‘Just a joy to use’ — I reviewed the new Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and its striking design, giant blazing screen, and useful Glyph Matrix reminded me that phones can actually be fun

19 Mar 2026, 13:00 · TechRadar

TechRadar Verdict

Not only does the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro look gorgeous, but it has a blazingly bright 6.8-inch screen and offers impressive performance given its mid-range chipset. Moreover, its OS is streamlined and intuitive, while offering a whole heap of ways to actually get concrete uses out of that versatile Glyph Matrix. The camera isn’t quite up to the standard of some more premium handsets, but using it is just fun in a way so few phones are these days. Honestly, Apple and Samsung: take note.

Pros

+Gorgeous design
+Bright 6.8-inch screen
+Fun, functional Glyph Matrix
+Very solid performance

Cons

-Camera slightly inconsistent
-Battery life lasted less than estimated
-Nothing fans may expect more industrial design

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The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is a budget phone with its sights firmly trained on flagships. It offers a huge 5000-nit AMOLED display, a seriously stylish 0.31-inch / 7.95mm thick aluminum unibody, and a sufficiently powerful mid-range chipset to play games without breaking much of a sweat. More importantly, it continues to champion Nothing’s disruptive attitude to design and brings back the Phone 3’s super-flexible Glyph Matrix.

Let’s start with the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro’s display: at 6.83 inches, it gives you a serious amount of screen estate. I fired up some 2K videos and its picture always looked clean and precise, while its 5000-nit peak brightness is probably enough that you could use it as a reading torch. I did find its colors weren’t quite as rich as my iPhone 16 Pro’s Super Retina XDR display, but it looked pretty lush all the same.

But for me, the (4a) Pro’s design is what earns it a place among the best phones. Its aluminum unibody feels solid yet light, and while I think some diehard Nothing fans might miss the transparent back plate from its predecessors, it keeps just enough of those iconoclastic design touches in its camera and glyph module to really stand out in a world of interchangeable gray rectangles.

Not gonna lie: I had a lot of fun playing with Nothing’s Glyph Matrix. While it could easily be read as gimmicky, the sheer quantity of functions it offers meant I found a bunch of ways to use it that genuinely felt helpful. From being able to tell when my girlfriend had messaged to seeing a custom dollar glyph every time I got a transaction notification from my bank, I could easily keep tabs on important things without getting distracted by the daily noise. It went beyond flashing lights and started to actively feel really useful.

More generally, software on the (4a) Pro is also seriously polished, feeling fun to use yet knowing when to stay out of your way. Built on Android 16, Nothing OS 4.1 offers a whole load of customizability, while still feeling clean and bloat-free. Its AI tools allow you to analyze notes, screenshots, and recordings but – crucially – you can also choose which files you want this AI to access, and how much you want to engage with it.

This is backed up by the phone's admirable performance. While its Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset isn’t exactly top of the range, I found that, coupled with the 12GB RAM of my testing model, it handled productivity tasks and multitasking without complaint. On top of this, the (4a) Pro happily crunched through any game I threw at it on the highest settings without any perceptible lag or frame rate drops; its 5,300mm² vapor chamber cooling system keeps it from getting too hot during these kinds of heavy loads.

Unfortunately, this can’t be a total love-fest, and I’m a little less enamored with the (4a) Pro’s camera system. On the positive side, the images I shot with it felt sufficiently sharp and detailed – the 3.5x optical zoom produces deliciously crisp images, for example – while night photography is bright and grain-free. However, I did find color reproduction to be a little more subdued than on the best phones on the market, and the exposure on my snaps could be weirdly inconsistent at times.

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