Nothing 4A Pro review: That flagship feels

says CEO Carl Bay Nothing won’t launch a flagship phone this year. So instead, we have the 4A Pro, a $499 phone that feels like it’s higher quality than last year’s flagship Phone 3helped greatly by the new metal design.

Compare the 4A Pro with its direct competitors Pixel 10a and iPhone 17eAnd it looks impressive: bigger, brighter, faster screen; More cameras. And the design is nothing unique, including the Glyph Matrix rear display. But if you dig deeper, the compromises the 4A Pro makes are revealed.

Nothing that wins you points for style, but unless you’re particularly enamored with the larger screen and bolder look, the Apple and Google phones have the 4A Pro ahead of them on substance.

Every ‘nothing’ phone so far has had a consistent aesthetic: clear plastic revealing a design (usually white or black) that incorporates the phone’s internal build without actually revealing much of it, with visible screws and stripped-down lights to complete the effect. The 4A Pro is different.

that it Mostly metallicwith a design crafted from a single piece of aluminum — available in silver, black, or ultra-light pink — that extends everywhere but the camera. This is the only island of transparency: a curved cube shape that squeezes in all the plastic details, metal rivets, and Glyph lights needed to remind you that this is still a nothing phone.

Going metal has two clear effects. First, it makes the 4A Pro a little more boring, and thus presumably more appealing to the mainstream market. Maybe that’s why this phone is launching in the US, while the fully transparent 4A is not. But it also makes the 4A Pro feel upscale. That’s partly because this is nothing’s thinnest phone yet, at 8mm thick, but mostly because I’m obsessed with the belief that metal looks cooler than plastic.

The Glyph Matrix display is, of course, the biggest gift this phone has come out of nothing. This is a larger, brighter dot-matrix display than the version introduced in last year’s Phone 3, though it’s much lower resolution, with just 137 LEDs, compared to 489. The 4A Pro also lacks the capacitive button built into the back of the Phone 3. This makes this a better-looking but considerably simpler graphical display: it can still show the time, battery life, or display basic icons to go along with notifications, but it can’t be used for a suite of games and apps. The mini that was managed by the previous phone.

There’s nothing else that thrives in design, it’s all software. Its Android interface is still unique, especially if you’re partial to the option of making the most of a monochrome operating system. This sounds great, but good luck trying to find the app you want quickly. The 4A Pro runs on Android 16 operating system, which Nothing was enhanced With quality of life features like separate ringtones for different SIM cards, lock screen customization with widgets, and a darker dark mode. Given all that, it’s a shame that there’s nothing promising about giving the phone three years of Android OS updates, even though it will receive at least six years of security patches.

There are of course plenty of AI features, including a wallpaper generator and AI news summaries. There is nothing fundamental in spaceactivated by a dedicated button, lets you save photos and voice notes to create reminders and calendar entries. It’s part AI assistant, part app intended for storing event tickets, trip information, and task reminders, all in one place. This has been improved with cloud storage, so it can now sync across Nothing devices, which can be useful if you’re upgrading from another Nothing phone. Core apps aren’t supported for anything either, though we found programming our own widgets to be great More fun than functional.

The 4A Pro is not only the thinnest phone out there, but it’s also the largest. It won’t appeal to everyone, but for some, the 6.83-inch screen will be the main reason to buy the 4A Pro over mid-range rivals. Not only is it large, it’s also extraordinarily bright, hitting 5,000 nits at peak brightness, and offering a fast 144Hz refresh rate. Brightness is the biggest boost here, making this easy to use even in direct outdoor light.

Off the screen, the specs are strong, but a few stand out. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip is fast enough, but it will fall far behind the A19 chip in the iPhone 17E. The 5,080 mAh battery is good enough for a full day’s use, but it’s no larger than the Pixel 10A’s battery. An IP65 rating indicates good protection from the elements, but Apple and Google phones have an IP68 rating, with better water resistance. They both also support wireless charging, which the 4A Pro completely lacks, and for me the faster 50W wired charging doesn’t quite make up for this omission.

You might think the 4A Pro has the edge in cameras, as it has three rear lenses, while the iPhone only has one, and the Pixel gets two. The calculus here will be a little different from person to person, but I’ll put it this way: I’d rather have one good camera than three hybrid cameras.

The 50MP main camera is the best of the bunch, with a large 1/1.56-inch sensor but a relatively narrow f/1.9 aperture. It’s decent in daylight, albeit with some aggressive bright color adjustment, but was completely overshadowed by bright sunlight behind a cloud in one of my shots. Low-light photos are mostly good, but the lights flicker out and detail is lost — and when I tested them side-by-side, the Pixel 10A won every time.

The 8MP ultra-wide camera is very basic and downright terrible in the dark. As for the 50MP telephoto camera, the 3.5x focal length looks impressive, but more importantly this uses a smaller sensor and narrower aperture than the Phone 3A Pro did last year. The results were better than I expected given this transition, and even in low light I was able to take some photos that I really liked. But there was a lot that went wrong: one shot came out in too much daylight; The low-light photo of the house looks great at first glance but has blurry smears through the tree blossom; Any shot beyond 3.5x tends to show very clear signs of AI tampering.

There’s also nothing touting the up to 140x zoom option. Here are some sample picks so you can make up your mind:

There are two obvious reasons to buy the 4A Pro at a bargain price of $500-$600. The most important thing is the aesthetics: no one makes phones that look like this. Even nothing other phone doesn’t have that looks like the 4A Pro. It’s a triumph of design, even if I prefer it that way Bolder colors than the cheaper 4A. The other plus is the screen, which is larger, brighter, and better than most others at this price, especially in the US. If you want a mid-range phone that looks like it costs a lot more, this could be it.

But these strengths require trade-offs elsewhere. I’ve missed wireless charging for the past week, and the Pixel 10A and iPhone 17E both have better, if less versatile, cameras. Three-year OS updates also seem trivial, so I’d only recommend this if you’re confident you’ll be upgrading again after a few years.

The Phone 4A Pro looks just like a flagship phone, and getting it for $499 will be a no-brainer for some. Just make sure you’re happy with the choice of style over substance.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge