Phone (4a)

Carl Pei, a co-founder of OnePlus, started Nothing in 2020 on the premise that phones had become a bit too serious about being identical. The Phone (1) of 2022 answered with a transparent back and a lattice of lights called the Glyph, and the a-series has since carried that sense of humour down to a more realistic price. The Phone (4a) was unveiled at a London event on 5 March 2026, successor to the Phone (3a) of a year earlier.

The big change is the lighting. The back-panel Glyph Interface gives way to a Glyph Bar, a strip of seven squares made from 63 mini-LEDs that shows charging progress, timers, notifications and the camera's recording state, and it is about 40 per cent brighter than the 3a's lights. The rest is glass at the back (in Pink, White, Black or Blue), a Gorilla Glass 7i front and a plastic frame, at about 204g.

Beneath it sits a 6.78-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 4, a 5,080mAh battery with 50W wired charging, and a camera system with a 50MP main sensor, an 8MP ultrawide and, notably, a 50MP periscope telephoto at 3.5x optical zoom. That lens is the headline, and the stretch from the old 2x is a clear step. Software is Nothing OS 4.1 on Android 16, with three years of OS updates and six years of security patches, which is shorter than some rivals now promise.

The caveats are the usual mid-range ones. Reviewers describe the ultrawide as soft and low-light shooting as slow, performance as only a little ahead of the previous generation, and battery life as middling next to phones with larger cells. Water resistance is IP64, a splash rather than a dunking. The price rose from the 3a at launch, and the UK listing now sits above the launch figure. For someone who wants a phone with a character that is unmistakably not another slab of glass, and a telephoto lens they will actually use, it remains easy to like.

Photographs courtesy of Nothing