Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: Faux flagship

The original Nothing Phone 1 was a trendsetter for transparent tech, but everything that the boutique brand has put out in the years since hasn’t drifted too far from that blueprint. The look has evolved, but it’s a little less eye-catching a third time around – and that’s without even talking about the efforts of other manufacturers to ape it. 

In contrast, the new Nothing Phone 4a Pro bucks the trend. It’s a significant step upwards, and it’s easily the freshest and most interesting handset the brand has brought out in years. It’s more than a mid-ranger, not quite a flagship, and easily one of the most compelling sub-$1000 smartphones you can buy right now.

Let’s cut the chase, the most noteworthy thing about the Nothing Phone 4a Pro is the way it looks. It’s the slimmest device that Nothing has released to date, at 7.95mm. The cut-through of that compact form-factor is bolstered by a metal unibody and a reimagined take on the Nothing Phone 3’s glyph matrix. 

This time around, the dot-matrix display is bigger but comes with largely-comparable functionality to its 2025 counterpart. You can use it as a timer, volume indicator, or even a progress tracker for an Uber or calendar event. It even supports visual ringtones. All the same (and most of the time), I defaulted to using it as a notification light and not much else.  

As impressive as this hardware is and as much as I know it’s going to thrill the enthusiast crowd, I can’t help but feel like less-is-more when it comes to this kind of thing. For as much as the company continues to invest in this part of its pitch, no amount of programmable LEDs has ever eclipsed the simple, straightforward sell of being able to flip your phone over to put it into silent mode. 

Let’s not get too distracted by the pretty lights, though. The reality is that most manufacturers typically save a big shift in design language for their flagship phones and, in that context, the Phone 4a Pro isn’t just a pivot from Nothing’s own playbook but a deviation from a wider norm. 

On the front, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro features a larger 6.83-inch AMOLED screen with thinner bezels, a 32MP selfie camera, plus a higher refresh rate, peak brightness and resolution. On the outside, it’s protected by an IP65-rating for dust and splash resistance. That's higher than the one found on the Nothing Phone 4a but lower than what you can find on other devices that cost this much.

Then, on the back, it’s got the same set of lenses as the Nothing Phone 4a. That setup strings together a pair of 50MP wide and telephoto lenses with an 8MP ultrawide lens but ups the ante with a superior Sony image sensor that allows for faster focus and better low-light performance. In practice, I found that the camera on the Nothing Phone 4a Pro was surprisingly capable. 

Under the hood, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 processor, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. On the software side, you’re looking at the latest version of both Android 16 and Nothing OS. 

At the time of writing, Nothing has committed to supporting the device post-launch with three years of OS updates and six years of security updates. That's decent but falls short of what you can expect from the likes of the Pixel 10a, Samsung Galaxy A series or OPPO's Reno F series.

Looks aside, there are few surprises when it comes to the everyday performance of the Nothing Phone 4a Pro. The sum total of the spec sheet adds up to pretty much what you’d expect. Apps loaded fast, and there were no obvious issues or hitching when multitasking.

I’m not enormously enamoured about how AI-pilled Nothing’s software suite is, but the degree to which those LLM-lined bells and whistles are streamlined does a lot for me. Say what you will about the company’s attempts to augment the Android experience with AI, Nothing is generally smart enough to stay in its lane and play to the strengths of the tech – which is not something I would say about every manufacturer in the mix. 

If you don’t give a hoot about AI apps, you’ll still be able to enjoy this device – and you'll still find utility in the ability to instantly transcribe voice recordings. The rest of it – from the AI-powered news, AI-generated wallpapers, vibe-coded widgets and smarter screenshot collections – is easy to live without, but there if you get curious.

Unfortunately, relying on the Nothing Phone 4a Pro as a daily driver, it wasn’t long before I ran into one specific area where the hardware here doesn’t quite deliver in the form of gaming. Diablo Immortal ran reasonably well, but my experience with Destiny Rising was very choppy by comparison. I think if your on-the-go gaming appetites extend past the world of low-fidelity indie games like Balatro and collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering Arena, then you’ll likely run into the limits of what the hardware here can do sooner rather than later.

Fortunately, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro did make up for these shortcomings somewhat when it came to battery life. Although I found myself missing the wireless charging and MagSafe and Pixelsnap functionality found in more premium Android devices, there’s little to fault about the charging capabilities of the Nothing Phone 4a Pro – which supports wired charging of up to 50W via USB-C. 

Over the time period I spent testing the device, I could easily make it through two-ish days of regular usage before I needed to plug the Nothing Phone 4a Pro into a charger. However, that anecdotal performance isn’t really matched by the benchmarks. 

Burned down via streaming video from YouTube over Wi-Fi, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro took 18 hours and 15 minutes to go from a full charge to zero. That's not a great result. Not only is it below what the rest of the mid-range market is, it’s below what you can expect from a premium device or an ultrathin phone like the Galaxy S25 Edge. As noted, my regular usage left me with few complaints, but your mileage may vary.