Nothing Phone 4a Pro review: premium aluminium meets quirky design

Nothing’s latest quirky smartphone is a huge aluminium Android with three cameras and a big LED matrix screen on the back that challenges the notion mid-range phones can’t be just a bit more fun.

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.

The Phone 4a Pro is a bit of a departure from UK-based Nothing’s previous glass-clad transparent designs. It still has a touch of those elements but only in the camera island at the top, with the rest of the body now solid aluminium – a rare sight in the world of Android phones.

It costs £499 (€479/$499/A$949), sitting above the regular Phone 4a at £349 and below the top-of-the-line Phone 3 costing £699. That puts the Phone 4a Pro in direct competition with some very good, if less interestingly designed, rivals such as the Google Pixel 10a.

The slim aluminium body feels great, but the 4a Pro is a very big phone with a huge 6.83in OLED screen on the front. Only a handful of phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra or iPhone 17 Pro Max are quite that big, making it a two-handed affair most of the time.

The large camera island on the back contains a big, bright circular dot-matrix LED screen, which can display notification icons, the time, timers, volume and charge levels. But it can also be used as a rough selfie screen for the rear camera or to show fun little widgets such as a moon phase tracker or others downloaded from Nothing’s user community.

Similar to previous iterations of Nothing’s Glyph interface, much of it is a bit gimmicky, but having the time on the back of the phone or seeing icons for certain notifications is surprisingly useful.

Screen: 6.83in 144Hz QHD+ OLED (450ppi)

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4

Operating system: Nothing OS 4.1 (Android 16)

Camera: 50MP main, 50MP 3.5x tele and 8MP ultrawide, 32MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.4 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP65 (25cm depths for 20 minutes)

Dimensions: 163.6 x 76.6 x 7.9mm

The 4a Pro has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip, which won’t win any raw processing awards but keeps up with daily tasks just fine. It handled games at medium settings but made the phone relatively warm during play.

The battery lasts a solid two-plus days between charges with the screen in active use for more than seven hours across a mix of wifi and 5G for general messaging, browsing, watching video and using various apps. Playing games significantly reduces the battery life by about 30% an hour, but the 4a Pro outlasted even the heaviest general use days with a good 20% left in the tank. Most will only need to charge it every other day.

The 4a Pro runs Nothing OS 4.1, which is one of the slickest and easily customised versions of Android 16. It can be used with standard app icons and widgets or dot-matrix-style designs that add a bit of retro cool to everyday tasks. If you thought other phones were a bit boring, this is the antidote.

It supports live notifications from apps such as Uber or Google Maps on an improved lock screen. Plus it has Google’s Gemini built in with a collection of Nothing’s own AI tools.

The Essential Space app introduced last year now syncs to Nothing’s cloud, so up to 2.15GB of your AI-analysed images, text, voice notes and call recordings are safely backed up, though you need a Nothing phone to access them which limits its usefulness. The phone has AI-powered search, which plugs into data from Essential Space. The new Essential Voice is an AI-powered dictation system that cleans up your umms, errs and other errors as you go, and recognises phrases such as “my phone number” to insert your number so you don’t have to look it up each time. It’s a nice idea, similar to Google’s new Rambler tool, but it is a bit slow and requires an internet connection to work.

Nothing will only provide three years of Android version updates with a total of six years of security updates, which falls short of the best you can get for this kind of money. Also note that some apps such as Netflix do not support the kind of HDR content playback that makes the best of the screen on the 4a Pro because of certification issues.

The 4a Pro has a triple camera on the back with a solid 32-megapixel selfie camera on the front to make you look your best.

The main 50MP camera is excellent in good light, shooting photos with plenty of detail and a nice, wide dynamic range, but it struggles a little in dimmer conditions, looking a bit soft. The 50MP 3.5x telephoto camera is the best of the bunch, shooting great images in good light with sharp details and good colour. It can also manage a very good 2x crop zoom for an effective 7x magnification before stretching all the way up to 140x with digital zoom, which starts to fall apart beyond 30x.

The 8MP ultra-wide camera is disappointingly weak on detail, so shots only seem good if you don’t look too hard. Nothing’s night mode is a little softer on detail than you might expect and sometimes the camera can be a little inconsistent in its exposure and colour balance, but overall the main and telephoto cameras are good for the money.

Video recording is solid but falls behind rivals that offer 4K at 60 frames a second, which is rapidly becoming the norm for phones.

The battery will maintain at least 80% of its original capacity for at least 1,200 full charge cycles. The phone is generally repairable in the UK.

The device is made of recycled aluminium, plastic, steel and tin, and has a carbon footprint of 50.5kg CO2 equivalent. The company publishes sustainability reports for some devices.

The Nothing Phone 4a Pro costs from £499 (€479/$499/A$949).

For comparison, the Phone 4a costs £349, the Phone 3 costs £699, the Google Pixel 10a costs £449, the Samsung Galaxy A57 5G costs £529 and the Apple iPhone 17e costs £599.

The Phone 4a Pro is another slick, striking Android from Nothing, which continues to buck the trend of dull slabs of metal and glass.

The aluminium body feels expensive, while the screen on the front is huge and vibrant. But it is the eye-catching camera cluster and dot-matrix display on the back that is its standout feature. Along with a great version of Android with lots of visual interest, it’s a fun phone to use day to day.

Some of Nothing’s AI tools are useful. It has decent mid-range performance and two-day battery life, plus good main and telephoto cameras to round out the package.

But the Phone 4a Pro is quite expensive for a mid-range phone, even with RAMageddon making everything more expensive. The cheaper Phone 4a offers many of the good features of the Pro model for less, which makes it better value. For now you can certainly get better cameras or stronger performance for the money, even if the alternatives aren’t quite as interesting as the Nothing.