Nothing has spent years making earbuds you can recognize from across the room. With the new Ear (3a), the London-based tech company is asking what its earbuds can do beyond playing sound. The answer is Audio Snapshot, a feature that essentially treats the earbuds like a screenshot button for audio.
A pinch of both earbuds can capture up to a minute of audio from music, podcasts, lectures, and other media, including up to 30 seconds before the recording starts. The audio snippet is saved directly to 32 MB of onboard storage before syncing with the Nothing X app, where it can be replayed, edited, transcribed, or shared.
Photography courtesy of Nothing
“With our products, we look for experiences and interactions where we can look at our phones less and be more in the moment,” a spokesperson for the Nothing Design Studio tells Design Milk. Whether walking, commuting, or exercising, the team saw an opportunity to capture ideas without interrupting whatever the listener was already doing.
Rather than introducing another screen or interface, Nothing built Audio Snapshot around the same physical pinch gestures used to control playback. The company hopes users might gradually assemble personal libraries of memorable audio much like screenshots accumulate in camera rolls.
Ear (3a) can also record calls and meetings for approximately two hours, with an audible notification alerting participants. Like Audio Snapshots, call recordings sync to Nothing X for editing and transcription.
Photography courtesy of Nothing
The new capability required some rethinking inside the earbuds, without letting the additional hardware dictate the device’s appearance. “Onboard storage for Audio Snapshot is only one part of a bigger puzzle,” the design team explains. “We also have to think about balancing battery sizes and the ergonomics of how the case opens.”
Color offers another point of distinction: The stems are still transparent, while the charging case evolves from the previous Ear (a) with refined contours and a more geometric form. For the case, the team drew inspiration from bubbled pill packaging, shrink-wrapped materials associated with the Finish Fetish art movement, and Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square.”
The studio also pushed the boundaries with color: Ear (3a) is available in black, white, yellow, and a particularly saturated pink. The team’s reference board ranged widely, including Sanzo Wada, Elsa Schiaparelli, the Strawberry iMac, Milk Makeup packaging, Paris Hilton, James Turrell, and Love Hultén’s synthesizers.
Photography courtesy of Nothing
Alongside the new colors and recording capabilities are more conventional upgrades, including a larger 12 mm dynamic driver, Hi-Res Audio Wireless, Static Spatial Audio, and Wideband Active Noise Cancellation up to 45 dB. Nothing also added an XS ear tip to the existing S, M, and L options, as well as a redesigned nozzle intended to improve fit.
The most interesting update to Ear (3a) isn’t found in its conventional audio upgrades or new colors. By giving a familiar gesture an entirely new job, Nothing is experimenting with an idea that feels surprisingly obvious once it exists: if we’ve spent years saving whatever catches our eye, why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with whatever catches our ear?
Ear (3a) is available from us.nothing.tech for $99.
Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.
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