Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: A solid sub-$500 phone let down by its altered looks

Nothing has captured the hearts and minds of Android phone users across the world with its line-up of "flagship killer" phones, which offer a premium phone experience without having to spend the sort of prices that other flagship phones command. The Nothing Phone 4 Pro is one of two new devices designed to provide just that.

The Nothing Phone 4a Pro boasts a lot of great specs for a sub-$500 price tag. But can it actually compete with some of the biggest names in the phone industry? The short answer is not everywhere, but it does put up a darn good fight in the process. Despite coming up short in some key areas, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro still offers a heck of a lot of value.

So if you want a good phone with a lot to offer, but don't necessarily want to pay up for the ultra-premium offerings of the Samsungs or Apples of the world, then this is a phone that's worth paying attention to.

Read on for our full Nothing Phone 4a Pro review to find out more, and how it compares to the best cheap phones.

Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: Cheat Sheet

• What is it? One of Nothing's two new mid-range phones, but with slightly better hardware than the non-Pro Nothing Phone 4a.
• Who is it for? People who want flagship-level features and performance without having to pay flagship prices
• What does it cost? Prices start at $499 / £499, which gets you a device with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage
• What do we like? The Nothing Phone 4a Pro offers great cameras, strong battery life, a large, bright display and a rear-mounted Glyph Display that can be customized in countless ways
• What don’t we like? The Nothing 4a Pro compromises on performance, loses some of the design magic of older Nothing phones, and cannot remap its extra button — known as the Essential Key. There's also no wireless charging.

Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: Specs

Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: The ups

Nothing has got a lot of the key points right, including cameras, battery and the actual look of the Nothing Phone 4a Pro.

Strong battery life

One of the most important aspects any modern phone can have is strong battery life, and the Nothing Phone 4a Pro did not disappoint. The 5,080 mAh battery isn't outrageously large, like you'll find in the likes of OnePlus 15R, but it still held up well to scrutiny.

For this review, the battery life test involved watching this YouTube video of sea life over a Wi-Fi connection with brightness set to 50%. After three hours, the battery had dropped from full to 84%. For reference, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which has some of the best phone battery life, dropped to 90% under the same conditions.

Assuming that level of battery drain is consistent, it means the Nothing Phone 4a Pro would be able to last over 18 hours on a single charge. Deliberately trying to drain the battery to test charging speed also proved challenging. It took over seven hours of streaming at full brightness with the flashlight and Glyph Display switched on to drain half the battery.

Charging itself was less impressive, and despite Nothing's promise that the 4a Pro supported up to 50W wired charging, my USB-charging meter didn't register anything higher than 27W. That was with two USB-PD chargers, rated for 87W and 30W respectively. The phone hit 24% charge after 15 minutes, 52% after 30 minutes and 95% after an hour.

Great cameras

Since the Nothing Phone 4a Pro comes with some hefty camera hardware for its price tag, I chose to test it against the Google Pixel 10 — which is one of the best camera phones. It's no surprise that the photos came out looking great, but in a lot of cases, they were equal to or superior to Google's more expensive handset.

That was particularly noticeable with the zoomed-in shots. Since the Pixel 10 has a 13MP telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom, compared to Nothing's 8MP lens with 3.5x zoom, you'd assume Google's phone produces better-quality photos.

As you can see in the sliders, that wasn't actually the case. At 3.5x and 5x magnification, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro managed to produce noticeably more detail and far less fuzziness.

The main lens was something of a mixed bag, with the 4a Pro lacking sharpness in a number of places. Low light was also slightly worse off than Pixel 10, on account of the camera capturing far less light — even if the quality was relatively even.

The 4a Pro's ultrawide and selfie cameras both proved they could produce photos that were almost indistinguishable from those captured by the Pixel 10.

Though I will say this, the Nothing 4a Pro's selfie camera did a much better job capturing the actual color in my face — rather than making me look pasty and washed out like the Pixel did.

The unique Nothing design language

What sets Nothing apart from other Android phone makers isn't the specs or the price tag, it's the company's unique design language — which stems from both hardware and software innovation.

One of the most obvious is the Glyph Display, which is a larger version of the one that came with the Nothing Phone 3 late last year. This pixelated light display offers a whole host of features, including a timer, clock, visualizer and more.

The software UI also has some of the most unique looks of any version of Android, with a similar dot-matrix style that permeates the phone in various places. I find that this is something of an acquired taste, and there are aspects that I don't like — including Nothing's black and white icons. But since this is Android, you can always adjust the look to suit your own tastes.

Better still, Nothing operates its own community-created software library called Essential Apps — letting you download and use widgets and Glyph Toys designed by other Nothing Phone users. It's possible to create these widgets with Vibe coding now, but since there's a wait list, I wasn't able to test how effective it is yet.

Large bright display

Nothing has gone all in with the display this year, with a larger 6.83-inch display that's rated for up to 5,000 nits of brightness. Which is pretty incredible, considering a lot of other bright phones max out around the 3,000 nit mark.

I haven't been able to accurately test how bright the 4a Pro's screen actually is, but it did seem noticeably brighter than the 3,300 nit Google Pixel 10 Pro. Streaming movies like "Avatar: The Way of Water" was an immensely enjoyable experience.

If you're looking for a bright, big-screen phone on a budget, then the Nothing Phone 4a Pro is certainly one to consider.

Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: The downs

Cheaper phones come with compromises, though it feels like Nothing missed out on a few basic quality of life improvements that could make its phones unbeatable in this particular price bracket.

Weak performance

Unsurprisingly for a cheaper phone, the performance on the 4a Pro is not great. The phone runs on a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, rather than one of the more expensive Gen 8 chips, and that means it doesn't have quite the same capabilities than you'd find on a flagship phone.

The Geekbench benchmarking scores came out noticeably better than those of the Nothing Phone 3a Pro, but they're also considerably worse than both the Pixel 10a and the iPhone 17e. It might not be fair to compare to Apple's chips, since they're powerhouses in their own right, but it's quite embarrassing to be less powerful than a Pixel 10a.

All Pixels have a reputation for being underpowered, and the 10a gets a raw deal because it has 2024's Tensor G4 chipset. While performance is measured in more than just benchmarking scores, it does show where Nothing has had to cut corners to make the 4a Pro as cheap as it is.

So this probably isn't the phone to buy if you're a serious mobile gamer or need to take advantage of as much computing power as possible.

Metal unibody design comes with compromises

While Nothing's unique design language is still very much alive in the 4a Pro, it's not quite as flashy as it used to be. In fact, the decision to switch to an aluminum unibody design takes away from one of the best things about having a Nothing phone in the first place.

If you look back at Nothing phones from previous years, you'll see that they have very striking, pseudo-transparent designs that stand out from every other smartphone out there. The Nothing 4a Pro features a miniaturized version of this design, which looks like an enlarged camera bar — housing all three lenses and the Glyph Display.

Don't get me wrong, it definitely looks nice, and interesting, but I can't help but wonder why we couldn't have this extended to the rest of the phone. Instead we get a bunch of dead space that but the rest of the phone ends up being dead space that lacks the same visual pizazz as its predecessors.

No wireless charging

I might have been able to forgive the radical design change if it came with a more obvious benefits. While the unibody no doubt offers a boost to durability, on account of it being metal rather than plastic, it would have been the perfect opportunity to add wireless charging to one of Nothing's A-series devices.

Wireless charging has been included on Nothing flagships, with the Nothing Phone 3 coming with 15W wireless charging speeds. But it has yet to appear on an A-series device for reasons I can not understand.

Considering we do get wireless charging on other similarly priced phones, like the Pixel 10a, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to continue excluding it. Even the basic 7.5W Qi wireless charging would be better than nothing. Though, since wireless charging and metal phones don't mix well, it would like require a complete redesign of the phone.

Essential Key can't be remapped

I'm not a huge fan of Nothing's Essential key as it is. Situated on the left side of the phone, this key offers a shortcut to various phone features — including voice memo recording, screenshots and recording any active calls. It's like it wants to be equivalent to the iPhone's Action Button, but ends up coming off more like Samsung's Bixby button instead.

Using it the way Nothing intended, the Essential Key just comes across as a bit of a useless addition. It's a glorified screenshot button, from what I can see, and the act of letting users add notes to those screenshots doesn't really make it any better. Nothing could have offered a bunch more utility if it had just offered a way to remap the key to some other feature.

From what I can tell there are ways to remap the button, but it's a multi-process that isn't built into the Nothing OS software itself. That complexity is going to dissuade people from attempting it, all while Nothing could have done what Apple did and gave users a little bit more choice on what that extra button can do.

Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: Verdict

There's a lot to love about the Nothing Phone 4a Pro, especially when you consider the $499 price tag. The cameras are very strong, capable of matching (and sometimes beating) a phone that costs a few hundred dollars more. The battery is also more than capable, and wrapped up in a phone that offers something distinct from other Android phones on the market.

There are some things that I would change, though. Weak performance is not ideal, even if those compromises are expected on a phone this cheap, and Nothing could benefit from being a little more accepting of wireless charging on its cheaper devices. A little more freedom on the Essential Key definitely couldn't hurt either.

None of that really compares to minimizing the trademark design Nothing Phones have been know for since their initial debut. Unique smartphone features are hard to come by, and I hope Nothing pivots back to the design that helped its phones stand out. As good as the Nothing Phone 4a Pro is, I don't want it to be the turning point that sees Nothing devices move towards more generic (and far less interesting) designs.