Nothing Phone 4a Pro Review: Heavy metal thunder

Design

• Mostly metal design
• Glyph Matrix, but it’s not interactive
• Only IP65-rated

For its first few generations of products, Nothing phones all shared a similarity in design: transparent backs. Each phone – including the regular non-Pro 4a – has that in common. With the 4a Pro, Nothing has gone in a different direction, but still has imbued it somehow with a clear sense of Nothing-ness. 

Rather than have an entire back cover made of transparent glass with interesting details and texture beneath it, the phone is all metal. It’s got a solid aluminium unibody design, the likes of which we rarely see these days. In fact, apart from OnePlus’ brief flirtation with the OnePlus Nord 4, it’s generally not been seen at all in years in the Android space. 

One thing that can be said about that decision is that it gives the phone a real sense of solidity. And I can’t deny it, I’ve actually missed that feeling of aluminium in my hand. It’s not as slippery as glass, and gives you that sense of security that if you drop it, that back panel isn’t going to crack. 

It wouldn’t be Nothing without at least some playful iteration of transparency though, and so the company decided to make it a feature of the camera island. Which, again, I think is a great decision. 

For many manufacturers, that bump on the back of the phone is very much thought of as a practical necessity to make space for the lenses needed for modern smartphone cameras. At best, they’re a featureless, inoffensive bump. At worst, they’re hideous mounds. 

With Nothing, it’s a feature that catches the eye, thanks to its playful arrangement of textures, exposed screws, and the round Glyph Matrix display, along with a simple square LED that flashes when you’re recording video or audio. 

That Glyph Matrix display is similar to the one introduced on the Nothing Phone 3 in 2025, but, despite being larger, isn’t as feature-rich as that version. You can still use it as a countdown timer, or to flash when notifications come in, or even use it as a very basic selfie mirror, but the interactive Glyph Toys have gone. 

On the Phone 3, you could press a small button on the back of the phone to play spin the bottle, or ask a virtual Magic 8 Ball a question. There’s no button on the Phone 4a Pro, just a slightly recessed dimple in the bottom corner which looks like it could be a button, but, sadly, is not. 

That’s not to say there are no Glyph Toys at all. They’re just not interactive. You can enable a feature where you have an always-on Glyph Toy when the phone is flipped on its front. In this menu, you can choose a digital clock, battery level indicator, solar path tracker, or moon phase graphic. And if you wiggle the phone, it can show a charging meter when charging or a caller ID when someone is ringing you. 

Still, what it lacks in fun it more than makes up for in usefulness and customisation. You can create your own rules in the software based on notifications from specific apps, contacts or even keywords in the messages. You can even create your own custom graphic to show when a particular notification comes through. 

You could, for instance, enable a custom graphic every time you get a message from a particular family member or loved one. If you have the time, it’s well worth putting it in to create the experience you want. It may not be as interactive as the Phone 3, but it’s got more going for it than the simple stack of LEDs on the regular Phone 4a. 

All built into a phone which sadly doesn’t have full water and dust protection, but will give you at least splash resistance at IP65. So if you buy one, don’t go taking it underwater for photos. 

I will say this too: the phone is pretty hefty, despite being Nothing’s thinnest phone to date. With its flat edges, large sides and weighty metal, it’s certainly not the most palm-friendly phone in the world. 

Software

• Nothing OS 4.1 based on Android 16
• A very visually appealing Android skin
• Plenty of unique features

As well as the industrial design of its products, the feature set and the software play a big role in creating the feeling of a company that’s different from the others. 

Most Android phone makers have a unique take on software, but few of them tie the user interface’s aesthetics and features so well to the hardware design. The retro-futurism that so clearly defines the outward appearance is very evident and consistently applied throughout the software skin. 

There’s a huge collection of widgets, folders, and app icons, all of which fit together really well. There’s a sense of playfulness to some of those, and an effort to make the widgets interactive too. All presented with the usual monochrome flat and dot-matrix fonts. 

The widget collection also includes Nothing’s community-driven Playgrounds widgets, which lets community members create their own widgets for the Home Screen. There are loads in there, from clocks and F1 calendars through to mini games. Once I discovered the Pokémon hunting widget, I ignored all the rest. Because, obviously, I’ve got to catch them all now.  

There’s not much new to talk about here that we haven’t mentioned in previous Nothing reviews. Essential Space remains on the new models, along with its dedicated button on the side. With this, you can save screenshots and voice memos to a dedicated space in the software. AI will then make sense of it all, transcribing any memos, creating to-do lists or just describing what’s in the screenshot. 

All in all, it’s one of my favourite custom Android skins on the market, also helped by the fact that it’s incredibly light on bloat. There are no additional or duplicate apps that don’t need to be there, or where Nothing hasn’t put its own distinct stamp on the design. You will find a weather app, but Nothing is otherwise content to leave the standard app set to Google. 

Screen

• 6.8-inch 144Hz AMOLED display
• Excellent in everyday use
• Optical fingerprint scanner

From a hardware performance perspective, it’s the display that stands out to me as a feature that outperforms its price tag. It’s big, bright and fluid. With a peak of 5000 nits for HDR scenes, even darker scenes in HDR movies look good on it. It can reach up to 144Hz if you enable the highest refresh rates, and has a pixel density over 400ppi. 

In short, for the most part, it keeps up with the best of them and even has competitive PWM dimming levels to stop flicker at low brightness levels from straining your eyes. It’s not LTPO-based sadly, so can’t adapt refresh rates at small increments automatically. That means you may see a very slight stutter when going from a static page to a moving one as it jumps to the next refresh rate. 

There’s very little negative I can say about it at all, and, as Nothing points out, it is the best display in the company’s entire portfolio. Measuring 6.83 inches diagonally, it’s super expansive, and the skinny uniform bezels around the sides mean you get an immersive view with zero distractions. 

My only complaint has nothing to do with the display, but the fingerprint sensor built into it. 

As more manufacturers move towards fast, instant ultrasonic fingerprint scanners, it can feel a little jarring to have to take the time to set up an optical scanner. But at this sort of price point, it’s one of the compromises you expect to find. And in truth, to use day in and day out to unlock, I rarely had an issue with its reliability. It failed to scan only once during my entire testing period. 

Cameras

• 50MP main camera is the best performer
• 50MP 3.5x zoom lens works well to 30x
• 8MP ultrawide is a little basic

For a phone in its price range, the triple-camera system on the back of the 4a Pro is very capable. For the most part, when shooting in bright conditions, even when HDR is needed to balance bright backlighting with darker foreground objects, it can contain the highlights and deliver sharp images with great colour from all three lenses. 

It’s not without its weaknesses, though. As is typical of most phones, the ultrawide camera appears to be the weakest. It’s not horrendous at all, but there was some noticeable distortion towards the edges of the photos from that camera in the daytime. And at nighttime, it can’t draw in as much light as the main camera. Neither can the telephoto 3.5x zoom lens. 

That telephoto zoom can go further, using a mix of machine learning, processing and digital cropping, you can go all the way up to around 140x. But I found that once I’d reached the 30x mark, I didn’t want to push any further, as the image quality started to look a little rough. 

And while it is great for zooming further into far away scenes, its strength I think is in taking photos of small leaves, plants and flowers in the medium distance. It can’t focus super closely, but it’s close enough that it almost passes as a solid macro lens. And it delivers great detail and a lovely depth-of-field effect. 

There were a couple of general weaknesses I found with the system as a whole, though. Regardless of which lens I used, there were times when the camera struggled with motion blur and focus. So I’d have shots, particularly at night time when the night mode was keeping the shutter open for longer, when photo results were blurry or soft. 

Compared to much more expensive phones I have also been testing around the same time, that’s the one thing that stood out to me. It’s that consistency in that when you press the shutter, it instantly captures an in-focus, blur-free shot, where the Phone 4a Pro didn’t. If you keep your hands steady, that shouldn’t often be a problem. 

Like the Phone 4a, you get access to a number of different photo styles too, adding what are essentially filters to the photos to add grain, contrast and adjust the temperature for a particular vibe. 

Performance

• Mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 power
• Runs smoothly in everyday use
• Not the most powerful chipset for the money

Just like the Nothing Phone 4a, the performance of the company’s Pro variant won’t blow anyone away, but with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 inside, it’s got more oomph than its non-Pro sibling with either 8- or 12GB of RAM. 

Those who really care about gaming performance and how a phone handles demanding graphics would be better off looking at phones from the likes of Poco, with the recently announced X8 Pro series definitely worth a look. 

Running it through our usual suite of benchmarks, it became clear quite quickly that this phone doesn’t sit at the top of the pile. But at the same time, it can keep its performance running consistently for long periods, even if it doesn’t blow you away with mega frame rate stats. 

Still, for most tasks, especially the everyday, casual type use-cases, there’s enough speed and responsiveness here to keep most people happy. I’d be perfectly happy using it as my daily device for communication, less-demanding games, and social media. 

On the communication theme, it’s worth noting that the 4a Pro supports eSIM. At least, it does in markets except India, where you’ll get an extra beefy battery at 5400mAh, rather than the 5080mAh you’d get in other markets. 

Battery life

• 5000mAh battery
• Easily lasts all day
• 50W charging

Battery life depends largely on how you use a phone, where it’s used, and how many of its features you enable. Cranking the display up to 144Hz and keeping the Glyph Matrix on all the time while travelling around a lot in a busy urban 5G environment will drain more than if you’re someone like me in a quiet rural 4G-only area with the display set to its automatic defaults. 

Still, my sense from using this particular phone is that the battery should last even the most demanding users a full day on a fully topped-up battery. Even on the days when testing the camera, video recording and benchmark stress tests, I wasn’t able to completely drain it. And most days I’d have more than half of the battery left over with my typical quite light usage. 

I rarely use more than three hours of screen time in a day, and when I do, it’s pretty casual gaming, YouTube, reading news, sports, social media and messaging. At just over 5000mAh, it’s not the largest battery around, but the software appears well optimised to make the most of it. 

And when it’s empty, it takes just over an hour to fully refill it using a 50W charger, providing you have a compatible one handy. 

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Should you buy it?