so it calls up my bud Carl pay it says hey I need a new phone what do you got
for me and he goes
nothing get it today we're going to be
taking a look at the nothing phone 3A and 3A Pro two more entries in nothing's
utterly confusing product lineup these
are successors to the 2A but in spite of
the pro moniker on the 3A Pro it is is a
lesser phone compared to the nothing phone 2 which still hasn't gotten a free
replac oh my God look at the size of
that camera bump good gravy any who
let's take a look at the packaging first we've got a ctoc cable
and little cute Sim removal tool so
clear and that's it nothing advertises up to 50 W charging on these phones
allowing each of them to top up their 5,000 milliamp batteries in less than an
hour but you will have to beo charger let's take a look at these devices
starting with the similarities on the bottom a USBC Port speaker and SIM tray
on uh this side we get a volume rocker on the top side we get a little
microphone port for noise cancellation and finally on the right hand side we
get the lock button and that's right the AI button but it might not be that
stupid the idea here is that it gives you quick access to essential space a
Beta app that is included with all 3A and 3A Pro phones that's meant to be
kind of a repository for your thoughts
uh journal ideas or just reminders
things you want to deal with say for example I were to hold it down and say I
finally thought of that rhyme for dingle hopper jingle
bopper that is going to head into my Essential space which oh I can also
access by double clicking a little bit of AI analysis
happens in the background and then it creates one of these little cards that
tells me what exactly it was that I was thinking in that
moment eventually while we're waiting for that oh hey there we
go transcription and a little summary of
what it was that I did look at that you can play the audio too I finally thought
of that rhyme for dingle hopper jingle bopper nice I really like this mouse pad
I'll have to figure out where to get it later I could see myself using this if
it was more like a photo zap like if I just every time I took a picture I could
just yiy Yak at my phone for a second and then it would just store that audio
clip with it I could see myself using it for that a lot of the time I'd be more
likely to just open up Google Lens or use the Google Assistant like hey I
would like to buy this mouse
pad useless essential space then why
don't we talk specs because the 3A is more of a sequel to the 2A it actually
has a less powerful Snapdragon 7 gen 3
processor compared to the nothing phone 2 in practice this resulted in lower
performance pretty much across the board but especially in gaming coming in at
around half the performance of the already not class leading nothing phone
2 the good news is that outside of gaming things don't look so bad and
nothing is committing to six years of security updates on these phones even
though they're only providing 3 years of full Android upgrades with that said
given the price I don't think that this is entirely unreasonable it's also not
unreasonable for me to take a short break and tell you about our sponsor say
goodbye to overpriced roaming charges with s eim plans with over 200
destinations where you can get reliable coverage all you have to do is set
things up before you head off on your trip and you will be connected on
arrival no more dealing with shoddy unsecure airport Wi-Fi and if you
encounter any issues their 247 support team is there to help you out plus plus
if you end up grabbing a regular nothing phone 3A or a phone that doesn't have
eim compatibility s's got your back and will give you a full refund if you
purchased accidentally so go to s.com sshort circuit or scan the QR code on
screen to download the app and use code ShortCircuit to save 15% on your plan
today now let's talk a few more of the specs both of these phones ship with up
to 256 gigs of storage and up to 12 gigs
of RAM though the regular 3A can be
available with 8 gigs of RAM RAM and 128 gigs of storage depending on your region
another big difference as I teased before when I showed these camera bumps
side by side is that the 3A pro has a 50
megapixel 3x optical zoom optically image stabilized Periscope lens built in
they both have the same 50 megap main shooter the same 8 megapix Ultra wide
but it's that telephoto that's really the difference oh and also the selfie
camera on the regular 3A it's 32 Maps
while on the 3A Pro it's 50 megapixels although I have to say I do wonder if
that's going to make a significant difference let's take some selfies shall
we I love selfies wow those skin tones are very
different is how much more yellow I look in that one oh yeah oh yeah
bud look at the detail and the eyelashes
if you really get in there yep that's more megapixels all
right man seriously how does this thing even wirelessly charge with like oh do
they not have wireless charging that's a downer yep no coils and there's some
more downers they both support Wi-Fi 6 which is okay but not exactly the latest
standard and both have support for only
ip64 water resistant so they're dust tight but I wouldn't do any more than
get an incidental Splash on them certainly do not submerge them okay my
classic picture of Bell in the dark that is very similar which makes sense given
that they are supposed to be the same camera but if we switch to our
telephoto it will all change
oof oh dude dude the skin
tones um he does not look like that can't
confirm that's not what I look like yeah see that's not that yeah that that's the
right one this one looks really good though like dude considering that you're
sitting in the dark like that's freaking sharp it is possible that part of it is
differences in the screen we did notice the tint was a little bit different when
we were comparing them in the Labs but we can resolve that by just opening up
little YouTube and maybe firing up some HDR footage that's not bad on the 3A
okay we're going to give it a sec we'll do crab Rave after but yeah First
Impressions not bad here's another difference we noticed while both are
supposed to have exactly the same 6.77 in display the 3A Pro consistently was
anywhere from 100 to 200 nits brighter in our testing speaking of brightness
nothing claims up to 2,000 2,000 right
3,000 nits Peak brightness we were not able to measure anywhere near that in
any kind of real world usage either with auto brightness enabled and SDR and
HDR nowhere oh right the speakers do you
think they'll both be the same I mean the cutout looks the same let's try the
pro first
Amplified Earp speaker always love to see that get that stereo
sound little muddy mids not the most defined bass I've ever heard but
certainly acceptable it gets nice and Loud another Amplified Earp speaker this
time on the 3A I'd bet money those are the exact
same speakers something we wouldn't notice in videos but that feels nice
when just using the devices is both of them support variable refresh rate up to
120 HZ on their displays but not all the
way down to 1 Herz so you won't get any power savings there but it is worth
noting that the power efficiency of these phones and this seems to mostly
come down to the new processor is pretty darn good while we didn't reach the
claimed what was it like 28 hours of YouTube video playback that nothing said
we did get about 19 hours on both of these phones which is a pretty solid
showing all right so All That Remains then is to talk about the design it's
been a little bit polarizing to say the least but quite frankly if nothing's
designs didn't already put you off then I don't really see how this is going to
push you over the edge it's got their same glyph interface thing that'll kind
of light up when someone calls you actually we should probably play around with that a little
bit it's still cool honestly and it comes at a pretty reasonable price
especially when you consider you know Apple's charging $600 for the iPhone 16e
so the regular 3A is 379 bucks that's
the 12 gigs 256 gig version and then the 3A Pro is going to cost you about
another $80 for the better camera and better other
camera I mean that's about it right it
really is a better telephoto camera I'll say that much part of me is tempted
right like it's good enough although if the reason that I didn't switch to the
s25 was that they ditched the Bluetooth
remote capture for the selfie camera then I can't very well justify switching
to a phone that also doesn't have that and doesn't have a stylus at all oh
there's some other colors to consider before I make a decision whether to switch to this or not so we've got black
and blue and gray white and black wow uh
oh wait no there we go uh
huh so bold even with all the cool colors I'm
not sure if I'm ready to commit to switching to this right now now maybe the nothing phone 3 will woo me because
their OS actually does seem really clean
um really thoughtful just wouldn't mind gorilla
glass instead of panda glass you know better
processor a little bit more of a semi- flagship
experience subscribe to ShortCircuit