The Nothing 3A phones were just announced with a new take on the company’s “make tech more fun again” ethos. These devices have improved hardware over the Phone 2A, updated cameras, and a new feature called the Essential Space to store and index your miscellaneous screenshots, voice memos, and photographs, all through a dedicated button. Starting at $379 for the 3A and $459 for the 3A Pro, they offer solid specs for their midrange prices — and a look at what Nothing has been working on for this AI-centric moment.

The 3A and 3A Pro are mainly differentiated by their cameras, which you’ll notice just by glancing at the two devices. The 3A Pro’s prominent round camera housing includes a 3x periscope telephoto lens; the 3A offers a standard 2x zoom. Both phones include a 50-megapixel f/1.8 main camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide. The telephoto cameras on each use a 50-megapixel sensor for lossless crop zoom: 4x for the 3A and 6x for the 3A Pro.

They’re big phones, each with a 6.77-inch display, and the 3A Pro feels especially chunky with the protruding camera housing. Both use Nothing’s striking translucent back panel design for a bold look, which balances an awkward camera bump on the 3A Pro. When I started using the phone I felt like my fingers were constantly bumping against the housing. I’ve adjusted to it after a few days and dig its Pop Socket-esque functionality.

The phones come with Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 chipsets, 12 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage, which is generous for the midrange class. They ship with Android 15 and Nothing is promising three years of OS updates and six years of security patches — a decent, if not the best, software policy for a budget phone. They’re being offered in the US through Nothing’s beta program.

Nothing Phone 3A and 3A Pro sample images

The Glyph interface and LED light strips are still present, but Nothing seems to be shifting its efforts toward software features. The Essential Space is a new place to save screenshots, voice memos, and images, like Google’s Pixel Screenshots app. It answers the eternal question: what do I do with this thing?

Is your photo gallery cluttered with pictures of stuff you want to remember? Do you wish you had somewhere to keep all those inspiration photos for your bathroom makeover? Do you yearn for a place to put the information in an email you keep searching your inbox for every time you need it? Then you get what the Essential Space is all about. You save stuff there, it uses AI to pull out relevant bits of information, and it helps organize what would otherwise be left floating around your phone somewhere.

Using the Essential Key to add things to the Essential Space took a little adjustment. It’s right where I’m used to the power button sitting, so I kept pressing it unintentionally. A single press will capture a screenshot, and a double tap opens the app so you can browse through your collections. This feels backwards for reasons I can’t quite explain, but I’ve mostly gotten used to it.

Nitpicking aside, I think Nothing is onto something. I added screenshots of travel information for an upcoming flight that are otherwise spread across emails and apps. The Essential Space keeps it in one tidy spot and is good at pulling key timing and dates from the screengrabs. It’ll even make a little to-do list for you. It didn’t quite get everything right about my connecting flight, but I think that’s because the date wasn’t visible in both screenshots. The software seems to do a decent job when it has complete information to work with.

The functionality is pretty simple right now. Nothing has more on the roadmap like a mode that starts recording a voice memo when you flip the phone over, and the ability to automatically organize related content into collections. It seems like a useful feature with a smart AI layer, rather than something that leans into AI just for kicks.

The 3A is available to order March 4th and ships March 11th. The 3A Pro goes up for order March 11th, and will ship starting March 25th.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge