Nothing Phone (4a) review: It's all about that zoom

While Nothing's mission to make technology blend into the background has been a philosophical north star for the company, it has manifested itself as physical transparency on many of its devices.

That is until the latest iteration, with the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro stepping things up a gear with a metal unibody shrinking the transparency into an iPhone-like bar at the top of the phone. Launched alongside the company's top phone for 2026 is the Nothing Phone (4a), which is much more like the approach Nothing used for its previous mid-range devices.

In that, there's something of an incremental step taken by the Nothing Phone (4a) - a contender one of the best cheap phones of 2026 - offering familiar aesthetics from this company that wants to do things a little differently. But when you're working in the Android space, how different can you really be?

Price & Availability

The Nothing Phone (4a) was announced on 5 March and went on open sale on 13 March 2026.

It's available in 8/128GB and 8/256GB guises, as well as a 12/256GB option. It starts at £349 / €349, but it isn’t available in the US, with the company ranging the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro instead.

The top spec of the Nothing Phone (4a) sees it coming in £100 cheaper than the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, drawing a fairly significant difference in positioning between these two devices. It's a £20 bump over the Nothing Phone (3a), which was announced in 2025.

Phone (4a) vs Phone (3a): What's changed?

• New Glyph Bar
• Increased optical zoom
• Newer generation processor
• Boosted display resolution and brightness

The Nothing Phone (4a) sits very much in the same position as the Nothing Phone (3a), coming in at a similar price, for a device with a similar-size display, on a hardware platform that's incrementally newer – but without meaningful changes to the battery or charging.

The design has been tweaked, removing the cut-down Glyph Interface of the previous generation, with a Glyph Bar instead. The display is fractionally larger, with a higher resolution and bumped up brightness.

Elsewhere, the Nothing Phone (4a) gets a new lens, extending the zoom to 3.5x optical (over 2x optical previously). But in the process it moves to an f/2.88 aperture – instead of the f/2.0 previously – so there's less light for the sensor to play with.

Compared to the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, there's a wildly different design, slightly lower-grade hardware, different main camera (and no 140x digital zoom option). The display is smaller and not as bright, without 144Hz refresh. So it's close between them, but the design makes these two phones easily distinguishable.

Design & Display

• 6.78-inch AMOLED display
  • Corning Gorilla Glass 7i
  • 1224 x 2720 pixel resolution
  • 120Hz maximum refresh rate
• Plastic frame, transparent glass back
• IP64 protection
• 205g; 8.5mm thick

At first glance, the Nothing Phone (4a) hasn't changed a huge amount over the Nothing Phone (3a).

It's the same overall idea, with a glass plate over the back revealing a geeky design under the surface, with exposed screws, ribbons and other elements.

While the shape of all these elements is slightly different, it's not the dramatic design change encountered on the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro with its metal unibody.

One of the big changes comes with colour. Now coming in white, black, pink and blue, it's last two of those options that look the most exciting, with the black being just a little too normal to really stand out.

There's a change around the camera, which while still offering three lenses, is now more of an oblong arrangement, with the previous reduced Glyph Interface getting dropped.

Instead, we get the Glyph Bar, packed with Mini-LEDs divided into seven squares, with one red. The red will illuminate when filming people – a nice touch – while the white is designed to give you a notification system on the rear of your phone.

It's a little more normal and less of a head-turner than the Glyph Interface of old, and part of it makes no sense at all. Nothing said that it was ideal when your phone was face down to avoid distraction, so you could be identified of important notifications. That seems like a bit of a Catch-22 – a system to alert you when you're trying to get a break from the screen.

I found that the flashes were a distraction, while the distinctive chirps and tones the phone emits weren't to my preference (my dog was really interested, I guess because of the high pitch), so I tended to silence the phone.

There's a nice display on the Nothing Phone (4a): it's a little smaller, fractionally lower resolution, and not quite as bright as the Phone (4a) Pro – but there's not much in it. With a 4500 nit peak brightness, it's still impactful, although it tends to be a little on the dim side for my liking – an easy tweak.

It's a 120Hz display, which I'm perfectly happy with, as the lack of 144Hz doesn't strike me as any great loss. Its colours are plenty vibrant: certainly, there's nothing to complain about when it comes to the display – except for the factory-fitted screen protector.

Sitting over the new Gorilla Glass 7i surface is a plastic screen protector that's a little soft and over the two weeks I was using the phone, picked up a number of scratches. Yes, that's what it's designed to do, but I feels too soft, picking up deformations that wouldn't impact the display. It looks messy.

Performance & Battery

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4
  • 5080mAh battery, 50W wired charging

Powering the Nothing Phone (4a) is the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4, which is typical mid-range hardware. It's a step down from the Phone (4a) Pro which has Snapdragon 7 Gen 4. It's typical hardware for this price point, also found in the Motorola Edge 70 Fusion.

I found it to offer great daily performance over the weeks that I've been using this phone. I've enjoyed playing Call of Duty Mobile without noticing much of a difference to flagship phones, while everyday tasks are carried out with no problem at all.

I did find the phone to get a little too hot when under heavy load: when driving using Android Auto and charging the phone – with the hotspot enabled – it would regularly complain about being too hot and turn off the hotspot. I didn't find this to be a problem at other times, only during those driving, charging and hotspotting sessions.

I also randomly found it dimming the display completely while using autobrightness, leaving me to manually drag it back up again, although this was fixed by restarting the phone.

There's a 5080mAh battery in the Nothing Phone (4a), which is a good capacity for a mid-range device at this price – although competitors are ramping up capacities, with the Honor Magic 8 Lite at 7500mAh and that Motorola Edge 70 Fusion offering a version with a 7000mAh battery.

I found the battery to be generally good, lasting through a typical day, but it naturally can't compete with those larger capacities that are starting to appear elsewhere. Support for 50W charging helps, again, it's not the fastest you can get at this price point, but it's competitive against the likes of Samsung, Google and Apple.

Camera Performance

• Triple rear camera:
  • Main (24mm): 50-megapixels, f/1.88 aperture, Samsung GN9, autofocus (AF), stabilisation (OIS)
  • Telephoto (3.5x / 80mm): 50-megapixels, f/2.88, Samsung JN5, AF, OIS
  • Ultrawide (16mm): 8-megapixels, Sony IMX355, f.2.2
• Front: 32-megapixel, f/2.2

The biggest talking point of the Nothing Phone (4a) is the inclusion of a 3.5x telephoto lens. Often, the load-out for a mid-range phone will be the main camera supported by the ultrawide, sometimes with not-so-useful macro or depth sensors thrown in for good measure.

Few rivals offer a true zoom at this price, so it's a great point of differentiation: one of the top mid-range devices, the Pixel 10a, doesn't even have this, so even against the phone that's generally considered the best cheap phone for photography, Nothing has something to talk about.

The telephoto lets you tap through to 3.5x or 7x (using cropping), before offering pinch-zoom out to 70x. The results are generally good in good lighting conditions up to that 7x mark, but beyond that there's a loss of detail and sharpness fairly quickly.

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The main camera captures good detail, with nice colouration that's generally realistic. Across the system, it's not so gifted in low light – it's okay, but there's mottling in shadow detail even in good light. Low-light images, meanwhile, lose sharpness quickly – so it can't compete with the Pixel 10a in this area.

I'd put the ultrawide camera in the 'junk lens' category as the quality is low, with a lot of blurring towards the edges and a lack of contrast. It's best avoided.

I also found the front camera to be wildly inconsistent compared to the main camera when it comes to colour, with the selfie camera much warmer than it should be. I found myself correcting the colour on selfies before sharing.

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As a mid-range phone, the performance is stacked into the main camera and the telephoto, which feels appropriate, but doesn't challenge the Pixel for overall quality and low-light performance. And it's a long way from flagship performance across the cameras as a whole. But you do get that all-important 3.5x tele – and that's the real talking point here.

Software and AI

• Android 16 with Nothing OS 4.1
  • 3 years OS updates, 6 years security updates

Nothing is known for Nothing OS, with many people fans of the type of customisation on offer.

While there are visual changes, including the monochrome finish to the home page, there's the option to opt for a stock Android home screen instead. Some might find that the lack of colour in apps makes them harder to find.

There are custom widgets and a slick and considered feeling to Nothing OS – while it also preserves many elements of Android that others ride roughshod over. Take, for example, Do Not Disturb, Sleep Mode and some of the scheduling that Android offers. Nothing leaves this alone, so it works as expected (including being supported on import from an Android phone backup), whereas many brands – including Samsung – try to reinvent this part of the device (unsuccessfully).

The general feeling with Nothing OS is that the changes are useful; it's not filled with pre-installed bloat, duplication and changes for the sake of changes, and that's refreshing. The 3 years of OS updates falls short of what you'll get from Google and Samsung, but is typical of cheaper phones.

Nothing's attempt at differentiation comes through in Essential Space, which is a bit like Journal on iOS. You're either a person who wants to record information and search it up again, or you're not – and I'm clearly not, because I didn't find it that useful.

Essential Space is designed to help you store and recall information, or be able to process things like screenshots, and I did find it wanting to add check-in details for a flight based on a screenshot. That's the AI 'brains' of the operation in effect.

However, there's crossover with Google's Gemini, which will happily take information from you, allowing you to resume conversations later, and will process information from screenshots into the calendar or to extract details.

Still, Essential Space there if you want it, along with a dedicated hardware button. It's a shame that button can't be used for something else, though, as many might find that more useful.

Nothing Phone (4a) review: Verdict

The Nothing Phone (4a) is a great mid-range phone, offering distinctive design and operating system customisation, a respectable telephoto camera, and good performance for the price.

It's not as premium as the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, mind, which does enough on top of this device to justify the slightly higher price. The finish is the Pro's main additional appeal.

For many people, however, the Phone (4a)'s 'geeky looks' will be the first attraction, with the overall performance enough to sell this phone. The design and the telephoto lens do a lot of the lifting here to stand out against the competition – and undoubtedly with success.

Also consider

The mid-range phone section is competitive, with the Nothing Phone (4a) priced to undercut many of the top performers in this segment. The Pixel 10a remains a better camera experience, while the OnePlus 15R offers a bigger battery, but both cost more. The Samsung Galaxy A37 is closer in price, but much less exciting.

The closest rival is the Motorola Edge 70 Fusion, which has compelling specs, but will likely offer a software experience that's a little muddier thanks to Motorola leaning into Moto AI. Alternatively, the Poco X8 Pro offers more power for the same price.