Nothing Phone 4A Review: Still the Best Value Mid-Ranger Around

The sequel to my favorite cheapish mid-range smartphone of last year is here, and I’m so excited I might have to slip into the splashproof pants. The Nothing Phone 4A will set you back just £349 or £399 depending on how much lovely storage and RAM you want stuffed inside. And once again, you’ve got a nippy wee blower with a proper triple lens camera and that lovely stylized Nothing OS shenanigans. So let us have a proper good squint at the Nothing Phone 4A.

Unboxing

So, first up, what you actually get stuffed into that rather lovely box. You get a wee bit of blurb from the Nothing team, our Nothing Phone 4A of course, one Nothing-branded USB cable, a transparent pokey pin, and last but most definitely not least, a condom case to keep your Nothing Phone 4A safe from harm.

Design

The Nothing Phone 4A is perhaps unsurprisingly yet another chunky rectangle. It’s certainly got plenty of heft. It weighs over 200g in a millipede’s mansion. It’s a 6.78-inch beasty, but not too much girth because of the elongated design of the screen, so it’s reasonably comfortable to clutch. And those bezels may not be quite as slender as what you get with the Nothing Phone 4A Pro, but at least they’re not horrifically thick and reasonably symmetrical. You’ve got Gorilla Glass 7i up front and a pre-installed screen protector as well.

Now, that Gorilla Glass has proven reassuringly scratch resistant on other smartphones that I’ve tested that have used it. You’ve also got a mostly plastic frame, completely matte finish, so it doesn’t pick up smudgy, grimy grease at all. And then around back, you’ve got the usual completely transparent panda glass. And like last year’s model, the Nothing Phone 4A comes in white, black, and a rather splendid blue that your uncle spurts very moist indeed for. And this one also now comes in pink. And I’m talking proper pink, too. None of that rose gold bollocks. I’m thinking more along the lines of Mr. Blobby or Danger Chicken.

As for that old scattered glyph lighting arrangement, well, this has been replaced for the fourth generation with the glyph bar. This is a column of seven miniature squares, constructed from 63 mini LEDs. Six of them are fully customizable and white. The base one there is red. And despite being a very different arrangement to the Nothing Phone 3A series, you still get most of those usual glyph features tucked away, which we’ll look at in a bit.

I’m also pleased to see that elongated camera bump once again making a return here on the Nothing Phone 4A, centrally positioned for a sort of symmetrical vibe, although obviously not entirely symmetrical, especially with all the inner workings on display. And that camera bump doesn’t jut out too far either. It’s just about usable as a finger shelf to help out with one-handed use, although it is a little bit slippery. But hey, it very much looks like a Nothing phone, unsurprisingly. Really stands out from the crowd. So I’m absolutely down for it.

The Nothing Phone 4A is also IP64, splash and dust resistant, same as the previous generation. So it can get quite moist. Apparently you can survive for around 20 minutes in a very shallow body of water, so you don’t have to absolutely soil yourself if you drop it in a puddle or something. As before, the Nothing Phone 4A sports an in-display optical fingerprint sensor housed right down at the bottom of that screen, so it is a little bit of a stretch, but so far seems perfectly dependable. Even if your thumb’s a wee bit moist or something, no worries at all.

Glyph Bar

If you want to get involved with that glyph bar around back, it’s in the Glyph Interface section of the settings. You’ve got three levels of brightness here, and even on the lowest level it’s still pretty damn bright to be fair. You’ve got a selection of 10 different default ringtones that you can choose between. And alternatively, if you just want to go completely random, you can choose the Generative Ringtone option. And similarly, you’ve got a choice of 10 different notification signals.

And our great mate Flip to Glyph is back in action, which is kind of a mild version of Do Not Disturb. It’s handy for those moments when you kind of want the world to just piss off and leave you alone, but you also kind of want to know if anyone WhatsApps you or you get a work email or something. It’s all fully customizable thanks to Essential Notifications, which is your typical if-this-then-that style setup. So you can set up various conditions for instance, any missed calls you want to be notified about, and also anything that comes through from WhatsApp. You can set up new rules at any point, selecting notifications from any of the apps you’ve got installed and also specific contacts and specific keywords.

It can also operate as a volume indicator, as a countdown timer, all the usual bangers. Unfortunately, the Glyph Progress still has very limited support. Despite the fact that Nothing has been saying for years it would be working on this, new third party apps will be supported soon, so hopefully that will eventually happen.

On the whole, Nothing OS has been well behaved in my time with the Nothing Phone 4A. A few little quirks and bugs here and there, like sometimes the swipe gestures will just stop working for 30 seconds for no apparent reason, but it’s still pre-launch so I’ll forgive it. Oh, and it’s also very much worth pointing out that eSIM is supported on the Nothing Phone 4A, but only if you live in Japan. Here in Blighty, nope. It’s a physical SIM all the way for us Brits.

Display

Slapped on the front end of the Nothing Phone 4A, you’ve got yourself a 6.78-inch AMOLED panel again, but it’s now crisper than the previous generation with its 1.5K resolution, 2720×1224 pixels. It’s a wee bit brighter now too. I still struggled to see what was going on in murkier Netflix fare when I was outdoors in quite a bright environment, but otherwise didn’t struggle to see what was going on. Contrast is fine though. No dedicated HDR streaming support, reasonably poppy colors, and that refresh rate scales from 30Hz all the way up to 120Hz, and 2160Hz PWM dimming support as well, which you don’t get in some rivals from the likes of Samsung and Google, not even on their flagship bloody phones. So great news if you are sensitive to that OLED flicker.

The stereo speaker arrangement is perfectly fine here on the Nothing Phone 4A. Not exactly evenly balanced though. That bottom speaker is definitely pulling the majority of the weight compared with the tinny earpiece speaker. Not particularly loud when you max it out, so if you’re in a raucous environment then you might struggle to hear what’s going on. I definitely highly recommend slapping on a pair of Bluetooth headphones or earbuds if you are enjoying some Netflix, some YouTube, or of course a good bit of music. And the Bluetooth streaming has been absolutely fine for me, no worries there.

Performance & Gaming

The brains of the Nothing Phone 4A is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7S Gen 4 chipset, backed by either 8 or 12 gigs of RAM depending on how much money you spunk at Nothing for this lovely shiny see-through blower. I’ve been testing out the 12GB model and I found the everyday performance is absolutely smooth as my baldy bone.

And if you are a gamer, well, optimized titles like PUBG and Call of Duty will run fine on this thing. And even more intensive titles like Wuthering Waves are a pretty enjoyable experience. I didn’t bump the visual settings above the default medium levels, just left it there. Did bump up the frame rate to 40 frames per second and it could just about handle that, though it wasn’t a consistent frame rate by any means. It did occasionally drop into the high teens and 20s. But overall it was fairly stable. It certainly did not enjoy life when I knocked it up to 60fps though. That was pretty much right out.

But I found the phone was pleasingly responsive, and even when I was gaming on Wuthering Waves for well over an hour, no worries. The phone was starting to get a wee bit hot, but I didn’t see any kind of throttling. Performance was pretty consistent. And yes, you do have a dedicated gaming mode which you can yank out at any point, which you can use to block calls, block notifications, or you can just have them pop up as wee little bubbles so it doesn’t distract you too much. You can also record the action. A few decent wee tools on there.

Battery Life

The battery capacity hasn’t really grown over the previous generation. You’ve got a 5,080mAh cell stuffed inside of that slightly chunky frame. Yeah, that ain’t as big as some rivals which these days are topping 7,000mAh quite comfortably thanks to silicon carbon battery tech. But you know what? The battery life has been really bloody good on the Nothing Phone 4A. Even if you’re a highly demanding user like myself, a full charge of that battery will comfortably get you through the longest, most arduous of days, even if you’ve got screen time stretching into the double digits.

Take today for example. I got up at just after 6am not because I was hungover or needed to vom, I was pleasantly hangover free just because I’ve got a lot of bloody videos to shoot. I’ve so far clocked up almost 6 hours of screen time. It’s now almost 3pm. I’ve had a wide variety of apps on the go, played Wuthering Waves for just over an hour, Spotify streamed lots of music in the background, mocked around with the camera a wee bit, plenty of messaging and a bit of work and everything. And I’m still sitting here on 40% battery life. So again, despite heavy usage, it’ll comfortably last me the day. You could probably just about stretch to a full weekend of action if you’re a bit more chill with it.

And then when you do need to juice it up, well, you’ve got the same 50W wired charging on here on the Nothing Phone 4A as you had on last year’s 3A. So it’ll take just over an hour to fully charge it from basically draining it. But bugger all support for wireless charging as usual.

Cameras

Because I love you and adore you so much, why don’t we finish up this lovely squint at the Nothing Phone 4A by having a good old poke around that camera tech. What you’ve got on here is a proper triple camera setup, which is pretty ruddy rare on a smartphone at this sort of price point.

That main 50MP shooter uses the Samsung GN9 sensor. It’s a 1/1.57-inch sensor and it’s paired up with a bit of optical image stabilization. I believe that one’s recycled from the Nothing Phone 3A, but the telephoto shooter, while still using the same old Samsung GN5 sensor, has been boosted. The optical zoom is now 3.5x thanks to the fancy pants tetraprism periscope lens design, and once again a bit of OIS on board there as well. And then the third and final shooter is a basic 8MP ultrawide angle shooter using Sony’s IMX355 sensor.

In my limited testing so far with the Nothing Phone 4A, it seems like a pretty capable camera setup. That telephoto shooter is definitely the highlight, allowing you to capture some pretty crispy looking portrait snaps. Nothing reckons the background separation has improved for this generation, but you’ll still get some fuzz and smoothing in some of those shots. But living subjects are certainly well handled. Some of my motion shots came out much better than I expected.

You’ve got the usual Ultra XDR smarts as well, which captures 13 raw images at a variety of exposures and combines them into one brightly lit snap. Certainly iPhone fans will be right at home here. You do lose some of the natural shadowing with this unfortunately, but iPhone fans and Samsung fans will certainly be right at home. And you’ve got a dedicated night mode which really does brighten up those low light snaps. Not too much noise, although some of my more ambient shots did come out rather warm. Tones were a bit all over the place. But I’m certainly hoping to test out the camera a lot more alongside the Nothing Phone 4A Pro and do a full side-by-side comparison type situation later.

You’ve got various tools and toggles as always. You can switch off the HDR if you don’t want that on board. You can bump up to 50 megapixel images as long as the lighting isn’t cac. And you’ve got a variety of different modes that you can flick to as well, including that dedicated night mode that I mentioned and a full-on expert mode which allows you to mess around with the ISO level, shutter speed, and white balance. If you drag this up, you’ve also got a bit of RAW capture support too.

For your video shenanigans, you can capture up to 4K resolution footage at 30 frames per second, otherwise 1080p at 30 or 60 frames per second. You do have HDR smarts as well, but only when you’re shooting at 1080p. And yes, when you’re shooting at 4K, you can swap between the main sensor and that telephoto shooter to get a bit closer to the action. Stabilization seems pretty good. Audio capture is nice and clean as well. And yes, when you’re shooting video, that little red light around back does flash once again just to indicate what’s going on. But if you’re not a fan of this, you can just knock it off in the settings.

And then last up, around the front end of the Nothing Phone 4A, you’ve got yourself a 32MP selfie shooter. Sadly, bugger all 4K support from this bad boy 1080p at either 30 or 60 frames per second but again, it does a decent job for your vlogging shenanigans. Reasonably crisp visuals as long as you’re not shooting in particularly low light. Audio capture is absolutely fine as well.

Verdict

And there you have it, my lovelies. That in a delicious wee nutshell is the Nothing Phone 4A. The Pro model has been launched alongside the Nothing Phone 4A, but I haven’t had a proper fondle of that one yet. I’m hoping to bring you a full review in just a week or two, so definitely stay tuned for that. I’ll do a bit of side-by-side shenanigans with the standard 4A.

But so far, I am really loving this wee bugger. As I say, last year’s Nothing Phone 3A was one of my favorite affordable mid-rangers of the year, and once again I’m really liking this. Pretty decent performance, great battery life, some excellent features, love the Nothing OS stylistic vibe, and pretty bloody flexible camera tech for this sort of price as well. Are you tempted by the Nothing Phone 4A? Be great to hear your thoughts down in the comments below.