If design is an important feature on a smartphone to you, chances are that London-based Nothing has come to your attention. Set up by former OnePlus Co-founder Carl Pei, the company has focused heavily on design to stand out from the crowd, and its latest, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro, continues in this vein.
Announced today in London, the Phone 4a Pro is the most mature Nothing smartphone released to date, both in hardware and design. It features some of the best specifications yet on a Nothing phone, but it also shows the company’s willingness to evolve its design while listening to customers.
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The result is a phone that has a standout design, albeit with one key caveat. I went hands-on with the Nothing Phone 4a Pro just now in London, and here’s what I found.
The Phone 4a Pro has a standout design
Make no mistake: the Phone 4a Pro has the best Nothing Phone design yet. Unlike the Phone 4a — more on that below — which (re)introduces the Glyph bar, the Phone 4a Pro brings back the same Glyph Matrix display from last year’s Phone 3, but fixes all the key complaints with that implementation.
The two key challenges with the Phone 3, which was the first to replace the Glyphs with a dot-matrix display, were that you had to press a button to activate or use the display, and that the display was so small it was easy to miss. The Phone 4a Pro fixes both problems with a larger Glyph Matrix display that’s easy to see, making it inherently more useful.
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I love how the Glyph Matrix display now feels like a unified part of the camera design, unlike the Phone 3, where it felt like an afterthought. This also highlights the cameras, which are another area where Nothing has stepped up its A-series phones with this latest launch.
The Phone 4a Pro has a great camera on paper
Priced at $499 or £499, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro is priced to compete directly with the Google Pixel 10a. Alongside the standout design, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro camera could put the Pixel 10a on notice.
Google’s new entry-level Pixel features a single 48MP camera, and while Google is able to work magic through excellent software processing, it’s hard to see how it can compete with Nothing, as the Phone 4a Pro features a 50MP main camera, 8MP ultrawide, and a 50MP periscope telephoto lens that offers 3.5x optical zoom, and up to 140x zoom.
Yes, it’s about more than just hardware, and I will need to test this camera heavily, but this setup could set a new standard for the affordable smartphone segment. The upgraded 32MP front-facing camera could do the same, yet, although much of this will come down to Nothing’s overall camera processing.
The rest of the specs sheet is also respectable
Then there’s the rest of the specs, and the Nothing Phone 4a Pro also delivers a solid experience here. It’s powered by a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 processor, which isn’t the absolute best but should be more than good enough, and paired with either 8GB or 12GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of storage.
The Phone 4a Pro should also be quite interesting for its battery life, with the international model featuring a 5,080 mAh battery, while the Indian version gets a 5,400 mAh battery. This is paired with 50W wired charging that Nothing promises will charge the phone to 50% in 22 minutes, but given the metal unibody design – and the fact it’s an A-series device – there’s no wireless charging.
The Phone 4a has one thing the Phone 4a Pro doesn’t
There’s just one area I wish Nothing would have been bolder in its choices: the colors. While the Phone 4a Pro has an excellent design, its non-Pro sibling has a better range of colors.
The Phone 4a Pro comes in Pink, Black, and Silver, while the Phone 4a comes in Pink, Black, White, and Blue. Yet that doesn’t explain the full picture: the Phone 4a features a plastic body, allowing its colors to be far more vibrant than the Phone 4a Pro’s, which also means the Phone 4a Pro lacks the same vibrancy and appeal as its non-Pro sibling.
While this is similar to other phone manufacturers, who often reserve their most vibrant colors for the less-expensive devices, it’s worth commending Nothing for at least offering a Pink colorway. The metal unibody does change color in light – so it’s pink in some conditions and closer to silver in others – but it’s nonetheless a nice option.
I like the Phone 4a Pro more than I expected to
The Nothing Phone 4a Pro stands out for several reasons, but two more not mentioned are the overall build and thickness.
The Phone 4a Pro features a full-metal unibody design unlike anything else in this price segment. Even more impressive is that it manages to pack all of these features into a body that’s just 7.9mm thin, making it Nothing’s thinnest phone yet, and resulting in a unique in-hand feel.
The Nothing Phone 4a Pro is available to pre-order on March 13 with general availability on March 27. Based on my first impressions and the starting $499/£499 price tag, this could be one of the best budget phones you can buy in 2026, though I’ll reserve my full judgment for the full review.
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