Nothing today unveiled its latest mid-range duo, the Phone 4a and Phone 4a Pro, bringing significant design and hardware upgrades over last year’s Phone 3a series. The Pro model in particular takes a major step forward, featuring a refreshed, premium design, more powerful internals, a sharper display, improved cameras, and more, all for a reasonable price increase over its predecessor.
Starting with the design, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro adopts an upgraded metal unibody that ditches the brand’s iconic transparent back in favor of a more minimal look in the bottom half. The top half, however, features a new rectangular camera island in Nothing’s distinctive style that helps it stand out among competitors.
A bold new camera island with Nothing’s signature touch
The updated camera island bears no resemblance to the Phone 3a Pro‘s polarizing circular setup. At first glance, it looks similar to the iPhone 17 Pro’s rectangular camera island, but the Phone 4a Pro’s design has far more personality and a unique feature you won’t find on an iPhone.
For starters, the camera island retains Nothing’s signature transparent look. It houses a triple camera setup, with two sensors placed in a pill-shaped cutout in the bottom left and a third sensor within its own circular cutout on the top left. Over on the right, the phone features Nothing’s Glyph Matrix, which we’ve previously seen on the flagship Phone 3.
Nothing says that the Phone 4a Pro’s Glyph Matrix consists of 137 mini-LEDs, covers a 57% larger area, and is 100% brighter at around 3000 nits. It reportedly delivers sharper, more detailed notifications and supports both Glyph Toys and the Glyph Matrix AOD experience.
Flagship-grade display meets performance improvements
Over on the front, the Phone 4a Pro sports a flagship-grade 6.83-inch OLED with a 144Hz refresh rate, 5,000 nits peak brightness, and 2,160Hz PWM dimming. It has a 1,260×2,800p resolution and is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 7i, similar to the recently released Pixel 10a.
As recent leaks suggested, the Phone 4a Pro is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip, which offers significant performance gains over the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 in the Phone 3a Pro. The upgraded SoC is paired with up to 12GB of RAM and up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. It also features a new 5,300mm² vapor chamber for better sustained thermal performance.
Cameras and battery: Upgrades, downgrades, and minor tweaks
In the camera department, Nothing has equipped the Phone 4a Pro with a 50MP f/1.8 Sony Lytia 700c main sensor with OIS, a 50MP Samsung JN5 periscope sensor with 3.5x optical zoom and OIS, and an 8MP Sony IMX355 ultrawide sensor, carried over from last year. Unfortunately, the front camera has been downgraded from 50MP on the Phone 3a Pro to 32MP on the new model.
Battery capacity gets a slight bump from 5,000mAh to 5,080mAh on international variants, while the India-spec model will ship with a larger 5,400mAh pack. Charging speed remains unchanged, with wired charging capped at 50W.
Software-wise, the Phone 4a Pro will ship with Nothing OS 4.1 based on Android 16 out of the box, with Nothing promising three OS upgrades and six years of security patches. Pricing starts at $499 in the US for the 8/128GB variant, while the 12/256GB model will cost $599.
Pre-orders for the Nothing Phone 4a Pro will begin on March 13, with open sales starting March 27. The device will be available through Nothing’s website and select retail channels in black, silver, and pink colorways.
