Nothing Phone (3a) and (3a) will introduce a new button – here's what it does

There’s been no shortage of activity around the Nothing Phone (3a) and (3a) Pro which will be unveiled on 4 March. Following an official unboxing from the Nothing team – and various other videos – there’s not much left that we don’t know.

One of the interesting details – and something that Nothing previously teased – is the inclusion of a new button on the side of the phone. And, thanks to a deep dive into the feature over at SmartPrix, we now have a good idea of how this new button might work.

Called the Essential Key, it will reportedly be used to control and access a new area of the phone called Essential Space. It’s said that Essential Space is still in development, but it appears to be some sort of AI hub.

Using the Essential Key you’ll be able to capture content to put into Essential Space and then quickly access it again. So, rather than taking a photo and then going to hunt for it in your Gallery, you’ll be able to send it straight to Essential Space, where it can be analysed by AI.

Screenshots will work in the same way, heading into Essential Space for easier retrieval when you need the information you were looking to save. The same can be done for voice notes, with Essential Space holding and organising all this information so it’s easy to retrieve when you need it.

It sounds like an AI notebook, where you can quickly save things you might want to refer back to, without them being scattered all over the phone in different apps.

While that sounds great, Essential Space might run into the problem that other new features do – people have established routines already and generally don’t struggle to find information on their devices, not with device-wide searching and so on. But, you can see how a centralised AI might collate this information, extracting information to return it when asked.

The question is what happens if you don’t want to use it? Adding a hardware button to support this feature is a pretty big deal and if the experience isn’t good there’s the potential that it becomes the proverbial Bixby button.

When Samsung introduced its own voice assistant, some devices (like the Galaxy S8) had a button that only opened Bixby and couldn’t be assigned to anything else. Samsung eventually issued an update to the Bixby app to allow it to be used for other things, but for some time, it was redundant hardware.

Whether that’s the fate that awaits the Essential Key on the Nothing Phone (3a) remains to be seen, but what we’ve learnt over many years of new phones with bright new ideas, is that some never get off the ground.