Nothing Phone (4a) Pro review: polished design, fun functionality | Tech Radar

Overview

‘Just a joy to use’ — I reviewed the new Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and its striking design, giant blazing screen, and useful Glyph Matrix reminded me that phones can actually be fun

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Details

Not only does the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro look gorgeous, but it has a blazingly bright 6.8-inch screen and offers impressive performance given its mid-range chipset. Moreover, its OS is streamlined and intuitive, while offering a whole heap of ways to actually get concrete uses out of that versatile Glyph Matrix. The camera isn’t quite up to the standard of some more premium handsets, but using it is just fun in a way so few phones are these days. Honestly, Apple and Samsung: take note.

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The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is a budget phone with its sights firmly trained on flagships. It offers a huge 5000-nit AMOLED display, a seriously stylish 0.31-inch / 7.95mm thick aluminum unibody, and a sufficiently powerful mid-range chipset to play games without breaking much of a sweat. More importantly, it continues to champion Nothing’s disruptive attitude to design and brings back the Phone 3’s super-flexible Glyph Matrix.

Let’s start with the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro’s display: at 6.83 inches, it gives you a serious amount of screen estate. I fired up some 2K videos and its picture always looked clean and precise, while its 5000-nit peak brightness is probably enough that you could use it as a reading torch. I did find its colors weren’t quite as rich as my i Phone 16 Pro’s Super Retina XDR display, but it looked pretty lush all the same.

But for me, the (4a) Pro’s design is what earns it a place among the best phones. Its aluminum unibody feels solid yet light, and while I think some diehard Nothing fans might miss the transparent back plate from its predecessors, it keeps just enough of those iconoclastic design touches in its camera and glyph module to really stand out in a world of interchangeable gray rectangles.

Not gonna lie: I had a lot of fun playing with Nothing’s Glyph Matrix. While it could easily be read as gimmicky, the sheer quantity of functions it offers meant I found a bunch of ways to use it that genuinely felt helpful. From being able to tell when my girlfriend had messaged to seeing a custom dollar glyph every time I got a transaction notification from my bank, I could easily keep tabs on important things without getting distracted by the daily noise. It went beyond flashing lights and started to actively feel really useful.

More generally, software on the (4a) Pro is also seriously polished, feeling fun to use yet knowing when to stay out of your way. Built on Android 16, Nothing OS 4.1 offers a whole load of customizability, while still feeling clean and bloat-free. Its AI tools allow you to analyze notes, screenshots, and recordings but – crucially – you can also choose which files you want this AI to access, and how much you want to engage with it.

This is backed up by the phone's admirable performance. While its Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset isn’t exactly top of the range, I found that, coupled with the 12GB RAM of my testing model, it handled productivity tasks and multitasking without complaint. On top of this, the (4a) Pro happily crunched through any game I threw at it on the highest settings without any perceptible lag or frame rate drops; its 5,300mm 2 vapor chamber cooling system keeps it from getting too hot during these kinds of heavy loads.

Unfortunately, this can’t be a total love-fest, and I’m a little less enamored with the (4a) Pro’s camera system. On the positive side, the images I shot with it felt sufficiently sharp and detailed – the 3.5x optical zoom produces deliciously crisp images, for example – while night photography is bright and grain-free. However, I did find color reproduction to be a little more subdued than on the best phones on the market, and the exposure on my snaps could be weirdly inconsistent at times.

There’s a slightly mixed picture with the (4a) Pro’s battery, too. While it offers a seriously ample 5,080m Ah cell, I couldn’t quite eke out the 21 hours of You Tube vids that Nothing indicated it should deliver – I found it delivered a little over 13 hours of 2K streaming instead. Still, that’s very decent and, thanks to its 50W wired charging, you can quickly top it up to full in a little over an hour.

Fundamentally, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is just a little bit different from everything else out there. After finishing up my testing, I honestly felt a bit sad going back to my play-it-safe i Phone, something I never would have predicted going into this review.

Of course, if you want top-of-the-range power and an unimpeachable camera, you’ll want to pick up a flagship. But if you’re after a mid-range handset, I’d happily recommend the (4a) Pro.

Nothing Phone (4a) Pro review: price and availability

Launched on March 19, 2026, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is available now. It has a list price of

499 / £499, which will net you the spec with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. While that version isn’t available in Australia, don’t feel left out – you can still get your hands on the edition with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage, which retails for

599 / £549 / AU$949.

As well as those two different versions, you can also pick between three different colorways: black, white, and a dusty pink. The pink looks awesome and I’m glad there are options for those who don’t just want a monochrome handset, but the pick of the litter for me is the white I tested here, as it really shows off that aluminum body and stark, semi-transparent camera module.

6.44 x 3.02 x 0.31 inches / 163.66 x 76.62 x 7.95mm

50MP f/1.88 main, 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide, 50MP f/2.88 periscope

I’ll be honest: when Nothing phones first entered the market, I wasn’t totally swayed by their style. At the time the Phone (1) was released, it both felt a little too brutalist and yet not quite as outré as the pre-release hype had led me to expect. I’ve gradually come around on this, particularly as more concrete innovations like the series' Glyph notifications have been introduced alongside those stark looks.

Why do I mention this? To add a little context to what I’m about to say next.

I love the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro’s design. There’s something effortlessly understated about its build, which manages to remain both unique and instantly recognizable. I know some will be sorry not to see the series’ full transparent backplate here – you might want to opt for the base (4a) if you prefer that look – but the (4a) Pro’s aircraft-grade aluminium body still looks suitably industrial while also feeling pleasingly premium to the touch.

It’s also Nothing’s slimmest phone to date, measuring just 7.95mm / 0.313 inches and weighing in at 210g / 7.41oz. As a result, even taking into account its expansive 163.66 x 76.62mm / 6.44 x 3.02 inches height and width, the (4a) Pro never felt anything less than comfortable in my hand. Yet it’s no delicate flower either – its Gorilla Glass 7i screen should help protect it against scratches and drops, while its IP65 rating should entirely keep dust at bay and, Nothing promises, allow it to endure a dunking in 25cm / 9.84 inches of water for up to 20 minutes.

Undoubtedly, the phone's most prominent feature is that chunky camera module on the back. Nothing is very much on board with the full-width camera trend we’ve seen from the Google Pixel series and the i Phone 17 Pro. But while these blocky camera bulges sometimes look a little unsightly to my eye, I have to say, Nothing has nailed it here – not only has the brand broken it up by using its transparent design language, but that expansive Glyph Matrix turns it from dead space into a striking visual feature.

Speaking of: the Glyph Matrix itself is also seriously well designed. Comprising 137 mini-LEDs, it offers fantastic versatility, allowing you to display a wide range of moving and still glyphs to accompany various functions on your phone, which I’ll explore more in the software section below. And it’s also ludicrously bright at 3,000 nits – when I first excitedly showed off what it could do to my partner, she winced as if I’d just let off a flashbulb in her face. Oops. Fortunately, you can turn the brightness down if you don’t want it set to ‘stadium floodlight’.

After using the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, my trusty i Phone 16 Pro has genuinely felt a little drab by comparison. Given how much I loved the latter’s looks when I first bought it, that shows the high bar the (4a) Pro has set in terms of its design.

Almost immediately, the first thing that will strike you about the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro’s display is its size. It’s huge. At 6.83 inches, it’s only a shade smaller than the Samsung Galaxy 26 Ultra’s gargantuan 6.9 inches, although the 2,800 x 1,260 resolution of its AMOLED panel can’t quite reach the 3120 x 1440 pixels offered by Samsung’s flagship.

Still, during my testing, I found it looked impressively crisp. To really try out what it could do, I watched Planet Earth III on BBC i Player and was impressed by how clear the footage seemed, rendering elements like the huge, red glistening eyes of a gliding tree frog in gorgeous detail. It also shows off images with bags of contrast; that AMOLED display is capable of hitting deep blacks that offer a real HDR pop to everything you see.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is also impressively bright. While it didn’t quite hit the supernova-like glare that its 5,000 nit peak brightness would suggest – I’d peg it as not dissimilar to the brightness hit by the 3,000 nit-peak i Phone 17 Pro – it still absolutely glowed. Whether I was testing under our office’s fluorescent lights or one of those rare guest appearances the sun makes in the British sky, it never appeared anything less than luminous.

There’s pretty much only one area in which I found the (4a) Pro's display wasn’t quite able to keep pace with flagships: color. Comparing it side-by-side with my i Phone 16 Pro, its hues felt just a tiny bit too cool by contrast – for example, a burning sunset over a colossal river delta looked a tiny bit less amber and glowing, missing out on the rich realism of the more premium phone. But the fact that the (4a) Pro can be credibly compared with handsets nearly twice its price, even if it can’t quite best them, shows just how impressive its display is.

Software can be the Achilles heel of some Android handsets. I’ve seen a few too many OSes over the years that focused on aesthetics over usability and came crammed with low-quality, third-party apps – forcing apps like Temu on me does not endear me to your phones.

Fortunately, Nothing OS sidesteps all of these issues. It’s lean and intuitive – within a few hours of starting to use the (4a) Pro, I understood pretty much everything about how it worked – but more importantly, there’s almost zero bloat. After setting the phone up, pretty much the only third-party apps in the App Drawer were ones I’d imported from my old phone, while the homescreen was kept wonderfully clean. Take note, Android developers.

It also looks great. I’ve tried minimal, monochrome interfaces on phones like the i Phone in the past, but I’ve often found that, without the cognitive cue color provides, I just spend longer hunting for the app I need. Yet here, Nothing OS not only looks pleasingly stylized, but it also manages to do so without increasing my cognitive friction when navigating, thanks to those clear app icons and the ability to scale up my most commonly used apps.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro also offers plenty of AI features. But unlike some brands that make these tools impossible to avoid, Nothing largely confines them to its Essential Space section.

Press the button on the left side of the screen to capture a screenshot, record your screen, or take a voice note – these are then added to the Essential Space app for your easy access, and made available to be analyzed and have key information extracted. This info can then be harnessed by Essential Search or Essential Apps, which are effectively apps created by your prompts, customized to your specific needs. Kudos to Nothing for taking such a balanced approach here between giving users access to these tools and allowing them to choose how much they want to engage with them.

Right, time to put adultish things away – let's talk about some of the fun stuff the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has to offer.

The Flip to Glyph feature allows you to mute your ringtone and notifications by turning your phone face down – I found this invaluable, given I often place my phone screen down to minimize distractions at work. You can even restrict calls and notifications to only come through from essential contacts like your partner or kids. Should you want to see a caller’s ID or check your battery level without getting drawn in by the screen, you can just wiggle your phone, and it’ll show up on the Glyph Matrix.

But perhaps my favorite feature is the ability to create your own rules and assign custom glyphs to them. As well as allowing you to assign unique glyphs to specific people – I set my partner's calls and messages to display as a heart, for example – you can also set rules for specific apps, allowing you to differentiate between a Whats App and an Instagram notification. You can even set glyphs for specific keywords: I set it so any message mentioning my cat’s name would flash the cat glyph.

Not only is the Glyph Matrix an incredibly fun feature, but Nothing has found countless ways for it to actually materially improve your experience using the device. I definitely think that elevates it from a mere gimmick to something I genuinely used.

Overall, I found images captured with the Nothing (4a) Pro to be pretty crisp. While using the 50MP main camera, edges were largely as well defined as on my i Phone 16 Pro, and it maintains this detail well when using the 3.5x optical zoom. I’m less keen on digital zooms, given the same results can usually be achieved with judicious cropping, but the (4a) Pro’s 7x lossless zoom was almost as crisp as the 16 Pro’s 5x optical zoom, despite some slight haloing around highlights.

On the whole, night photography was pretty impressive too. The (4a) Pro merges seven frames into one, which Nothing claims lets in 500% more light than rival cameras, and you can definitely see that in the finished results. None of the photos I took looked dingy or underexposed, and there wasn’t a hint of grain there, although I would personally prefer a little less brightening of the mid-tones, as a bit more HDR punch would make these photos look even more bold and contrasty.

Unfortunately, the (4a) Pro’s camera system has some definite weaknesses too. Although black levels were consistently deep, highlights were a lot less reliable – some of my shots of feeding swans ended up looking totally overexposed, while my snaps of magnolias in the park didn’t quite capture the same brilliant whites as the ones I shot on my i Phone. I’m used to exposure levels remaining pretty stable from shot to shot, but sometimes the Nothing feels like it can produce weirdly divergent shots from the exact same lighting conditions.

Additionally, colors don’t always look totally true to life. Shooting tulips on the brink of bloom, some of the hues were a lot more muted than I was hoping, looking a little more washed out than the i Phone’s intense reds. And while I look pretty pale and pasty in most selfies, the (4a) Pro’s front-facing cam sometimes made me look a little like Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Fundamentally, you can’t expect a totally flagship experience from a mid-range phone – compromises have to be made somewhere to keep costs this low. But I think the (4a) Pro meets such a high standard in several other areas that this one shortcoming is a lot more noticeable by contrast. It’s a decent camera on the whole – it just doesn’t reach the same heights as the rest of the phone.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro’s impressive design isn’t just skin deep – under the hood, it’s packing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4. While this isn’t the most powerful CPU on the market, it still gives the (4a) Pro the edge over many mid-market rivals – for example, the Samsung Galaxy A56 relies on the weaker Exynos 1580. Add in the fact that you can spec Nothing’s phone with up to 12GB RAM, and you can see why I was expecting some pretty serious performance here.

And I’m delighted to say that the (4a) Pro more than lived up to these expectations. During everyday use, I didn’t experience any hanging or appreciable slowdown. Swiping between various apps, I was able to quickly pivot from watching You Tube videos to navigating on Google Maps. Even when multi-tasking, the phone didn’t seem to break much of a sweat – I cheekily loaded up a game and left it running picture-in-picture while I typed some of this review in Google Docs, and both apps continued to run fluidly, like this wasn’t a slightly outrageous thing to ask of the phone.

On top of that, while we criticized the Samsung Galaxy A56 for its weaker gaming capabilities, I found the (4a) Pro’s gaming performance to be pretty unimpeachable. Loading up Genshin Impact, I found there wasn’t a hint of lag or stuttering, whether I was battling Hilichurls or charging around cities. Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Mobile was silky smooth, seeming to deliver on Nothing’s promise of 90 Hz refresh rates and making it easy to gun down my bewildered opponents while they were still desperately swiping their screens trying to train me in their sights.

But this kind of performance is no good if your phone can’t sustain it. Fortunately, I found that, thanks to its 5,300mm 2 VC cooling system, the (4a) Pro was able to keep its cooling under this kind of strain. Despite the fact that I spent a couple of hours gaming on the (4a) Pro, there was only very mild warming on the back – and I think that was much more likely from my sweaty mitts than its CPU overheating. Given that quite a few phones still get blisteringly hot from demanding games, I was really glad to see how chill the Nothing Phone was.

With a capacity of 5,080m Ah, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is able to keep pace with huge flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, which has a typical capacity of 5,000m Ah – although it can’t quite beat the One Plus 15 with its voluminous 7,300m Ah battery.

What does this mean in practical terms? Well, despite using it pretty intensively during my testing, I found that the (4a) Pro would often last well into a second day’s usage, meaning you’re unlikely to need to worry about it lasting your whole day.

In terms of hard numbers, Nothing estimates it should give you 17 hours of combined usage or 21 hours of You Tube viewing. Putting this claim to the test, I set the (4a) Pro streaming 2K video for hours on end to see how it held up. After six hours, its battery had dropped to 56% – that means I’d expect it to last around 13 hours 40 minutes in total. That’s quite a way short of what was estimated, but this was at max brightness, which likely brought its life down somewhat.

Fortunately, even when the phone does run out, juicing it up again is lightning fast, thanks to its 50W wired charging. Nothing’s estimates weren’t quite borne out by my testing here either: rather than the 0% to 60% they suggested I’d see in just 30 minutes, I got to 47%. Still, that’s seriously fast, meaning you’ll likely be full after just an hour’s charging – that's still speedier than many mainstream handsets, even if the phone can’t quite hit the absurd pace of something like the 100W charging of the One Plus 15.

Both stylishly understated and utterly singular, huge yet perfectly ergonomic, slim yet robustly built.

Absolutely enormous and wonderfully bright, crisp even if it’s not quite as high resolution as some flagships. Colors less vibrant than the best phones though.

OS is simple to use, feeling slick and streamlined. Can engage with AI tools as much or as little as you like. Glyph Matrix tools both fun and surprisingly useful.

Crisp detail, decent black levels and impressive night photography. But inconsistent exposure levels and muted hues hold it back from greatness.

Strong chipset and RAM options for a mid-range phone, handles multi-tasking and gaming without noticeable issues, and stays impressively chill under heavy workloads.

With its 5,080m Ah capacity, the battery lasts a good long while, although it fell a little short of Nothing’s estimates. 50W fast-charging topped it up super fast though.

You want fab design and performance for your buck Not only does the Nothing Phone look and feel great in your hand, but it’s capable of surprisingly potent performance. Neither demanding mobile games nor multitasking seems able to knock it off its stride.

You just want to have fun Fundamentally, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is just a joy to use. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, it stays out of your way for the most part and, if you don’t enjoy playing with the Glyph Matrix, you’ve got a heart of stone.

You want more camera than phone The (4a) Pro’s camera system is not bad by any means. But given its slightly washed out colors and occasionally wobbly exposure, it can’t compete with more camera-first phones.

You prefer Nothing’s more brutalist designs This is the most restrained a Nothing handset has looked to date. So, if you want more of that bold, industrial design on show, go for the transparent-backed (4a) instead.

6.44 x 3.02 x 0.31 inches / 163.66 x 76.62 x 7.95mm

50MP f/1.88 main, 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide, 50MP f/2.88 periscope

Samsung Galaxy A56 I’ll level with you. The Samsung Galaxy A56 can’t compete with the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro when it comes to performance, as it’s not as dab a hand for gaming. Neither does it have as innovative features as the Glyph Matrix. So why am I recommending it? Because you can already get it for as little as

319.99 from Walmart, £247 from Amazon UK or AU

559 from Amazon AU – that’s a substantial reduction from its

499 / £499 / AU

699 list price, making it a great value alternative.

Nothing Phone (4a) For some die-hard Nothing fans, I appreciate that the (4a) Pro might be a little too conservative in design. Where’s the unabashedly techy transparent backplate? On the more affordable (4a), that’s where. On top of this, the (4a) offers still impressive performance, similarly streamlined software, and the same epic 5,080m Ah battery capacity. Not bad, given it starts from as little as £349 / AU$649 – although US users can’t get their hands on it currently.

I tested the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro over the course of a week and a half. To test out its display, I engaged in plenty of browsing and watched multiple 2K HDR videos to compare it to flagship devices. When assessing performance, I tested it out both in a variety of productivity contexts and by playing demanding games like Genshin Impact and Call of Duty: Mobile on max settings.

When putting its camera through its paces, I took a variety of photographs in different contexts, from floral shots during bright sunlight to nighttime shots in a city, comparing them to my i Phone 16 Pro for context. And to try out its battery life, I looped 2K You Tube videos for six hours to see how much the battery drained, before juicing it up with a 50W charger to see how quickly it would refill.

In terms of my experience, I’ve been reviewing a wide variety of gadgets for many years, as well as editing plenty of phone and tablet reviews written by the reviews team. I’m also a regular mobile gamer and have shot some 46,000 photos on my i Phone over the years, meaning I have a lot of experience shooting on mobile.

Josh is Reviews Editor at Tech Radar. With over ten years of experience covering tech both in print and online, he’s served as editor of T3 and net magazines and written about everything from groundbreaking gadgets to innovative Silicon Valley startups. He’s an expert in a wide range of products from Spatial Audio headphones to gaming handhelds. When he’s not putting trailblazing tech through its paces, he can be found making melodic techno or seeking out the perfect cold brew coffee.

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Key Takeaways

‘Just a joy to use’ — I reviewed the new Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and its striking design, giant blazing screen, and useful Glyph Matrix reminded me that phones can actually be fun
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission
Not only does the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro look gorgeous, but it has a blazingly bright 6
We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you're buying the best
The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is a budget phone with its sights firmly trained on flagships