Nothing Phone (3a) 256GB (2025)

My pixel 6 pro died in the night so I needed to get a replacement. I wasn't fussed on the way Google had nerfed that phone when newer models came out so I decided to try the Nothing phone as suggested to me by the guy at JB HiFi. I wish I had've stuck with my gut and just went Pixel again. TL;DR- My husband got this phone after I tried for 3 arduous weeks to get used to it. In the end I've swapped and gone with Google again instead and I would return this phone in a heartbeat if I didn't have a need for it.

Context: I am a pretty light phone user. I take a lot of photos and videos with my phone, fair bit of social media browsing, web shopping etc but I do not game on it much if at all. So my review will be taking these things into consideration.

The pros: - Easily found at JB HIFI

- Has a very unique look about it

- Comes in a few colours

- No bloatware on the device (Though it does have its own native everything which you cannot uninstall)

- Size is the same as standard flagship phones.

- Build feels solidly built in the hand if a little heavy.

- Fingerprint sensors work first time every time even in lower light situations

- Has all the basic phone functionality you'd want in a mid range phone including Google cloud access etc.

- "Glyph Interface" on the back lights up and flashes in any pattern you choose for whatever you choose it for, which is pretty gimmicky though really given your phone is almost always laying face up; however it is handy at night or low light situations to act as a softer flashlight or to locate the phone in the dark, it's also handy for when you want your phone on silent but also still want to be notified of a txt or call.

- Charge lasted me a day or 2 with limited use. (Like I said though, I am not a heavy phone user)

- Wireless charging

- The screen was pleasant to look at. Colours are less saturated than Samsung but customizable in settings

- Personalisable with widgets and icons if you're into those and like a cluttered or very masculine looking homescreen.

- An app draw which allows you to organise your apps in groups (Though not by your own logic)

Cons: - No wireless charging.

- No E-sim compatibility unless you buy the Pro version.

- Brightness when set to "auto" fails miserably. It stays too dark you can't see the screen in daylight or at night it's so bright its blinding. It really struggles to read the environment and adjust accordingly. - This is extremely annoying when you're trying to open the camera to capture something quickly.

- You need to down swipe 2x (ore more if you have a lot of widgets in the top bar) to change the brightness. Its annoying and not quick at all. In fact, nothing about this phone is fast or intuitive.

- No headphone jack (which isn't unusual but means you need to buy one)

- Setting a wallpaper that is not native to the phone or created by the Nothing company is a joke. It zooms in terribly and does not warn you of this, so it makes it nigh on impossible to get anything to fit and look decent. I spent days trying to find the exact ratio to use and ended up putting the image I wanted onto a muuuch larger image (on pc) and making do.

- After just a week, I started getting a black border around the wallpaper when exiting apps. Locking the screen didn’t fix it, and it became persistent. Apparently others have had this too.

- The "Nothing Essential space" Button which is located exactly where your hand holds the phone. It is essentially the nothing brands "bixby button". It cannot be disabled. It cannot be overridden with another task and it is extremely easy to accidently press. Every single time you pick up and hold your phone, (because of its placement) it opens the "Essential space" app and takes a picture or starts recording depending on how many times you bump it or press while trying to get rid of it. You have to stop what you're doing, click stop recording, then back to get back to its main page then hit back yet again to be able to exit the app. It gets tiresome exceedingly quickly. And its worth noting that the Nothing Phone creatores are aware of how unhappy users are with this feature and are refusing to allow it to be turned off or re-written to a different function.

- The drop down menu from the top has icons instead of the words unless you make every single button large, in which case you need to do double drop down swipe and then scroll across 3 pages to find the button you want to use. I thought I would pretty quickly get used to the little icons for things but I never did, even after 3+ weeks of use. They just aren't intuitive at all. You also can't fit as many in the rows as you can with other phones.

- The camera... The camera is shockingly bad. Slow to open, laggy to focus, and unusable for anything moving. Even static subjects (like a doll on my desk) caused it to hunt focus back and forth. It struggles indoors and outdoors and in every setting.

-I was quite unimpressed with the cameraa picture quality too, especially indoors. Especially when compared with a flagship model, even an older one. The pictures seemed dull in colour (I do not like nor expect it to have Samsung level saturation; but something that resembles real life would be nice, especially for skin tones), pictures come out darker than real life, too contrasted and muddy and 9/10 times were actually blurry and out of focus when I was sure it was actually in focus while taking it. Once you zoom in you can see how bad it really is.

-Its really hard to find decent cases for these phones. I had to buy online.

-It is "splashproof" but not actually waterproof. Which, in a phone that still costs $800 really isn't good enough.

- Nit picking here, but it really annoyed me that in the box with the phone there is literally only 1 cord. No wall charger, and no little tool to get the sim tray out of the phone. One would think that those are 2 very basic things that every phone needs- especially the sim card tool given that the phone doesn't support e-sims!

- Speakers sound tinny, echoey and distort a males voice terribly. I am an avid "Calm" user and enjoy the meditations in the app daily, both male and female. I noticed with this phone the stormy/rainy background sounds like tin foil and is absolutely horrible and the male narrators voices sound higher pitched and uncomfortble. It just doesn't sound human at times. Music also sounded terrible in almost every genre.

- Bose wireless earphones realllllly struggled to stay connected to this phone. I have no idea why, they work perfectly with other phones and devices but were constantly dropping out and cutting in and out during playback. This behaviour stopped when I went Pixel again.