. These would also be the first Nothing phones with dedicated zoom cameras of any kind, as all the previous Nothing handsets went with dual setups employing a main camera and an ultrawide.

Nothing Phone (2a)

128GB 8GB RAM $ 329.00
256GB 12GB RAM $ 369.00
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Nothing Phone (2a) Plus

256GB 12GB RAM £ 315.24
256GB 8GB RAM ₹ 25,947
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Moving on, the Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Plus will also reportedly have eSIM support, another first for the brand. It's likely that you'll either get to use one physical SIM and one eSIM or two physical SIMs. The lower-end CMF Phone 2 won't have eSIM support.

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Reader comments

Nothing (like other OEMs) should focus on improving the primary camera experience rather than adding additional cameras. Most people benefit from high quality point and shoot photos more than periscope or wide angle lenses.

i hope (but dont expect) 3a size will be smaller than 2a

"all the previous Nothing handsets went with dual setups" yea cuz having a quad camera setup with 2 or 5mp macro and depth cameras is the same as having a dual camera setup. Those sensors are manufactured ewaste and don't belong on pho...