Nothing Phone 4a Review – Trusted Reviews

Design

• Four colour choices, including pink
• Classic Nothing looks
• Glass back, plastic frame

Since its inception, Nothing has been a company with a very clear design philosophy. And unlike most other tech companies, it is one that clearly cares quite deeply about the aesthetic of its products. They all tend to have that same retro futuristic look, that wouldn’t look out of place anthropomorphised as a character in Portal 2. 

The phones have long had character to them, and while the transparent back doesn’t technically allow you to see the internals of the phone, the layers of texture, patterns and exposed screws all help create a very distinctive look.

With the Nothing Phone 4a in particular, it’s not that far off the look and feel of the Nothing Phone 3a that came out last year. There are some different colours, though. Or, at least one new colour. Alongside the black, white and blue models this year is a pink one, which is the best looking of the bunch. It almost reminds me of the transparent-backed iMacs from the turn of the century.

It’s glass on the front and back this year too, with the only plastic being the frame around the edges. 

As for the elephant in the room, or at least the obvious change to any Nothing phone, or anyone familiar with Nothing’s first few phones: yes, the Glyph Light bars are gone. And with that, it appears those LED strips have been consigned to history.

That doesn’t mean there are no lights at all, but the makeup of them is very different. Instead of several curved strips, there’s one vertical stacked line of square LEDs that make up one pulsing, flashing light system to the right of the camera. 

Just like before, you can have it pulse and animate when notifications come in, or use it as a visual countdown timer, and the bottom, red LED will light up when recording video or audio. It even has integration with third-party apps like Uber and Google Calendar, to act as a live visual for updates and events. 

Display

• 6.78-inch OLED display
• Gorilla Glass 7i
• 30-120Hz adaptive

For the most part, the display on the 4a offers a solid experience. There are ways in which it’s beaten by the much more expensive devices, but for a screen in this price category, it’s solid. 

It doesn’t have the super-bright display you’d find on something like the Pixel 10 Pro XL, or the superb anti-reflective qualities of the Galaxy S26 Ultra. But for a device that’s half the price, you wouldn’t expect it to. 

What that means is that at times it feels as though the display is a little dark, especially when not viewed directly head-on and watching HDR shows and movies.

Still, it’s generally quite a vibrant and colour-rich display with deep contrast that offers a solid media experience with the brightness cranked up and viewed directly. 

On that note, there were a few times during travel and phone testing where the bright sun was glaring and reflecting off the screen, and the Nothing Phone’s auto brightness kicked in to ramp it right up, making it clear, vivid and easily visible in harsh daylight. There was no awkward jumping or a delayed response. It was quick and smooth.

Software

• Software follows the look of the hardware
• Deep integration with Nothing’s audio products
• AI features don’t get in the way

Nothing’s software and the way it’s integrated into the phone, the themes, the widgets, haptic feedback and smart features are some of the biggest reasons to buy the Phone 4a. Just like it was the phones that came before it. 

It’s rare to find a company with such a clear, distinct and laser-focused software approach. All the layers, widgets, icons and elements are not only consistently applied through every part of the interface, but also look like it belongs with the hardware. The font styles, stylised widgets and graphics all match the hardware aesthetics perfectly. 

The fact that it feels both light and feature-rich is great. It’s not cluttered or bloated with additional apps and features. Nothing, unlike other companies, hasn’t gone down the route of copying Apple’s ‘Liquid Glass’ transparencies and effects random parts of the software like Oppo, Honor and Vivo have. 

Because it’s light, it gives it the feeling that it’s responsive and effortless to use, but does it in a way that’s not plain or boring. 

I enjoy the little things, like when you tap on the virtual keyboard to type. There’s a subtle tap from the haptic engine, not a cheap buzzy vibration that you often get on the more affordable devices. That just helps elevate the experience somewhat and means I actively keep that feedback on instead of switching it off. 

You get deep integration with Nothing’s audio products with custom widgets for headphone battery levels, and a fun music player window widget which shows album art and play/pause/skip controls on your Home Screen. This effectively is just mirroring the music player notification widget. 

There are a few AI features loaded, but they don’t feel like they’ve been overloaded or shoehorned in just because it’s 2026 and it must have lots of AI features. And, you can largely ignore them if you want. But there is a custom ChatGPT widget designed to match Nothing’s OS design and make it easier to interact with OpenAI’s popular agent.

Essential space is there again this year, with its dedicated button that allows you to quickly capture voice notes or screenshots and save them directly to what is effectively a digital corkboard to help you remember things that have inspired you. I quite like it, but I never found myself using it all that often. 

Cameras

• 50MP main camera
• 50MP periscope zoom
• 8MP ultrawide

Being a mid-range phone means it’s always best to temper expectations somewhat for how good the cameras are going to be. And while it’s true that Nothing’s triple camera system won’t match up to the best camera phones, it’s an all-round solid system that is more than good enough for daily use and is pretty good at night time too.

What I like most about the camera is actually the experience of shooting with it. You can just point, tap to focus and shoot, and your image will be captured quickly with the appropriate exposure and the right area in focus. 

In the daytime, if this phone cost more, I would criticise the overall texture and treatment of colours, highlights and shadows. But it’s hard to find too much fault with it. Sure, sometimes the HDR treatment of bright colourful spots leaves it looking a little artificial, but for the most part, I’m pleased with how well it contains those super bright points in the photos. 

I sometimes found the blues were a little unrealistic, not quite matching what I saw with my eye, especially when looking at blue skies. But again, it wasn’t horrendous, and the treatment and saturation of colour meant most pictures had a pleasing vibrancy that I’d be happy to post on social media without any filters. 

There’s a new zoom lens this year, the same one that’s in the Nothing Phone 3, which means better light capture and stabilisation when you kick into 3.5x zoom, adding a bit more zoom range but at the same time adding to that consistent, solid camera performance across multiple focal lengths. 

Nothing also has a bunch of its own preset filters loaded, which can be fun to play with if you want to get creative with looks. You can shoot black and white, or add a cool, grainy texture, add soft focus for portraits, and all manner of other presets. 

At night, shooting urban scenes in the lit streets of Barcelona, I was pretty happy with the results from all three cameras for the most part. Clearly, the primary lens is the one that captures cleaner, crisper images with better detail and colour, but the others aren’t awful. 

That main sensor is also more sensitive to light than the other two and more capable of drawing it in quickly, and so when using the night mode setting, it usually takes less than a second to capture the scene, whereas the ultrawide might take a second and a half, or two seconds. 

The perk of that delay though, is that if you just happen to catch a moving vehicle at just the right moment, you can get a pretty effective motion blur that adds a bit of movement to the picture, without needing to dive into any manual controls or needing a tripod. 

Being critical, the zoom lens often produced results where you can tell that machine learning or image processing is doing a lot of work to smooth it out. To the point where, at times, surfaces lose natural texture and detail, and so don’t quite look like a faithful reproduction of the real thing. 

So clearly, the main camera is still the best one – particularly in low light, with the second and third lenses not quite matching it in terms of ability to capture light, or reproducing detail quite as cleanly. 

Performance

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 chip
• 8 and 12GB memory
• LPDDR4X RAM, UFS3.1 storage

Whether or not you’d be happy with the performance of the Phone 4a very much depends on how you use your phone. But if you’re after the best phone in this section of the market, it’s safe to say the 4a is not it. 

For the most part, doing casual tasks and swiping around, moving between different layers of the interface is pretty responsive and smooth. But if you were to try to load demanding games with high visual fidelity and fast frame rates, it would soon start to struggle if you put those games into their highest settings. 

It’s just not the super-powerful type of phone. But I suspect those people who buy the phone aren’t buying it to crunch through hours of Call of Duty or Genshin Impact in ultra visual settings. You can get more powerful devices in and around this price range, but it typically means compromising on things like good software, camera performance and getting a good-looking device.

Still, cranking through more casual games like Mario Kart Tour is a breeze thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 chip and up to 12GB RAM. It’s responsive and quick enough to cope with the less demanding, but still fast-paced games. And if there’s any resolution dropping to keep frame rates smooth, that’s kept to a minimum.

It doesn’t seem to struggle with poor download speeds too much either, which is often a telltale sign of a cheaper device. I was never left waiting ages for news pages and images to download and game/app downloads were about the same as usual. 

In short, I think the performance is fast and efficient enough that virtually anyone but the most demanding of users is well catered for. 

Battery Life

• 5080 mAh battery, although in India it is 5400mAh
• 50w fast charging

The battery capacity might not completely blow you away when read on a spec sheet. Especially not with brands like Oppo and Vivo pushing towards the 7000mAh mark. 

Still, there was never a concern for me that I wouldn’t make it through the day. In fact, it was virtually a two-day phone for me in most of my testing. And this was including a day when I did some of the stress testing benchmarks and camera tests we perform for all of our reviews. 

Even on that day, having taken it off charge at around 7 am, I started the next morning with 54% left. Included in those tests was an hour-long session watching Sweet Tooth on Netflix at 50% brightness, which only drained 5% of the battery.

Just guessing based on my experience and what I know about the device – I suspect the battery efficiency has a lot to do with the fact that the Snapdragon chipset inside isn’t the most power hungry on the market. That helps the phone easily get through days. And I suspect that even power users should at least make a full day on a full battery quite comfortably.

Should you buy it?