Both Nothing Phone (3a) and Nothing Phone (3a) Pro are attractive mid-range devices that are seen as worth owning compared to what competitors offer. What makes people angry with Nothing is the use of UFS 2.2 and LPDDR4X memory which is seen as slower or has lower specifications compared to competitors with UFS 3.1 and LPDDR5 and above.
Nothing today shared their justification for why UFS 2.2 storage was chosen over UFS 3.1. According to Nothing, they are confident in the capabilities of Nothing OS.
Nothing emphasized that the specifications on paper do show that UFS 3.1 performance is faster than UFS 2.2. Nothing's goal is to provide the best daily usage experience for users and in their lab tests, UFS 3.1 is only great when installing applications and transferring large files. According to Nothing, these two things are not everyday things that users do.
Nothing compared the Phone (3a) with the Realme 11 Pro Plus. The random and sequential file transfer speed performance of UFS 2.2 on their new device is seen to have more or less the same performance in the real world. Nothing then shared that Nothing OS uses Adaptive NTFS technology to further accelerate the file transfer process that occurs in the background. Then, Nothing OS also has Smart Clean technology that manages the device's internal storage efficiently and saves users' storage space.
UFS 2.2 is said to still be a reliable component for future use. So the 3+6 year update support on Nothing Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Pro will not affect anything because Nothing OS is developed to be supported on various types of components regardless of age.