So if you've just got yourself the nothing phone 3A or 3A pro, you got style. And if you're thinking about getting a new phone and want something not too expensive, which has respectable specs, amazing features, and a unique look, then my advice is you get nothing because I don't think you'll be disappointed. I'm going to share with you 17 of the first things to do with your brand new Nothing phone 3A and this does include tips, tricks, and hidden features that I think you'll want to see.

And if you haven't got to nothing, phone 3A yet, but you're thinking about getting one. It's worth watching this video because you will get a good look at what makes this phone unique, and what truly makes this phone positively, absolutely nothing in a good way. Anyway, let's get this started. 99% of people, when they get a new phone, will likely want to do this on day one.

Paper the Walls

So let me show you. If you hold your finger down on an empty part of the screen, you'll see the customization option. If you tap on this, here is where you can change your wallpaper. And these ones right here are the Nothing designed wallpapers. If you go to more, you have an entire section. If you scroll across here, these are all first-party Nothing wallpapers. But before you go ahead and choose one of these, hit the more option here at the end. Because as the name suggests, there are in fact more Nothing wallpapers that have been on previous phones and then also ones that are completely brand new, which weren't there in that original line up. So I'm going to choose one of these. When you've chosen your wallpaper, you see the option at the bottom to enable scrolling. And all it does is when you're scrolling between your home pages, it will shift the wallpaper a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, like it's kind of flowing with the movement of the pages. It's a nice effect.

So I do recommend you leave this on and then hit the tick at the top. So there is a good chance a lot of people would choose the same wallpaper as you, but you can actually add some more effects to the wallpaper, for example, the atmosphere effect. And the great thing about this one is it kind of softens any sharp edges that might be on the wallpaper, making the app stand out more clearly against the background. The other option here is really nice, is the glass effect. So this kind of adds some vertical glass like lines to the image, which can look awesome. It does depend on your background though. So as you can see, that only affects the lockscreen because the home screen has the atmosphere effect. We turn the atmosphere effect off, then we get it on both screens. And if you just want this wallpaper to be on one screen or the other, you can actually deselect one of these and then it will just apply to the one that is still selected. So it's entirely up to you. And this is just the basic approach to doing wallpapers.

AI Wall

The next one is a bit more advanced and a bit more fun. Now let's say you want something truly unique, even more unique at a customized stock paper. Well, you're going to like this. So how do you bring it down on an empty screen again? Just like before, go to customization. But this time we're going to go to more wallpapers at the bottom of the screen here. And this is where you'll find the Wallpaper Studio in the Wallpaper Studio section. If you go to create, you get these two images, one at the top, one at the bottom, and if you swipe across, you can select different types of images. So I'm going to go with terrain here just for example. And as for the colors, I want to go with the ink set up.

And here we can hit the plus in the middle or the create wallpaper does the same thing. And this will combine those two images into one, creating something very unique to you. And the great thing about these wallpapers is it can be very hard for someone to recreate exactly what you created, because the AI models are constantly evolving, and also the chances of someone selecting the exact same combination is quite unlikely. Anyway, once you've created something nice, you can either hit the download up here, or you can set the wallpaper straight away, and then we have the same effects that we can apply. Just like before.

Lock Screen Basics

Let's go a bit more customization, locked down. And let's start with something that is very basic but very, very useful. So how do you break it down on an empty space again, go to customization. This time we're going to swipe across to the lock screen. And you'll see a couple of other options pop up just underneath. And the first thing we're going to look at here is the shortcut. So if we tap on this so you can customize the shortcuts at the bottom corners of the screen to be whatever you want.

A couple of useful ones you could add here is the Do Not Disturb or even the mute. The torch. Also, the QR scanner could be very, very handy. Now on the opposite side, by default this will be set up as the Google Wallet. But in my opinion, there are much better ways you can open the Google Wallet on your phone once it's locked, and I will show you it because it's one of my favorite tricks. Anyway, that was a basic lock screen customization trick.

Pro Lock Screen

Now let me show you something a bit more advanced and something this exclusive to nothing as far as I know. Same thing again, we just hold your finger down on an empty space. Screen customization - swipe across to the lock screen. This time we're going to go to widgets. So if you just picked up a brand new phone, this area will be completely empty. So what you can do here is swipe down through all of the widgets, pick the ones that you think would be useful to you. But do keep in mind this grid space is 4x4. So let's say you've chosen a few widgets that you really like, but there's not enough space to add more that you would like to have here as well. Well, there is a new feature, which is pretty cool, and it is the expand widget area. So if you tap that you now have four rows of four, which means you can add a lot more widgets to your lock screen. And one of the most useful and most powerful widgets to add is the quick settings. Because when you add a quick setting widget, you can choose which setting you want it to change. So you could literally fill your lock screen with several different setting options, one of which can be the wallet. So I mentioned earlier that you didn't necessarily have to use the wallet down at the bottom right corner, and that's because of this. We can even have it a bit bigger or even massive. Another one that will make use of this phone's unique features is this.

If we go to Quick Settings, let's choose the small one this time, the glyph tool. So this is a great new feature. When the regular torch isn't cutting it. You can also turn on the glyph lights for that extra brightness. Now, there is one downside that you should be aware of. If you are going to expand the widgets on the lock screen, and it is the fact that the clock cannot be customized if you do this. So I'm just going to minimize the widget area again just so you can see what I'm talking about. When you use the smaller widget area, you can swipe left and right on the clock to choose different clock fonts. But do keep in mind you can't add clocks to the widget area if you want to, and there is a cool widget you might want to play around with here on the lock screen, and it is the essential space. We'll come back to why that's important, but also the countdown. So with the countdown set up, you could choose a shape and you can set a date. Let's say it's an important date. For example, a date where something special was happening, March 2057. Probably the date I hit a million subscribers. What this does is it creates a countdown clock on your lock screen so you don't forget about that special day.

Bonus 1 - Always On

If you like that last one, you're going to love this next one. Jump into your settings. There are a couple of ways to do this. Easiest way is probably to swipe down and go to settings. Here, go to Lock Screen, scroll to the bottom and go to Always Show basic info on lock screen. And this is how you turn on the always on display.

So when you enable this, of course, yes, it's going to use a little bit more power. But the upside to this is all of those widgets that you set up on your lock screen can now be visible on the always on display, and that is pretty awesome. I do expect a lot more manufacturers will probably copy this in the future.

Send Them A Message

All right, now here's a quick fire bonus tip for you guys. If one day you happen to lose your phone or leave it on a bus or something, who knows, you might be lucky and the person who finds it actually wants to give it back to you. But if that is the case, this will help speed that up. Go into your settings. Go to the lock Screen again and here you will see Add text to Lock screen. So here you can leave a little message that will help the person who finds your phone contact you when you don't have your phone.

But on the other hand, let's say the person who finds your phone is a property thief and they don't want to give it back. Well, then I do have a little power tip still to show you that could help you in that scenario. I think you're going to like that one anyway. Let's move on to the next one. Okay, that's enough customization of the lock screen.

Custom Shortcuts

Let's move on to some customization of the home screens and the quick settings, aka shortcuts on this phone. So if you swipe down once you get your first few shortcuts, swipe down again and you get all of them and you've got two pages here. Anyone who's used an Android phone before will be very familiar with this. Now to customize these, just hit the little pen right here. You can remove any of these quick shortcuts if you want to just by hitting the minus next to them. And all of these ones here at the bottom have already been added to the shortcuts section. So you can add any of these. You want a couple of nice ones to add. Are these the song search? So if there's a song playing and you don't know what it's called and you like it, you want to figure out what it is.

You can hit that quick shortcut button and it will tell you extra dim is what some people call me sometimes, but, it's also a very handy setting on this phone, especially at night when the phone is too bright. Even on its lowest brightness mode, you can actually dim it down even more. This can also be great when you wake up with a hangover. Now, once you've added and ordered the shortcuts that you want, you can customize the order of these. I do recommend you put them in an order where the most used and most important ones will be at the front on the first page. And do remember, the first two rows on the first page are visible after just one swipe. So those are arguably the most important of all. And one of the cool things you can do with the quick settings on the nothing phones, which I really like, is this. So let's say you've added a new widget. If you hit the little arrow just at the bottom, you can actually expand the size of those widgets. So they take up a bit more space within the quick settings.

Exclusive Shortcuts

Now, before we move on from the shortcuts, there is one really cool shortcut that I've got to show you because it is exclusive to nothing phones. So if you swipe down, swipe down again. As long as you haven't deleted it already, it should be right here, the glyph timer. So to use this, just hold your finger down on the glyph timer. You can then set these predefined times right here. Or you can jump into the settings.

Once you've set the duration of your timer, all you need to do now is turn your phone upside down. Clean the back of your phone if you got the black one, because it is a little bit of a fingerprint magnet. But what you start to notice is this little light bar here will gradually start to turn down as the timer is running out, so it gives you a visual representation of how long is left on the timer that you've just set using the glyph interface.

Sound’s Good

So you probably noticed I've got some nothing here two right here. I bought these as soon as these came out. And these are still in my top five favorite earbuds right now. Stylish, sound, good, comfortable, really good ANC and really good passthrough mode for what can make these earbuds sound even better is the codecs.

And this applies to all earbuds, especially those that use Qualcomm codecs, which is a lot. So check out this tip. Go into your settings. Go to connected devices. Go to Connection Preferences and scroll all the way to the bottom of this page until you see Qualcomm Haptics codec preferences. Now, Haptics Adaptive is switched off by default, and I do recommend you switch this on because this will allow this phone to transmit a 96kHz high resolution audio signal to compatible earbuds.

Play it by Eye

So one of the most unique features on the Nothing phones is the glyph interface. And it can change the way you use your phone to a certain extent. And here's one of the ways you can make the glyphs work for you. So if you jump into your settings glyph interface, ringtones and go to Add Contact. So once you've chosen a contact from your phone book, you can now choose a specific ringtone for that contact.

And that ringtone does come with a specific glyph pattern. So the idea is, not only will you be familiar with the ringtone that's associated to that person, but you can also become familiar to the glyph pattern associated to that person. So even when your phone is not ringing with sound, but it's ringing silently or vibrating, you still know who it is. If you can see the back of the phone or even feel the vibrations.

Flip N Glyph

Now here's another glyph tip for you guys. If we go back into the settings again, go back to Glyph Interface. Scroll down here. You'll see the option to flip to glyph. So if you switch this on, this essentially puts your phone into silent mode, but activates the glyph so you do know when you're getting phone calls and things like that, just based off the light patterns on the back of the phone.

Only The Essentials

Here's another exclusive usability feature on the nothing phone. Stay within the glyph interface. If you go to notifications here, you can set up a central glyph notifications, which are only for specific apps. So if we go to Add New Essential, I'm going to choose WhatsApp. So I want this to flash every time I get a message notification only.

We can set all of these if we wanted to, but I just want to know when I get a new message, and that's it. And this is how the essential glyph looks. So it just blinks a couple of times here, and then it stays static over here until you check your phone. So if you're in a meeting and you see this specific glyph notification, you know that it came from WhatsApp. If that's how you set it up.

Glyph Tweaks

There's a couple more glyph tweaks that I want to show you very quickly. If we jump back into the settings again, we go to glyph interface. You can actually change the brightness of the glyph lights. Do keep in mind that if you adjust this, this will use more power. By default they are on the lowest.

You can also customize the settings for the glyph timer, which I showed you, you can access from the shortcuts. There's also the volume indicator. So when you adjust the volume on the phone, let's say it's face down, is playing some music. You can actually see the volume. So this phone really is one of the most unique phones out there.

Glyph Drum Kit

And the way in which you use it is very different. If you make use of the glyphs. But check this out. If you really want to personalize this phone, then you've got to do this. Jump in to your settings, go back to the Glyph Settings, Glyph interface, and then scroll down to the composer. Now if you kind of treat this like a drum kit, you can play around with it. Once you figure out a pattern that you like, you can then hit record.

You just play the tune you want to play, hit save. And now this will be set up as a ringtone. And you can really make it as complicated to as simple as you like. So if you want a good example of how it should be done, you should probably have a listen to this. And if you are really getting into the glyph lights and things, I do recommend you set up a bedtime schedule. That way, if your phone is facedown charging at night and you start getting WhatsApp messages and things like that, it's not lighting up the whole bedroom.

Quick Drawer

All right, here's a brand new organizational tip for the Nothing Phone 3. So if you swipe up, you've got your app drawer. This is the classic Android style, but nothing has introduced a new approach to this. So if you hit the three dots in the top right corner, you'll see the smart beta option. If you tap that, this completely transforms the app drawer when you swipe up. Now, everything is categorized into these nice folders, and it can potentially be easier to navigate than just an alphabetical list.

And I really do like how the apps in the app drawer are colored, as opposed to the monochrome, which is kind of the nothing style. So the idea with things being monochrome on the home screen is that they're less distracting. You're less likely to be drawn into TikTok or Instagram or anything like that, and therefore you use your phone more intentional, really. But when you do want to find TikTok or Instagram, when you swipe up, it should be pretty easy to find because all of the colors are here in glory.

Numbers

Now, here's a little custom tweak that you might want to make. It's completely optional, but check this out. If we go into the settings, go to battery. Here you can enable the battery percentage in the top right corner. I know this is a minor tweak, but some say numbers are the closest that humans can get to the language of God's.

Optimise while you sleep

Now there's a little ninja trick here, which you might want to switch on within the battery settings. If you scroll down, you'll see sleep standby optimization. If you turn this on, it limits the network usage on the device, and this can potentially help your phone be less distracting at night, which is a good thing, I think. So you might want switches on.

Display Settings

So I've not really talked much about the display on this phone. And that's because most of the settings are already at their optimal. But just to double check, if we jump into settings again and we go to display here you'll see adaptive brightness. You do want to leave that on. If it's a bright, sunny day and you're struggling to see the screen, the brightness will boost. If it's a dark room, it will lower down and that will help save power. The screen timeout should be 30s and if you scroll down, you should see HDR display that should be on and also the dynamic refresh rate. Definitely leave it on dynamic unless you want to run it on the highest refresh rate and sacrifice some battery.

But what I wanted to show you here is the screen saver. So if we go back to my home screen quickly see this clock? I get so many questions about this clock. Well, check this out within the screen saver. If you go here, switch on the screen saver. Go to the clock here and go to customize. You can actually choose the analog clock style, which I just showed you on the home screen to appear as a wallpaper, which is fantastic for when you're charging your phone at night.

So instead of a bright white clock on the screen, you just kind of have this dim wallpaper clock that kind of moves around. And yes, Nothing has some good clocks for this phone, but they don't seem to expand to fill the same amount of space as this one. So if you do want to get this particular clock, here's how you do it. Go to your play store, type in Google Clock and it is this app right here. Now when you hold your finger down on an empty part of the screen, go to widgets. These are all or nothing widgets, but if you swipe across, these are all of the app widgets which are available. And then if you go to the Google Clock app that you just installed, you see there's a bunch of different styles you can play around with.

Pro Organisation Tip

So here's some homescreen customization tips for you guys. So, pretty much any app that you have on this phone can be expanded by holding your finger down on it and then hitting the two outward arrows here. That enlarges the app. So it's just a bigger version of the app. So it takes up more space on the home screen, making it easier to find. And this particular app is very, very useful and very powerful. And we'll come back to it shortly. But what I really want to show you guys here is the folder options. So I've got a bunch of social media apps right here. I'm just going to drag one onto the other one, and then drag the other one and drag them all into this folder.

Now that that's done, if I hold my finger down on the folder, just like the regular apps, we can enlarge the folder. But there are a lot more options here on a nothing phone. So if you hold your finger down on this and go to customize right here, you can change it to the grid layout, which is pretty standard on Android, the circular layout, which is quite nice. And then we can just set up a cover. So here we can just choose one of these icons for this specific folder. Since it's social media, maybe it should be something like this. Maybe. And the whole idea of this is to make these apps less distracting so that you can stay on task.

Precious Memory

All right, here's another tip for a little later on down the line. So if you go for the lower storage version of this phone, at some point you might start to run out of space, especially if you're filming lots of 4K video. So check this one out. Go into your settings, go to storage. Here. You see the Smart cleanup tool. Now because this is a brand new phone. Of course it doesn't really require this at this point in time, but what this essentially does is it reorganizes all the files and folders on your phone to make everything run more efficiently.

And if you go back one step, you can turn on the storage manager. And if you tap on that, you'll see you can remove photos and videos. There are over 90 days old, but the phone will only do this if the storage manager recognizes that these videos and photos have been backed up. And then you've got Google's own tool here as well to free up space on your device.

Essential tip

There is a brand new button on this phone that hasn't existed on the previous nothing phones, so I guess I better show you what that's all about. And it is super useful if you use it. Right. So this button right here, just below the power button, is what's known as the essential key. And the best way to describe it is it's a kind of AI screenshot key. Let me show you. So here's a brilliant website. It's called what Gear Dot net. And here's a little chapter about the Snapdragon eight elite chip. Now if I push and hold the essential key. I can now record some audio along with this screenshot just to explain to myself when I call this up later on why I screenshotted it in the first place. That's now added to the essential app. So remember how I enlarged that earlier? Well, I could tap on it here, or I could double tap the essential key to jump straight into the essential app. The Essential Space app, to be more precise. Now, the great thing about this approach to Screenshotting is it's so much more advanced and screenshotting on its own. It actually use AI to transcribe what I said when I took the screenshot, and then it will also use AI to summarize what it was that I screenshotted. It also records the location where you were when you took that screenshot. And the great thing about this is, let's say this is a topic that I'm researching, and I'm taking a bunch of screenshots from a bunch of different websites. It's creating all these bullet points for me. What I can now do is create a collection and I'm just going to call it Snapdragon. And I can add all of the Snapdragon screenshots into this one folder. And I do think this is a brilliant research tool.

So there's two ways to use the essential key. You can either push and hold it to do the voice recording, or you can push it once it does a snapshot. And you can just type in a note if you don't want to speak out loud. Now, something else is extremely powerful within the space app here on the Nothing phones is. If you do use the essential key and screenshot, let's say an email that has a date and time in it, it would actually extract the information and add it to your upcoming list. So who would know that there is something upcoming and it will use AI to tell you what it is? So I've got a bunch of stuff here that I was just playing around with. Three events are upcoming. It knows the time and date for those events, and it also knows where that information was taken from, and you can jump straight back to it. So I am a fan of this essential key. I'll just go get the hang of using it more often. But I really do like what Nothing is done with this AI and I do recommend you make the most of it as well. It's like screenshotting but with super powers. All right, so you've made it all the way to the end. If you've never watched any of my other tips and tricks videos, you probably don't know this, but I always save some quick fire bonus tips for you guys to stick around for the longest, so check this out.

Air(Pod) Support

Jump into your settings, scroll down to Special Features. Here you will see a bunch of special features, obviously, but the one I want to show you is this in the experimental feature section.

If you've just made the switch from Apple to Android, first of all, congratulations for scaling up the side of the walled garden and abseiling down the other side because it's not easy to do. And let's say you've got some AirPods you can actually switch on AirPods support here, and this will allow you to view the battery life information on your nothing phone.

Pop Up

There is another bonus feature here, which is the pop-up view, so this is available on lots of Android phones, that the way you use this is you can background an app and hit the app icon at the top and use pop-up view here. So another way that you can start a pop-up mode is to drag halfway up and then drag to the top, and there we go. It's now floating here. If you tap on it, it expands it a little bit. If you want to fully expand the window, just drag downwards and then there we go. It's back to full size.

Maximum MultiTasking

Here's another bonus tip. Jump back into the special features. Here you will see Ram boost. You can expand the RAM by sacrificing some of your ROM on the device, and this can help speed up multitasking. Test it out how it is. If you feel like it's struggling a little bit later on down the line, you can come here and increase the amount of RAM if you need to.

Sharing is Caring

This is one of my favorite new additions to the Nothing phone 3. So if we scroll across, you'll see here I have this little icon. This is the photo widget, the official photo widget. And what you can do here is if you hold your finger down on it, you can go to photos and you can add whatever images you want from your gallery and it will appear here. But where it gets really interesting is if you've got another friend who has a Nothing phone as well. If you hold your finger down on this and you go to share, you can share this particular widget with the photos that are attached to it with your friend.

So you and your friend can actually send photos back and forth between your phones, no matter where you are in the world via this widget. I really like the idea of this. This is fantastic. So let's say you're going on holiday and you want to share the photos from your holiday with your family. Every day you can sort of update this widget, and then they will see it on their phones straight away on their home screens. And right now I've actually got all my Star Wars wallpapers in this folder, so I can share this with you guys if you've got Nothing Phones. And did I ever tell you that story? How I was a stormtrooper once in The Force Awakens? If you've watched the channel before, I've probably told you 100 times already.

First You Get The Power

Now remember how right at the beginning of the video, I talked about how the Google Wallet can be opened more easily? Well, this is my favorite way to do it and this will be your favorite way to do it, especially if you're coming from iOS. Check this out. Jump into your settings. Once again, go all the way to the special features. And in here we're going to go to gestures. And now we want to change the double push of the power button from camera to all apps and shortcuts. Tap on this. And here you can choose Google Wallet. So in doing this, when your phone is locked, you can literally double tap the power key, which initiates the Google Wallet.

You unlock it with your fingerprint and then you're good to pay for whatever it is you're trying to do and scan your loyalty cards and all that kind of stuff. I know a lot of people say, why would you do that? The camera is better to have is a double tap, but the way I see it is, I use the Google Wallet way more than I use the camera on a daily basis, so that's why I set it up like that. My advice is try it out, see if you like it.

Tea Leaf Protection

Now there is one more tip and if you jump with your settings, go to Security and Privacy. Make sure all of this is green. And that it says looks fine up here. If it doesn't, you need to look into whatever is being flagged, but go to more security and privacy, and you'll see.

This brand new feature here is called Power of Verify. So if some tea leaf does steal your phone, the first thing they'll probably do is try and turn it off so that you can't ring it or use the Google Find My feature now with this on it actually will require your biometrics or your Pin number in order to shut the device down fully, so this can buy you some time to get on the Google Fi and actually pinpoint the location of your nothing phone.

So there is so much more to learn about these new phones from Nothing. I hope you guys learned something new in this one. If you did, a little thumbs up would be appreciated. If you want a follow up video on this, diving into the camera features and things like that, let me know. If I get enough requests for any specific video, I will do my very best to make it for you guys. Appreciate you guys for sticking around so long. If you wouldn't mind, give me a little thumbs up. I would appreciate it because it will cost you absolutely nothing and it means a lot to me anyway to see you guys in the next one.