Much ado about Nothing: British firm’s new phone is a mid-range marvel

Standing out as a new brand in the mid-range smartphone space is tough. Between pared-back versions of Samsung and Google’s best, the flashy and inexpensive Chinese brands and many options from stalwarts Nokia and Motorola, there’s not a lot of room. But Nothing’s Phone 3a may have just jumped to the top of the pack.

With a great look, an impressive screen and a triple camera system (including a 2x zoom), the 3a is compelling for $600 on hardware terms, but it also offers a distinct software experience that’s both productivity-minded and genuinely fun.

Nothing’s monochromatic take on Android strips out a lot of the colour and logo design that apps use to get you to keep tapping them, while filling the phone with simplified retro elements that make it feel like a modern-day LCD toy. While the brand has shown no interest in frivolous generative AI features that rewrite your sentences or create cartoon images on demand, it has introduced a feature that uses the technology to turn your screenshots and notes into actionable to-do lists and reminders.

The 3a is a phone that really brings to mind what Google’s Nexus and Pixel lines were originally about – being capable yet clean and simple to use. But – somewhat ironically – it’s also a refreshing alternative to the kind of addictive, overdone and AI-filled phones the big brands offer today.

The Nothing Phone 3a packs more style and camera capabilities than most phones at this price.Credit:

High-end style at mid-range cost

Nothing is a London-based company headed by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, which launched its first phone in 2022 with a unique look created in collaboration with famed Swedish design house Teenage Engineering. The brand is new to Australia, reaching our shores last year, and the phones don’t look like anything else on the market.

The rear of the 3a showcases an evolved version of the brand’s trademark look, with a clear glass back that exposes the screws and a series of artful panels representing the actual circuit boards and ribbon cables enclosed beneath.

The rounded camera bump is centred, and surrounded by three strips of LED lights that make up what Nothing refers to as the glyph interface. The idea is that you can put your phone face down and intentionally stop using it while still getting some visual feedback. The ringtones match sounds and vibrations to specific glyph patterns, so you can set certain ones to important contacts, or the lights can gradually count down to indicate a timer or the progress of your Uber Eats delivery. I’d rather leave the phone face up or use a smartwatch, but it’s a fun idea.

The cameras are a 50MP main lens with optical image stabilisation, an 8MP ultra-wide and a 50MP telephoto, and they add up to a great photography experience for this price point. Standard shots in good light come out bright and clear, and having a physical zoom means you can get nice photos up to 5x if you have a steady hand.

I noticed that the standard and zoom lens would often differ in colour balance and exposure, which can be annoying, and low-light performance is soft. But I’m probably being overly critical here; it’s a $600 phone with a dedicated zoom lens and which takes generally great shots, so it’s practically in a class of its own.

Around the front, the screen is also punching above its weight. It’s a big 6.77-inch OLED with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, which supports HDR10+ and can get amazingly bright. If it has a weakness, it’s that at higher brightness levels (say, if you’re outside and the screen is boosting) the colours can become a bit washed. But again, in this price range, it’s an excellent screen for streaming video and gaming.

Nothing positions itself as a fashion-forward “designed in London” brand.Credit:

Speaking of which, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip powering the 3a is a decent processor for most general tasks and gaming, but it’s about a year old so isn’t particularly suited for intensive on-device AI or the latest in 3D. It is very efficient, ending most days with at least half of its battery left (unless I’d played a lot of games). There’s no wireless charging, but wired goes up to a fast 50W if you have a beefy enough charging brick.

That $600 base price gets you a device with 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. Amount of RAM (which is the memory a device uses to hold information it’s actively working with) isn’t a phone spec we talk much about, but I mention it here because the $690 version of the phone with 256GB of storage raises the RAM to 12GB, theoretically making the phone faster. Unless you need heaps of storage, the base model should suit most users.

There is also an $850 Nothing Phone 3a Pro (right), which adds more capable cameras including a telescope 3x optical zoom.Credit:

NothingOS is light on AI, big on charm

The 3a runs a very clean version of Android 15, with only Nothing and Google’s apps pre-installed. If you want to lean into the latter, you can easily set it up as a Pixel-like standard Android, but Nothing has provided a lot of its own customisation options too, designed to cut down on colour and distractions. Together with the very old-school bleeps and bloops of its system and notification sounds, it makes for a pleasingly Tamagotchi-like take on the smartphone.

I enjoy the chunky LCD-style widgets – including one for screen time that fills up as you use your device, a daily calendar where you have to tear off the sheets, and one that is just Snake, the ancient phone game – which you could use to make a simple at-a-glance home screen. The folder covers are clever as well, allowing you to organise apps without letting their familiar icons peek through to entice you. You also have the option to use the Nothing icon pack, which automatically shrinks all the logos and makes them white, so your phone looks a bit less like a casino.

Nothing’s widgets and icon theme let you make a less colourful but more fun home screen.Credit:

I don’t usually mess with the icons on my homescreen, but I tried to go all-in on Nothing’s ethos here. I found it difficult at first because I think I subconsciously use colour of the icons to tell apps apart. But with my monochrome apps sorted into zones based on type, I do think I used my phone a lot more intentionally. At the very least, I stopped opening apps such as Reddit for no real reason, which I do all the time on other phones.

Elsewhere, NothingOS has some smart tweaks to standard Android, including an auto-categorised app drawer similar to Apple’s library, as well as low-fi alternatives to certain Google apps such as weather and recorder. Quirky elements such as the custom camera filter system, which is presented like a series of polaroids and swatch cards, and experimental support for Apple’s AirPods, give the whole thing a friendly tech-forward vibe. But the biggest swing is Essential Space.

Practically, the only explicitly AI-powered element of NothingOS, Essential Space is presented as an early, unfinished feature. But there’s a dedicated button for it below the power button, so I think it’s fair to treat it as a key part of the phone. The idea is that you hit the button when you want to remember something – just say it out loud, or point the phone camera at it, or take a screenshot – and Essential Space takes care of the rest.

I used it extensively for a few days, and it clearly needs work, but it is a solid idea. In cases where I’d sent photos of real-world objects, Essential Space identified and described all images correctly, and pulled in information from the web to give more details on products and features.

The app will also analyse the text present in images and screenshots, plus any text or voice notes you leave when capturing them, aiming to understand the context. This process can take a little while, so I just kept capturing and didn’t check the space until the end of the day. By then it had created a carousel of creative ideas at the top of the page based on what I had captured, which was hit-and-miss, and had turned some notes into to-do items.

For example, on Tuesday I pointed the camera at a package and said, “remind me to send this tomorrow”, and the phone reminded me at 9am on Wednesday. I also sent Essential Space a screenshot of an article about a coming Nintendo livestream, from which it pulled the April 2 date and created a future to-do item.

I found that the more I used Essential Space, the more cluttered it became and the more difficult it was to find a specific thing if the app didn’t serve it up to me. It would be nice if, when capturing an item, there was a quick categorisation menu I could use to help sort them.

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