Nothing Phone (3a) Lite review

Display

The Nothing Phone (3a) Lite packs a 6.77-inch AMOLED screen with 2,392 x 1,080 pixels or 388ppi density. It supports 10-bit color depth, up to 120Hz refresh rate, and 2,160Hz PWM dimming.

The panel is protected with a sheet of Panda Glass.

Nothing promises 800nits of typical, 1,300 nits of automatic, and 3,000 nits of peak brightness. And our display measurements are in the ballpark.

We got 721nits of maximum manual and 1228nits of maximum automatic brightness. Reducing the white patch to just 10% did not give us a meaningful increase over the automatic boost, though.

The minimum brightness we captured with the white screen on was 2.3 nits.

Refresh rate

The Nothing Phone (3a) Lite screen supports up to 120Hz refresh rate. There are three modes in the settings menu - Dynamic, High, and Standard.

The Dynamic and High modes use 120Hz for the system interface and 60Hz for static content and video playback. The only difference is that Dynamic switches to 90Hz for most apps, while High always uses 120Hz if supported.

Naturally, Standard mode locks the screen at 60Hz.

HDR

The hardware scanning apps reveal support for HDR10 and HDR10+ streaming, but Nothing has not mentioned anything about this on the official specs sheet.

We confirmed that YouTube does serve HDR content, and the phone also supports Android's Ultra HDR image, too.

Netflix, however, does not serve HDR content at the time of writing, only 1080p videos in standard dynamic range (Widevine L1 DRM is available).

Battery life

The Nothing Phone (3a) Lite is powered by a 5,000mAh battery. The phone scored an Active Use Score of 15 hours on our battery life test, a solid performance.

The (3a) Lite posted great results across all of our standalone tests, too – calls, web browsing, video streaming, and even gaming.

Charging speed

The Nothing Phone (3a) Lite supports up to 33W fast wired charging. The phone ships without a bundled power adapter, but you can use any USB-PD charger, so that's not an issue.

We carried out our charging test with a 33W USB-PD charger, and we also tried a couple of overqualified ones. The phone never took more than 27W of charging power.

With this 33W power adapter, the battery charged from 1% to 30% in 15 minutes. We captured 57% charge at the 30-minute mark. And we got 100% in 67 minutes, which is nicely fast.

There are a couple of battery options made to prolong its lifespan. Smart Charging is for those overnight charge cycles, Custom Charging limit is self-explanatory (between 70% and 90%). And you can enable Adaptive Battery to automatically limit the background usage of apps.

Speaker

The Nothing Phone (3a) Lite has a single, bottom-firing speaker, placed next to the USB port.

The speaker scored an Average mark on our loudness test. It's definitely not among the loudest we've heard, but together with the Glyph LED, we don't think anyone should have problems noticing what's going on.

The audio quality is good - there is some bass, the vocals are great, while the high frequencies could have been better.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.