Nothing’s New Ad-Supported £249 Smartphone Cuts Corners With its Cameras

The Nothing Phone 3a Lite looks to be just as quirky as its siblings, including the standard Nothing Phone 3 and Nothing Phone 3a series. However, in its pursuit of a lower price tag, the Nothing Phone 3a Lite may have made too many trade-offs.

The new smartphone rocks the trademark Nothing style, meaning it looks futuristic and unusual. It also still features a triple camera system, although it is one of the stranger ones on the market. As a budget-oriented handheld, the Nothing Phone 3a Lite was never going to have a flagship-quality camera system. In many cases, more affordable phones have fewer cameras. Nothing has instead made cuts in the quality department.

The 50-megapixel main camera looks perfectly fine, sporting a 24mm equivalent f/1.9 lens and a reasonably large Type 1/1.57 image sensor. However, it is the adjacent cameras that can’t keep pace with high-end photographic demands. The ultra-wide camera (120° field of view) has a tiny 8-megapixel Type 1/4 image sensor, which is seriously tiny. The third camera is a dedicated 2MP macro camera. While its macro capabilities look good, two megapixels is very little resolution. As expected, the Nothing Phone 3a Lite has a fourth camera — a 16-megapixel front-facing module.

Compare these cameras to the Nothing Phone 3, which PetaPixel found to be reasonably impressive, albeit not without some issues. That phone, which starts at $799, has a triple 50-megapixel camera system comprising a 24mm main camera (Type 1/1.3), a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto 3x (Type 1/2.75), and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide (Type 1/2.76).

Granted, while the Nothing Phone 3a Lite may have cut too many corners with its cameras, it still offers an impressively aggressive price tag. The phone, which Nothing says will not launch officially in the United States, starts at £249 in the United Kingdom and €249 in Europe.

However, there’s a catch. This low price is subsidized, not by cell phone carriers as used to be commonplace, but by advertisements on the phone itself. Nothing’s new “Lock Glimpse” feature brings lock screen ads to Nothing smartphones. On higher-end models, these are disabled by default, but that’s not the case for the Nothing Phone 3a Lite. The phone is cheaper because it is treating the end-user as a consumer far beyond the initial purchase.

Complete Nothing Phone 3a Lite specifications, including its processor and display technology, are detailed on Nothing’s global website.

Image credits: Nothing