GoKawiilis a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.
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CEO Carl Pei says Nothing won’t release a flagship phone this year. So instead we have the 4A Pro, a $499 phone that looks and feels higher-end than last year’s flagship Phone 3, helped in large part by a new metal design.
Compare the Phone 4A Pro to its immediate rivals, the Pixel 10A and iPhone 17E, and it looks impressive: a larger, brighter, and faster display; more cameras; and Nothing’s unique design, including the Glyph Matrix rear display. But dig deeper, and the 4A Pro’s compromises are revealed.
Nothing earns points for style, but unless you’re particularly enamored of the bigger screen and bolder look, Apple and Google’s phones have the 4A Pro beat on substance.
Every Nothing phone until now has had a consistent aesthetic: transparent plastic revealing a (usually white or black) design that implies the internal construction of the phone without actually revealing much of it, with visible screws and abstract lights to complete the effect. The 4A Pro is different.
It’s mostly metal, with an aluminum unibody design — available in silver, black, or a very subtle pink — that stretches everywhere except the camera. That’s the one island of transparency: a curved cuboid that squeezes in all the plastic detailing, metal screws, and Glyph lights needed to remind you that this is still a Nothing phone.
The shift to metal has two obvious effects. Firstly, it makes the 4A Pro a little more boring, and thus presumably a little more appealing to the mainstream market. Perhaps that’s why this phone is launching in the US, while the all-transparent 4A isn’t. But it also makes the 4A Pro feel high-end. That’s partly because this is the thinnest Nothing phone yet, at 8mm, but mostly because I’m hardwired to think that metal feels fancier than plastic.
I have an unreasonable soft spot for this small, utterly pointless, circular indent in one corner. Never change, Nothing. The sad face is how I know I have a Slack notification. I mostly just use the Glyph Matrix to tell the time.
The Glyph Matrix display is, of course, the biggest giveaway that this phone came from Nothing. This is a larger and brighter dot matrix screen than the version introduced on last year’s Phone 3, though it’s much lower resolution, with only 137 LEDs, compared to 489. The 4A Pro also lacks the capacitive button built into the back of the 3. Combined, that makes this a better looking but substantially simpler Glyph display: it can still show the time, or battery life, or display basic icons to correspond to notifications, but can’t be used for the array of games and mini-apps the previous phone managed.
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