Nothing Phone (3a) Pro review
Nothing OS 3.1 on top Android 15
The Nothing Phone (3a) and (3a) Pro run 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. While not industry-leading, this support window is still pretty good.
Nothing OS 3.1 has a clean yet distinct Dot Engine look with unique apps and widgets. The Gallery app and Camera app have specifically been updated.
Left:Nothing Phone (3a) * Right: Nothing Phone (3a) Pro
Nothing's signature dot matrix font and overall aesthetic surrounding it permeate the UI. You get a whole slew of custom widgets (18 in total) from everything from clocks and calendars to contacts and weather, so you can retain that consistent Nothing look.
The notification shade and quick toggles are also as much AOSP as they are Nothing. The quick toggle area has gone through several iterations but has now seemingly settled on a combination of big rectangles and smaller circles.
Nothing has its own icon pack, which, expectedly, sticks to the signature monochrome look. It covers the most popular apps we tried, so you can really get yourself a consistent look and feel if that is what you are after.
There is an Always-on Display available, and it, expectedly, sticks to the general aesthetic as well. There is a slew of lockscreen widgets to choose from as well.
In a bid to innovate and be a part of the "trendy crowd," Nothing is constantly trying its hand at some advanced and experimental features. Our review unit is missing the "Connect to Tesla" menu that the Nothing Phone (2) had, so perhaps that didn't pan out. However, the experimental AirPods support is still present. So is the "Glyph Progres" feature that integrates with third-party apps and allows you to track your Uber's progress from the back of your phone.
There is some less experimental hardware OS-level integrations available as well, like through the Nothing X app, which supports a number of headphones like the Ear (1), Ear (stick), Ear (2) and CMF Buds, Neckband Pro and Buds Pro.
Glyph settings
The most custom aspect of the Nothing OS is the inclusion of the Glyph Interface, which controls the LEDs on the back of the phone. First, the feature is optional, so you can just turn it off or schedule it if it bothers you at night. You can also adjust the brightness of the LEDs, which can get seriously bright, even at the default medium brightness.
At present, the Glyph Interface can be used primarily for notifications and alerts. The Glyph Menu contains Brightness, Ringtones, Notifications, Flip to Glyph, Glyph Timer, Composer shortcut for custom Glyph ringtones, and Visual Feedback for Volume control, Music Visualizer and third-party apps (Uber, Zomato and Google Calendar for now).
You can check out a more in-depth explanation of all of the neat Glyph options in our Nothing Phone (2) review. These haven't really changed that much.
Looks are just one aspect of the available customization, though. A smart drawer is available that can intelligently and automatically organize your apps into categories and serve your most used apps first. We found the grouping a bit confusing so we preferred to have the regular looking launcher.
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.
Alternatively, you can double-tap the key and do a voice memo that gets stored in there and later gets automatically transcribed by AI.
You can also set reminders for yourself; everything is automatically and intelligently categorized and organized for you.
The whole concept sure sounds like a nifty idea, but it seems it's geared towards users with very particular note-taking habits. We are not sure it will be among the phone's key selling points, and having such a prominent hardware key might not be the most user-friendly solution for most people.
Benchmarks and performance
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.
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 the NPU horsepower has allegedly already been put 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
Nothing Phone (2)
Motorola Edge 50 Pro
Nothing phone (3a)
Realme 14 Pro+
Nothing phone (3a) Pro
vivo V40
3DMark - Wild Life Extreme (2160p)
Galaxy S24 FE
Motorola Edge 50 Pro
Nothing Phone (2a) Plus
Nothing Phone (2a)
Nothing phone (3a)
Nothing phone (3a) Pro
Redmi Note 14 Pro+
Thermal-throttling
Despite not topping any performance charts, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 is still a fairly powerful chipset. Thanks to its modern and efficient design and manufacturing process, it doesn't kick out too much heat, but it can still get toasty, as evidenced by the surface of the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro, which also gets fairly hot during stress testing. It is not so hot as to be uncomfortable, but it is clear that Nothing is doing its best to pull heat away from the chip and out to the surface of the device.
Thermal-throttling
The tactic is working well since, even with prolonged stress testing, the chipset inside the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro loses very little performance and exhibits excellent thermal-throttling behavior without any major dips or jitters in performance.
Reader comments
- Anonymous
- 9 hours ago
- mAW
Was expecting better battery ngl
- Anonymous
- 11 hours ago
- nw}
In the end the phone after A year will melt in ur hands to safe the planet
- Anonymous
- 12 hours ago
- gEh
I'm disappointed to see them drop symmetrical bezels and even made them thicker. It was what made Nothing stand out to me. The corner radiuses look weird on the 3a.