Starcommander✨👨🏻‍💻

Nothing phone 3a Pro - A bizarre combination of ups and down

 [A review thread 🧵] 

Last month at the Nothing's Mumbai event, I gave in to the hype and purchased this phone for ₹34k. I have been using this phone with my main SIM for over a month. This review narrates my own experience and has no influence from anyone.

1)Design:

Design is always subjective. Nothing has an unconventional design approach for their devices. While I absolutely loved the grey variant on day one, black variant took some time. This phone looks good but it is an acquired taste. 

The bezels are thick with 88% screen to body ratio. Paired with a boxy frame, the phone feels uncomfortable to hold for a long duration. It also feels top heavy.  In short, it looks good but doesn't feel good. 

During my usage, the back glass has developed a scratch which makes me wonder about the durability. Note: I have never dropped this phone.

Camera:
The main hype is the 50MP periscope camera and it delivers. Photos are crisp and sharp in daylight and it does a fantastic job in tele macro shots. 
Some shots are so good, it can give a tough competition to the flagship devices twice it's price. The photos are natural and I really like the overall performance for the price.

The main camera takes some decent photos. When the subject is steady and has good lighting, the photos look good. The ultra wide camera despite being an 8MP shooter, takes some punchy looking, social media ready photos. Unfortunately, the camera has some notorious bugs 

Photos look good in the viewfinder and suddenly after processing, there is ghosting. In some random scenarios, the HDR is completely off. There is a significant colour shift between the lens. Worst bug however is the photos getting corrupted after processing. Good thing is, it has happened only twice. Along with these issues, the main lens exhibits some strong lens flare.

I like the natural processing on the skin tones especially in the portrait mode. However, the edge separation isn't the best. Another major drawback is that the 3x lens supports a maximum of 1080p 30fps. At least 4k 30 should be the bare minimum. Videos are above average. Stability of video is good. I don't take selfies much but I didn't like the output.

Low light photo and video samples:
1)Ultra wide
2)Lens switching in low light
3)Moon shot at night
4)Moon shot during evening

The AI is not overpowering which is a good thing. It maintains the natural colour of the environment. 

Performance:
Nothing has made some bold claims. Even with UFS 2.2, it apparently would not show signs of lag. While this claim holds true on light usage, while using the camera for a longer time, switching between lens shows some lags. The good thing is apart from the camera, in day to day usage, the phone did not lag. Scrolling through social media, websites, YouTube, the performance is smooth. Under heavy load, it does get warm but nothing significant.

Gaming:
I have a 9 to 5 job and I am no longer a heavy gamer. During weekends, I play 2-3 hours of BGMI and some light gaming. When I got the 120fps update, I was extremely excited. However, it soon turned into a nightmare. BGMI has a bug atleast on my unit wherein touch doesn't respond instantly. This happens randomly but quite a lot. This causes extreme frustration in the match due to which I stopped playing on this phone.

Battery and charging:
The battery life has been decent to good considering it has 5000mAh capacity. I have been getting 6-7 hours of SOT on continuous usage. During the weekdays, since I am busy with my job, my phone usage is very low. WhatsApp, Wifi Hotspot, X and Uber is what I use the most. I have been consistently getting ~3 days standby with 3 hours SOT. I hope the standby drain is improved. The charging speed is bad. Despite using a 100W GaN charger, this phone charges slowly. The fastest speed has been 1h 10 mins and slowest 1h 40 mins. Both while using the same charger.

Display and Media consumption :
This display is free from the infamous green tint issue affecting past nothing devices. As a phone 1 user, the green tint was the reason I sold that device. However, the phone does not support HDR on Netflix, quite a bummer for me. Apart from BGMI, the touch response has been good and so is the optical fingerprint scanner. The speakers are very loud but I wish the tuning was a bit better.

Software:
Nothing OS is oddly refreshing to use. This reminds me of the OG OxygenOS. I love the lock screen customisation, wallpaper studio and smart categorization in the app drawer. I like the overall UI aesthetics and the simplicity in the design. That being said, it needs major improvements. The Nothing Gallery has no editor, no AI retouch and relies on Google Photos editor. The software has so many bugs, it feels the phone is under beta testing. There was this bug wherein Google search would not open from Homescreen widget but got fixed later. Random black screen, AOD going out of screen to name a few.

Essential Space:
Great idea, decent execution but very bad planning. I did love the idea of having a personal space that will sort all my data, from flight bookings to hotel bookings in a single place. The issue is, it brings in the data together but makes it look confusing. Upcoming events UI is so confusing it defeats the purpose. I want to quickly check which hotel I will stay in on 24th April, but I can't. I have to carefully find it from a bunch of data. I expect a better UI from Nothing in this regard. May be calendar support would help me

Miscellaneous :
Glyph is a cool party trick but doesn't solve any problem. They have a long way to go. I haven't used the glyph composer a lot but I did use its integration with 3rd party apps such as Uber. It looks cool but as you step out, you become the centre of attention especially if it is dark. I am not a huge fan of filters, but it is good to have support for importing custom LUTs. Network on this phone is the same as most other devices. It's good but not the best. Inside lifts or tunnels, there is network drop.

For the price, it easily outshines any other device with a periscope camera. The outputs are sometimes so good, it can give a tough fight to the flagships. But then the bugs creep it and you start questioning your purchase decision. Of course I cannot expect 60k like performance in a 30k phone but for the price, I also don't expect to use a device with Alpha software. However, this was my experience with the device. It may vary from person to person.