Nothing Phone (4a) review: stylish design meets stylized photos

Nothing is still one of the youngest smartphone companies around, but it has quickly built a reputation for doing things differently, leaning heavily into transparent industrial design, playful software touches, and a community-driven approach to product development.

The Nothing Phone (4a) is the latest model in the company’s more affordable “a-series”, designed to bring elements of its flagship devices to a lower price point. It builds on the Phone (3a) with refreshed cameras, revamped Glyph lighting system, a faster Snapdragon processor, and an upgraded AMOLED display.

Nothing is trying to differentiate the Phone (4a) from other mid-rangers as a more creative smartphone, emphasising its camera presets and LUTs built right into the camera app. I have loved these on previous Nothing phones, and it brings me ever closer to my dream of having my Fujifilm film recipes on my smartphone.

On paper, with a triple camera setup, including two 50MP sensors, the Phone (4a) looks like a strong contender for the best budget camera phone – but the real question is whether the photography experience matches the ambition.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Nothing Phone (4a) starts at $349 / £349 / AU$649 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, rising to $399 / £399 / AU$699 for the top 12GB RAM configuration.

That price pits it against devices like the Google Pixel 10a and Samsung Galaxy A-series phones. For the money, the hardware is reasonably competitive: a large AMOLED display, a modern Snapdragon chip, and a surprisingly ambitious periscope telephoto camera. But here, the value lies in the device's style, with the Phone (4a) offering a much more eye-catching and unique design that will stand out from the crowd.

Design

Nothing has built its identity around its distinctive design, and the Phone (4a) continues that philosophy. At a glance, it looks very similar to previous Nothing devices, but the company has refined several elements of the design language while keeping the signature transparent aesthetic that has become its calling card.

The rear of the phone still uses a clear glass panel that reveals stylised internal components beneath it. This isn’t a literal view of the electronics inside, but rather a deliberately arranged design that mimics them, and it gives the phone a chic industrial look. Its three cameras sit high on the back, out of the way of my fingers, and fit inside a pill-shaped bump, with a distinctive aluminium surround swirl around it. Overall, it's just a cool-looking phone.

Nothing has expanded the range slightly this year. The Phone (4a) is available in white, black, blue, and pink, and the brighter finishes help emphasise the industrial design beneath the glass by providing a little more contrast. The pink in particular feels slightly softer, while the blue version adds a bit more energy, but both add a bit more pizazz than the more subdued monochrome options.

If you already own a Phone (2a) or Phone (3a), you may struggle to immediately tell them apart unless you look closely at the details. Normally, that would feel like a criticism, but in this case, it’s not a problem. Nothing’s design is still unique enough in the smartphone market that it hasn’t yet become stale, and the Phone (4a) still stands out on a table full of generic-looking rectangles.

Build quality feels solid for a mid-range device, and Nothing has improved durability compared to its predecessor. The Phone (4a) is rated IP64 for dust and water resistance, which means it can handle splashes and rain without issue, though it’s not designed for full immersion like some flagship devices. Nothing also claims improved structural rigidity and stronger glass protection, which should help the device survive the usual bumps and drops of everyday use.

Despite any tweaks, the overall shape and layout remain extremely close to earlier Nothing phones. Physically, the Phone (4a) measures 163.95 x 77.57 x 8.55mm and weighs 204.5g, putting it in the same general size category as most modern mid-range Android phones. The large footprint is mainly driven by the 6.78-inch display, which dominates the front of the device with relatively slim bezels and a centred punch-hole selfie camera.

That display is one of the phone’s highlights. It’s a 6.78-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 1224 x 2720 and a pixel density of around 440ppi. The panel supports a dynamic refresh rate up to 120Hz, which helps keep scrolling smooth and responsive, while the brightness can reach up to 1,600 nits outdoors and 4,500 nits peak for HDR content. In everyday use, it looks sharp and vibrant, easily competitive with other phones at this price.

Nothing also gives you two main display color profiles. The Standard mode aims for a more neutral presentation, but I found it slightly undersaturated. The alternative Alive mode boosts color a little more and gives photos and videos more punch, which I ended up preferring most of the time.

Under the display is an optical fingerprint sensor, which works reliably but isn’t quite as fast or consistent as the ultrasonic sensors used in some higher-end phones. That said, it still unlocks the phone quickly enough that it never felt frustrating in day-to-day use.

Along the sides, the button layout is fairly conventional. You get the usual power button and volume controls, all of which feel well-positioned and easy to reach when holding the phone. The only additional control is Nothing’s Essential Key, which sits separately on the left side of the device. Pressing it captures screenshots, voice notes, or screen recordings and sends them to the company’s new AI-powered organisational tool called Essential Space.

Personally, I never found this feature particularly useful. Essential Space is designed as a repository that collects screenshots, notes, and recordings and uses AI to analyse them and extract useful information. It’s an interesting concept, but it's just not the way I interact with AI assistants, and I don't find it as useful as dropping whatever I need into Gemini or CatGPT when needed. I’d have preferred the option to remap that key to something more practical for me, like launching the camera or toggling silent mode.

The most distinctive part of the Phone (4a) design continues to be the Glyph system on the rear of the phone – this time taking the form of the new Glyph Bar. This is Nothing’s latest iteration of its signature lighting system, which has evolved from the lights used in earlier models to 63 tiny LEDs arranged in segmented zones. It can display notifications, timers, progress indicators, and recording lights when shooting video with a little more contextual information through patterns than the previous Glyph lights.

While the Glyph interface has always been a little bit of a novelty, I actually find it useful in practice. I tend to keep my phone face down on my desk while working, and the subtle light patterns make it easy to see when something important has happened without having the screen constantly lighting up for every weather alert or marketing email.

Camera Performance

The Nothing Phone (4a) packs a fairly ambitious camera system for a mid-range phone. Two cameras from the Phone (3a) make a return, with a 50MP main camera, and an 8MP ultrawide, but the 50MP telephoto lens has got an upgrade – from 2x optical zoom to 3.5x – and Nothing claims it can digitally zoom up to 70x.

The main camera uses a 50MP 1/1.57-inch sensor, which is relatively large for a phone at this price. Combined with optical image stabilisation (OIS), it’s designed to capture more light, helping improve dynamic range and low-light performance. The telephoto camera uses a periscope-style lens with an 80mm equivalent, which is an ideal focal length for portraits and tighter compositions.

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In practice, though, the camera experience is a little more complicated. One of the first things I noticed when shooting with the Phone (4a) is that the HDR preview isn’t particularly clear. In scenes with strong contrast, the camera preview often makes photos look significantly overexposed, even though the final processed image comes out correctly balanced. It meant that while composing shots, I often had to ignore what I was seeing on screen and trust the processing pipeline to fix things afterwards. The final images usually looked good, but the shooting experience itself felt less composed than I’d like.

Once the phone finishes processing the image, the HDR output actually looks quite pleasing. Compared with many smartphones that push aggressive HDR processing, the Phone (4a) tends to produce a more restrained result. Highlights are controlled, and shadow detail is preserved without creating that artificial “over-processed” look that some phones suffer from. The results might not always be technically the most dramatic, but they can feel more natural and photographic.

Color rendering is where things become more subjective. In the default color mode, images can look slightly flat, with colors that feel a little muted and contrast that doesn’t quite pop. For some phone photographers, this might actually be desirable; it's perhaps more true-to-life, and it gives images more flexibility for editing later (although the extent to which you can edit a JPEG is limited). But straight out of the camera, the photos sometimes feel a bit lifeless compared to other brands like Apple's warmth or Xiaomi's film-like tones.

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However, where Nothing’s camera colors redeem themselves is when paired with the ability to apply LUTs (look-up tables) directly within the camera as presets. LUTs are essentially color profiles that transform the look of an image. The Phone (4a) allows you to import new presets easily via downloads or even QR codes and save them to the device. There are also a few preinstalled presets, although frustratingly, you can’t edit any of these. You can even replace the default camera with a preset of your choice.

This is the one camera feature I truly wish all phones had. It gives a way to build a style into the capture process rather than relying entirely on editing afterwards. As someone who abandoned being a Canon user for over a decade to jump into Fujifilm’s film simulations and film recipes, I have been itching for a phone to give me the flexibility over my phone images so I can color match my camera and phone – and the Phone (4a) comes the closest yet. You can even add grain effects to images, helping create a slightly more film-inspired look.

Of course, LUTs don’t improve the actual camera hardware. So while they can make photos look more interesting, they can’t fix limitations in sharpness, dynamic range, or sensor performance.

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Image detail from the main camera is generally good in decent lighting. However, I did notice that motion blur can appear more often than expected, even when shooting in fairly bright conditions. It’s difficult to pinpoint whether this comes from the sensors, the camera choosing slower shutter speeds, or the imaging pipeline itself, but it does mean you need to be careful when photographing while moving.

A proper telephoto camera is a welcome inclusion at this price point (last year's 2x telephoto does not count). The 3.5x optical zoom produces pleasant portrait perspectives and is genuinely useful for everyday photography. The camera also includes optional retouching tools and adjustable bokeh effects. Some of these effects allow you to change the shape of the blur highlights, including novelty shapes like stars or snowflakes. They’re fun to experiment with, but they feel more like playful extras than tools aimed at serious portrait photographers like Vivo's excellent Zeiss lens bokeh options.

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But while the optical zoom performs well, the phone’s more extreme zoom modes are less convincing. Nothing advertises up to 70x “Ultra Zoom”, but in practice, I found photos start to become fairly unusable beyond around 10x zoom. Image quality drops rapidly after that point, and the highest zoom levels are just plain bad.

Macro photography is handled using the telephoto camera rather than the ultrawide lens. This actually works well because it produces a more natural perspective and avoids the distortion that ultrawide macro cameras often create. The results are solid, if not particularly remarkable.

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Phone Performance

The Nothing Phone (4a) is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 4, a mid-range chipset designed to deliver solid everyday performance while maintaining good power efficiency. In real-world use, that generally holds true.

For everyday tasks, the phone feels quick and responsive. Browsing the web, scrolling through social media, switching between apps, and streaming video all happen smoothly with very little slowdown. In typical daily use, I didn’t experience any noticeable lag or stuttering. Apps opened quickly, multitasking was smooth, and general navigation around the operating system felt snappy.

Where the limitations of the chipset begin to show is when you start pushing the phone harder. Tasks like photo and video editing can put more strain on the processor, and during heavier workloads, I did occasionally notice slower processing times with my Lightroom or CapCut exports taking noticeably longer than they would on a flagship device. Although this doesn’t mean the phone struggles with creative work entirely, it’s still perfectly usable for editing photos or short clips on the go, and I just wouldn’t rely on it if you are a heavy mobile editor.

Battery life is pretty good. The device houses a 5,080mAh battery, which Nothing claims can deliver up to 17 hours of combined usage. In my experience, that estimate feels a little ambitious. In my controlled battery test, using a mix of video editing, photo editing, video playback, and productivity tasks, the Phone (4a) lasted 14 hours and 12 minutes, which falls a little behind rivals with larger cells.

In the real world, the phone did comfortably last through a full day of medium to heavy use, although I usually came home in the evening with the phone in battery saver mode. However, recharging is super quick; the phone supports 50W wired fast charging, which in my tests creached 35% in 15 minutes, 61% charge in roughly 30 minutes, and a full charge in just over an hour. So a quick top-up while getting ready in the morning was often enough to provide enough charge for the day.

The Phone (4a) runs Nothing OS 4.1 based on Android 16, and it remains one of the cleanest Android interfaces available. The design leans heavily into Nothing’s minimalist aesthetic, with monochrome icons, custom widgets, and subtle animations that match the brand’s overall visual identity.

In many ways, it feels similar to the software experience on Google Pixel devices: close to stock Android, but with a few carefully designed additions rather than heavy customisation. Nothing also promises three years of Android updates and six years of security patches, which is respectable support for a mid-range device.

Nothing also includes a handful of AI-assisted editing tools, including reflection removal and pedestrian removal, but this pales in comparison to the AI editing suite available on other devices. However, both tools can run directly on the device without requiring an internet connection, which is convenient when editing photos on the go.

However, their effectiveness varies. The pedestrian removal tool, in particular, is quite inconsistent. Sometimes it correctly identifies people in the scene and removes them cleanly, but other times it fails to detect obvious subjects entirely. Even when it does work, it can leave behind slightly blurry patches where the removed person used to be. It's a nice-to-have, but Nothing is lagging far behind the competition here.

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Final Verdict

The Nothing Phone (4a) continues the company’s tradition of making smartphones that feel a little more interesting than the competition. Its transparent design and Glyph lighting system still stand out in a market full of near-identical devices.

For photographers, the camera system isn’t a mid-range champ, but it puts in a decent performance. The cameras produce pleasingly natural images, however the ability to apply LUTs directly in-camera is genuinely a gamechanger for me, and adds a whole new dimension to the average camera hardware. However, inconsistent HDR previews, muted default colours and limited usability of the higher zoom ranges mean it doesn’t quite deliver a fully rounded camera experience.

Performance is solid for the price, with smooth everyday use and dependable battery life that easily lasts a full day. The screen is really nice to use, large and bright and Nothing OS provides a clean, fast Android experience.

Overall, the Phone (4a) isn’t the outright best camera phone in its class, but it offers a refreshing design that I really like. It is still one of the few mid-range phones with any design personality, and if you care more about style than photographic perfection then the Phone (4a) might be perfect.

Alternatives

The Google Pixel 10a might be a boring update from the previous generation, but it remains one of the best camera phones in the mid-range segment thanks to Google’s exceptional image processing and AI editing tools.

The Samsung Galaxy A56 is Samsung’s mid-range contender, offering a more traditional smartphone design, good cameras, and one of the best displays in this price bracket.