Name: Nothing Phone 4A/Pro Review: I Have a Theory
Uploaded: 2026-03-19T21:32:25.000Z
Duration: 12 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

All right, so this is the new nothing phone 4A and 4A Pro, two of the most compelling new budget phones available right now.

So this 4A is €349 getting released in Europe and a few other markets.

Adverbs of degree

And then this 4A Pro is starting at $499 US and notice there is no nothing phone for just 4A and 4A Pro.

I happen to think they're the two best looking nothing phones of all time.

The 4A, this blue one is definitely the most competitively priced.

It's running the Snapdragon 7S Gen 4 and has triple cameras, a higher fresh rate OLED display, a 5000 plus milliamp hour battery, and

I'll put all the specs up actually here for both phones so we can just get that out the way you can see them all here.

And you'll see the 4A Pro is a slightly higher end version of the 4A on paper, but

it also has a few unique design features of its own.

So in a world where the pretty underwhelming Pixel 10a just came out for 499 bucks and the iPhone 17e just came out for 100 bucks more than that, this is a perfect slot for Nothing to just jump right in and just be the alternative.

It's got the matte blue sides all the way around, the semi transparent back with the classic nothing dotted text and all these textures and shapes seen through the plastic back.

It's nice and has the triple cameras up here.

So when you see the iPhone 17e with one single camera and the Pixel 10a with dual cameras, this starts looking even better.

And then the Nothing software experience has been gradually improving over time.

So this is nothing OS 4.1 on top of Android 16.

And I really liked how well they've always done with the smoothness and responsiveness.

So phones without super high end chips still feel really nice to use.

They also majorly updated the storage to UFS 3.1 so apps will open faster and animations throughout the OS continue to get refined.

So I say the snappy factor is super high.

But there's also just straight up more home screen customization features now too.

There's more control over like how the folders appear on your home screen.

And this is also my first time using the Playground, which is the community driven store on the web where people can make even more insane custom widgets that you can add to your home screen.

Like this one, which is literally just an arcade game in a little 1 inch by 1 inch box.

Or this one, which just counts down how much time is left in the day, the week, the month and the year.

And oh my God, we're already so far into 2026.

Anyway, yeah, I like the Nothing software.

I feel like sometimes I'll use a nothing phone for a while and then I'll move to another phone and I'll find myself missing some of the nothing home screen features specifically because no other phone has quite the same set of stuff.

Of course, how can we forget the lights on the back of the nothing phone for this year's phone?

So seven LED dots lined up on the right hand side with the bottom one being red.

So it can do things like being a volume indicator for music when you're playing stuff and flip the phone over.

Or it can be a progress bar indicator for an upcoming Uber or Google Calendar notification, or a glyph timer as it counts down.

And also yes, the red dot blinks as a video recording indicator, which hey, maybe more phones should have.

The rest of the hardware though, it's not super premium, but it's just fine for this price.

It's fine like the 128 gigs of starting storage.

It's a little crazy on the $600 Pixel 10, but here makes sense, it's fine.

It's a good mix of like plastic and some recycled materials.

It's Gorilla Glass 7i on the front and it's IP64 rated.

But if you want a little bit more, or if you live in the US where he can't get this phone, then there's this one which is the Nothing4A Pro.

And just as soon as you hold it, you can feel that it's just a little nicer.

Like it's doing this thing where it's emulating a lot of the highest end big ultra flagships, but

It is also extremely fingerprinty and kind of annoyingly hard to clean for some reason.

But you're holding cold metal every single time, which is awesome.

And then the cameras and this new glyph matrix up at the top are in this like clear cutout which I really like.

Still triple cameras but bigger sensors and with more of an ultra phone looking plateau.

So then the bezels around the display are a little thinner.

So in a slightly smaller footprint you actually get a slightly larger screen.

The chipset inside is a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 instead of the 7S Gen 4.

And then the glyph interface on the back can tell you even more because it's this whole pixel dot style display.

It's basically a scaled up, lower resolution but brighter version of what The Nothing Phone 3 had a whole array that's fully customizable unless you put entire images basically on the back of the phone here.

So like if I miss a Slack notification, I have the phone face down, I have this specific icon show up on the matrix and then I know I missed Slack or if I miss a message from bae then you get this heart to show up.

And there's this whole set of pre made icons that you can use for any sort of notifications or contacts and you can even kind of make your own by using a custom image.

But I also kind of wish I could actually just draw something specific on the matrix myself.

Maybe that's a feature for a software update.

Also, the countdown animation for a timer is super intricate, but

it's too bad I'll never use it because it doesn't integrate with the built in clock app on the phone.

I like that it encourages you to basically just keep your phone face down most of the time and then you can choose if you see the notification you want to engage with to then pick it up and use your phone.

But most of the time you can leave it face down.

Some of the other stuff is kind of gimmicky, but I appreciate that bit of functionality.

Now neither of these nothing phones has a ton of AI features, which is music to some people's ears these days.

But you know, the S26 Ultra we just saw has like a ton of photo editing stuff and playground stuff.

They do put all their AI stuff in this intelligence toolkit is what they're calling it.

But that's where you can see that it is pretty minimal.

There's an AI wallpaper generator and there's some custom ChatGPT widgets and then there's the essential space that they've had for a few years now, which is still accessible by this shortcut button on the side of the phone.

So I have this theory about nothing as a company that is basically they just don't want to make a high end competitive flagship phone right now because they can't.

They actually, it's kind of impossible for them at this moment to make a competitive super high end flagship phone.

Like the last time we saw them really try a high end phone was the nothing phone three last year for $800.

It was a decently interesting phone but not very competitive for the price and fans did not love that price tag.

So then a few weeks ago there's this video on the Nothing YouTube channel where Carl CEO just basically says like, we're just not gonna do a flagship this year.

Like he straight up said we're not gonna make a new flagship phone every single year just for the sake of it.

Just because every other company has a new flagship every year doesn't mean we have to.

And the framing of it of course is very clever and thoughtful.

You know, they want every upgrade to feel more meaningful so they'll wait longer between flagships till they have something to share.

But also they are a relatively small company in the smartphone space.

So the order sizes that they're placing from suppliers is smaller than the Samsungs and Apples and Xiaomi's of the world.

So that means they pay more for the same parts.

And that combined with the skyrocketing RAM prices that we all have to deal with now just means it's harder to compete.

Like the bigger companies, they're not immune to higher RAM prices, but

a lot of them have placed larger orders or had longer lead times so that they're kind of locked in for old prices a little bit longer and can stave off the price increase maybe one more year.

So nothing is clearly not gonna do a full on flagship phone with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 16 gigs of RAM and a 7000 milliamp hour silicon carbon battery.

That stuff is all super expensive and harder to get.

And they also happen to know that that's not really the reason why people are buying nothing phones.