As you know if you've read my blog often, I'm constantly trying new phones to find the best one that I can stick with FOREVER. And, a very important choice is fast approaching me, where I THINK I’ve whittled the decision down to 4 phones.
The Pixel 9a, the Samsung A56, Nothing Phone 3a Pro, OR the iPhone 16e - and I have been testing all of them over the past few weeks.
It’s quite an important decision, because to me, this decides whether my son’s first phone is an iPhone which means throwing him deep into the inevitable Apple ecosystem, or with an Android phone, albeit the Samsung or Pixel ecosystems, or Nothing, because it’s a great, fun option as well.
So I thought I’d bring you along with me in this post where I try to decide which phone is the right one for me in the hope that it helps you also decide for yourself.
Pricing
First up, it’s pricing.
- Pixel 9a: £499 (128GB storage, 8GB RAM)
- Samsung A56: £499 (256GB storage, 8GB RAM)
- Nothing Phone 3a Pro: £449 (256GB storage, 12GB RAM)
- iPhone 16e: £599 (128GB storage, 8GB RAM)
Those are the headline figures.
But that isn’t everything you should take into account when buying or perhaps upgrading.
This is definitely going to be more nuanced depending on which country you are buying from.
I often hear stories that Samsung have incredible trade-in deals over in the US which never make their way over here to the UK. But I’ll run through the current trade-in deals I’m seeing.
I have either a Pixel 5a, or a Samsung A52 to trade in, so we can see what that does to the pricing.
Straight up, with the Pixel 9a I’ll get a £25 Store Credit and also up to £415 trade-in. So let’s see what that really means for my devices.
Well, the Pixel 5a that I bought a few years ago, refurbished for £200, I can actually get £260 for trade-in, which is INCREDIBLE.
And even the Samsung A52, I get £205 for trade-in which is about what I paid for this phone. So those are both solid trade-in prices. Which would bring the Pixel down to £239 or £294 depending on which phone I trade in.
Over to Samsung and very strange, they don’t let me trade in the A52, or the Pixel 5a. So all I get is £100 back as a generic ‘Any Phone’ offer. Which brings the A56 down to £399.
Good old Apple, doesn’t care about anything unless it’s another iPhone. So no deals to be had there whatsoever.
And Nothing doesn’t offer any trade-in’s at all.
Beyond the trade-in deals, there are extra discounts to be had. If you use the Samsung App then you can get an additional 5% and you also get discount on other accessories.
Nothing also offer 10% off audio and 40% off accessories when buying a 3a Pro.
But honestly, all of those deals and discounts change at times, it’s best to check each one in the country you’re buying from to see what the best deals are.
Design
Design is next and it would be silly to not start with the Nothing 3a Pro since it’s by far the most unique design of them all.
It has a circuitboard type design on the back of the phone along with glyphs, which can be used for notifications, or countdown timers, it has a few integrations with apps like Uber that shows you how close it is to arriving, and it’s just, a pretty cool and unique thing that no other phone has.
Oh, and if you are the type that just throws on a case, then there are some cases, both official and third party that still show off those Glyphs.
Overall, the nothing phone is reasonably comfortable to hold, if anything it’s a tad big for someone who has average sized hands.
You’ve got the volume buttons on one side, and then the power on the other side, along with their Essentials Space button, which we’ll talk about more shortly. It is plastic around the edges with a glass front and back.
And excluding that essentials button, with the button layout, it’s similar to an iPhone with the power on the opposite side to the volume rockers, which I kind of prefer. But, with the essentials button in a fairly low position, I often get confused between this and the power button, the position means that you will accidentally trigger it like, all of the time.
The Samsung A56 has a very familiar design, and looks similar to the flagship non-Ultra S-series phones like the S25. Again a glass front and back but with Aluminium rails which does make it feel a touch more premium than the Nothing 3a Pro.
The iPhone 16e keeps its very usual and premium iPhone design, volume rocker on one side, the power on the other plus you also get an Action Button which can be customised - finished off with a glass front and back and with a size that I would say is definitely easier to manage than the Nothing and Samsung A56.
And then we have the Pixel 9a which I would probably say looks the most premium design of the four.
Display
And continuing on to the display now with the Pixel 9a, it’s a 6.3” 120hz display which goes up to 2700 nits peak brightness, protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. It has a single camera at the top, an always on display and a fingerprint sensor which we’ll cover in a moment. I think the biggest thing I noticed when comparing the Pixel with others for this post, is the bezels around the edge of the display are noticeably thicker than the competition.
The iPhone 16e is a smaller 6.1” 60Hz Display, the ONLY phone in this lineup that’s not 120hz as it only goes up to 800 peak nits or 1200 in HDR which is way less than the pixel, but has a tougher Ceramic Shield front. And you have the notch on the 16e which houses the front facing camera and FaceID hardware.
The Nothing 3a Pro has a 120hz 6.77” display, which reaches 1300 nits and up to 3000 nits in HDR. It does also come with a pre-installed screen protector, which the others do not, however I had to remove this in the first few days because it collected so much dust and marks it just ruined the experience for me.
And then the Samsung Galaxy A56 has a 6.7” 120hz Display, Gorilla Glass Victus Plus and 1200 nits peak brightness with up to 1900 in HDR.
So the Nothing 3a Pro offers you the biggest screen, the Pixel 9a the brightness in non-HDR use, and so it really depends here on what you want in a phone.
Finger Print
In terms of unlocking your phone for day to day use, as well as other apps which require it like banking or password managers, then the iPhone has Face ID and the pixel has Face Unlock which extends to not just unlocking the device, but also those third party apps.
Outside of that, the iPhone doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor under the display or anything like that.
The Pixel does, but it’s an optical fingerprint sensor which means that it blasts a bright light at your finger each time. Generally this is OK, but it does have it’s disadvantages.
I found unlocking can be slower on the Pixel 9a, The A56 and Nothing 3a Pro also have an optical sensor but I found them faster than the Pixel 9a. Although the nothing phone’s sensor is placed much lower than the other devices which can be awkward sometimes and can need you to adjust your grip to reach.
Performances
Performance is really important in a phone, and generally speaking - it’s difficult to buy a flagship phone that performs badly nowadays. And whilst these aren’t flagships, they are all very capable phones.
But considering that these are all priced very similarly, it’s surprising to see a noticeable difference in their performance.
The Pixel 9a and iPhone 16e have their flagship chips in them. The Tensor G4 and the Apple A18 Chip.
Whereas the A56 has the Exynos 1580, and the Nothing has last years Snapdragon 7s Gen 3.
And from using these phones heavily over the last few weeks, the Samsung is definitely noticeably slower than others, and the Nothing 3a Pro also struggles in some tasks.
Between the Pixel and the iPhone, they’re both VERY good.
On the nothing, this only really happened when trying to multitask. Like, posting to instagram in the background whilst navigating around the phone, and especially editing videos, even minor edits like cutting off the beginning and end in a clip took quite a while to process.
Whereas on the Samsung, I find at times just browsing around the phone itself can be sluggish and so it’s definitely noticeable, especially when comparing with the Pixel 9a and iPhone 16e.
Camera
So overall for the cameras, honestly they’re all pretty good for their price point.
The iPhone only has a single main camera, the Pixel 9a has a 48Mb Main and a 13Mp Ultrawide, the Samsung adds a 5Mp Macro lens to that, and the Nothing 3a Pro has a 50Mp Main, 8Mp Ultrawide, plus a 50Mp Peiscope zoom lens.
The only areas I want to highlight here is that the Samsung really doesn’t look great when zoomed all the way in when compared to the others.
And the Nothing 3a Pro with that periscope zoom really does stand out when shooting from a distance.
Really the iPhone feels quite limiting with it’s single camera. I’d say the Pixel feels strongest in the camera to me, but I know it’s all personal preference so maybe let me know down in the comments which one you prefer.
Software
One of the biggest differences between these phones though of course is the software. And this is one area where I really need to pick carefully, because whatever I choose is going to be where my son starts building his own ecosystem of other products. Like headphones, tablets and so on.
Of course you have the higher level iOS vs Android discussion here.
In which case iOS offers a much simpler interface that many people won’t have any issues with. And since the phone itself is fast and super responsive it’s very effortless to navigate around.
FaceID also makes the experience pretty seamless with other applications such as password managers, banking apps and with Apple Pay it’s more likely to support your bank cards when over with Samsung or Google Pay I do sometimes run into issues where my bank doesn’t work with those accounts, which can be frustrating.
As far as family features go, this is the only part of iOS that I really don’t find it intuitive. You can access parental controls in the Screen Time section under settings, whereas Android has this split into a separate app called Family Link to manage everything which I feel is just a much more natural way than scrolling through the settings on my iPhone.
The Google Pixel 9a has Pixel’s flavour of Android which I personally really like. The UI is pretty flawless, with plenty of options for customisation only if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
You also get a bunch of Pixel Exclusive features like Call Screen which can answer incoming calls for you, and ask it who’s calling - then live transcribe what they say to you before you decide if you actually want to answer the call or not.
There’s Call Assist which can hold for you whilst you put the phone down then it will call you back when you’re at the front of a queue, and helps you navigate auto assistant queues instead of having to wait and listen to them.
Plus, similar to Apple, you have the Pixel ecosystem of products, like buds, the pixel tablet which my kid already uses.
It’s very similar to the Samsung phone in that respect, you have the whole Samsung Ecosystem and OneUI which is arguably one of the most popular flavours of android. Lots of integrations there into the Samsung ecosystem with other Samsung products, I actually made a whole video about the Samsung ecosystem which I’ll link down below to see what it’s capable of.
And then you have the Nothing Phone, which is a very different flavour of android with it’s NothingOS. Very clean, very minimal. I did find a few UI bugs where stuff just didn’t work as expected. Widgets didn’t fit properly, and also when jumping between apps I noticed my Instagram post photos getting moved whilst trying to copy information between them. But, you can strip NothingOS right back to a super minimalistic theme if you really like that sort of thing.
AI Features
Let's talk AI features.
So The iPhone is ‘Built for Apple Intelligence’ which at this stage doesn’t really give you much other than some writing tools and the ability to create your own emoji. And all in all I find Siri and Apple Intelligence just pretty useless. It mis-hears me ALL the time, then it will send some stuff to ChatGPT, in which case I find most of the time it’s just better re-mapping the action button to launching ChatGPT and skipping out Siri entirely. It’s kind of embarrassing how far behind Apple are, when you look at the competition now.
All Android phones, so the Nothing, Pixel and Samsung all get Google Gemini which - in my opinion, is getting VERY good.
You can use it like ChatGPT, you can use it as your Fitness or Nutrition Coach, ask it general questions, and I love the recent Gemini Live feature where you can share your camera and have a conversation with it whilst showing it certain things. It’s legitimately useful.
And then the Nothing phone 3a has this extra button which is for what they call, the Essential Space.
And this does show some promise. The idea is that you can tap it to take a screenshot and then write a note about what it is, or push and hold to take a screenshot along with record a short audio note about what it is.
And this is basically designed in two parts, one to keep screenshots away from cluttering up your camera roll, and two, like I discovered recently on a trip to see Manchester United, a genuinely useful way to stay organised.
By using the Essential Space, I stored the trips itinerary, match tickets, train tickets, and it uses AI to pull out information from those screenshots and adds reminders for you. So not once in my entire trip did I have to go searching for anything in my emails, like I usually have to.
Instead I just fired up the essentials space, and it knew exactly what information I needed next.
Super useful, if only the button wasn’t in a really awkward position that means it gets hit constantly by mistake.
Battery
In terms of the battery and charging situation for each of these phones, the iPhone has the smallest battery at 4005mAh, with 7.5w wireless and 15w wired charging.
The Nothing 3a Pro has a 5000mAh battery with 50w wired charging, and no wireless charging.
The Samsung Galaxy A56, also at 5000mAh, with 45w wired and no wireless charging.
But the Pixel 9a has the biggest at 5100mAh with a slower 23w wired and 7.5w wireless charging.
Now in terms of real world usage, I was quite surprised with the Nothing Phone 3a. I genuinely tried to get to empty every day and I just couldn’t - it’s a super strong battery, and similar story with the Pixel too, I’ve sometimes gone a couple of days without charging.
I’d say they’re all very close though and generally speaking you’re going to want to charge them at the end of every day if you want to get through a full second day.
Misc - IP Rating
A few miscellaneous things now, in terms of water protection, the iPhone and Pixel 9a win with IP68 protection, the Galaxy at IP67 and the nothing at IP64 which means that of all of these phones, the Nothing is the only phone that won’t survive behind submerged in water. Very important if you plan on taking this with you on family holidays to the beach and to swimming pools, hot tubs, that kind of thing.
Misc - Support
And then in terms of ongoing updates, the Pixel and iPhone lead the way with 7 years on the Pixel, and nothing official but typically between 5 to 7 year on the iPhone.
Samsung also is up there with 6 years, but Nothing is promising just 3 years which really falls short compared to the competition.
Which one am I picking?
So this is where there isn’t really a right answer. Everyone is going to like different things about each of these phones.
For me, and for my sons first phone - I actually decided to go ahead with the Pixel 9a. And I actually liked this phone so much, or rather, I liked the trade-in deals so much, that I actually traded in BOTH my old Samsung and Pixel. So now I have a sort of his and hers matching pixel, maybe when my daughter is old enough… we’ll see.
But I love that it’s basically a flagship phone. You get great cameras, great performance, it survived a drop onto concrete already so that’s promising, and it’s Android, which means no locked in Apple ecosystem. So much more freedom to work with other devices.
But, you might prefer the design of the Nothing Phone enough to sway you, or see the iPhone 16e or Samsung as an affordable way into the Apple or Samsung experiences.
So let me know using the comments down below, which one you prefer.
