Nothing Phone (4a) Pro review

Display

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has a pretty big 6.83-inch display. That is bigger than both last year's Nothing Phone (3a) Pro and the Nothing Phone (4a). You get a resolution of 1260 x 2800 pixels, which at this diagonal works out to around 440 ppi of pixel density - perfectly sharp.

Of course, Nothing is using an OLED panel. It has 10-bit color, a 144Hz refresh rate and 2160Hz PWM dimming.

Nothing advertises pretty impressive brightness numbers for the display, including 1,600 nits of while display brightness, like the Nothing Phone (4a) and 5,000 nits of peak brightness - a bit more than the Nothing Phone (4a) and, as per the marketing, 66% brighter than the Nothing Phone (3a) series.

We did our standardized measurements and got almost identical figures to the Nothing Phone (4a). That includes a brightness of around 784 nits by maxing out the slider - probably not enough for a comfortable experience. If you leave auto brightness enabled, you can get about 1,557 nits, which is a lot better and much more comfortable in sunlight.

Interestingly enough, just like the Nothing Phone (4a), the Phone (4a) Pro doesn't offer a higher brightness output when we shrink the test pattern down to a 10% window. It's just a quirk of how Nothing does its brightness control.

The minimum brightness we measured at point white is 1.9 nits.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has a 144Hz refresh rate, which is a bit better than the 120Hz on the regular Nothing Phone (4a). The phone can actually refresh at 30Hz, 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz or 144Hz. There are three distinct modes in display settings: Dynamic, High and Standard. Standard just locks the refresh rate to 60Hz. The High and Dynamic refresh rate modes appear to behave identically. Both can ramp up to 144Hz, but only in select apps and typically while actively interacting with the display - thankfully, Chrome is among those. Most other apps top out at 120Hz, and we rarely encountered 90Hz in practice. Once interaction stops, the refresh rate usually drops back to 60Hz, while 30Hz seems reserved for the always-on display. High refresh rate gaming support is a bit hit-or-miss, as titles need to be explicitly optimized and whitelisted. Games like Battlegrounds Mobile India and Call of Duty: Mobile are among the supported ones.

On a more positive note, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro's display is HDR10+ certified. It supports playback of HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG content, though Dolby Vision is notably absent. Interestingly, there is a dedicated HDR toggle in the display settings - something we don't see all that often - so you'll want to make sure it's enabled when watching compatible content.

The phone also carries the highest Widevine L1 DRM certification, which allows apps like Netflix to stream video in up to FullHD resolution.

Battery life

Nothing has slightly increased the battery capacity on this year's Phone (4a) Pro. The bump is fairly modest on the international version we have on hand - just 80 mAh, bringing the total to 5,080 mAh. The Indian variant gets a more substantial increase, with a 5,400 mAh unit. For clarity, our review unit is the international model.

We did our standardized battery testing and got some quite impressive numbers for the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro. Endurance has improved across the board in all of our tests, compared to last year's Nothing Phone (3a) Pro. The online video streaming time is particularly impressive.

Charging speed

Nothing rates the Phone (4a) Pro for up to 50W charging over USB Power Delivery. In our testing with a 68W USB PD charger, the phone peaked at around 42W during the charging process. In practice, any USB PD charger with PPS support rated above 50W should be able to deliver the maximum charging speed the phone is capable of.

In practice, charging speeds are decent, though not particularly impressive. In our testing, we got about 39% charge in 15 minutes and 68% in 30 minutes, with a full charge taking just over an hour.

Nothing uses impact-resistant Safe Cell technology for its batteries and promises 90% of maximum battery capacity will remain after 1,200 charge cycles or roughly three years of use.

Speakers - loudness and quality

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has a hybrid stereo speaker setup with one dedicated bottom-firing speaker and an amplified earpiece acting as the second channel. This kind of setup is inherently imbalanced and generally doesn't offer the best balance. This is the case here as well. There is a noticeable imbalance.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro earns a Very Good loudness score, much like its predecessor and the vanilla Nothing Phone (4a). Audio quality is solid as well, offering a pleasantly wide soundstage and rich overall output. Mids come through clean and well-defined, while highs remain controlled with little to no distortion even at maximum volume. As expected, bass is virtually non-existent.

Nothing doesn't really offer any additional audio goodies like special tuning or even equalizers. A bit of a missed opportunity, really.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

Connectivity

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro supports simultaneous SA/NSA Sub-6 5G connectivity on both of its physical Nano-SIM card slots. Unlike the vanilla Nothing Phone (4a), however, the Pro does have eSIM support. Do double-check with your specific vendor, since a version without eSIM support exists as well. In any case, you can have two SIM cards, physical or otherwise, active at the same time. There are seven antennas around the phone's unibody to ensure maximum connection clarity with any hand grip.

Location services include GPS, GALILEO, GLONASS, BDS and QZSS. Local connectivity is handled by dual-band Wi-Fi 6 (unfortunately, no access to the 6GHz band or Wi-Fi 7) and Bluetooth 5.4 with LE. There is NFC on board. No FM radio, or IR blaster, though.

The USB Type-C port on the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is limited to a USB 2.0 connection, meaning a theoretical maximum data transfer rate of 480 Mbps. That's a bit disappointing, especially since the underlying USB controller reportedly supports up to 5Gbps speeds but isn't wired to take advantage of them. There's no support for video output or other advanced features either, though USB OTG/Host functionality is still available.

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has a good set of onboard sensors. There is a TDK-Invensense icm536xx accelerometer and gyroscope combo, an OCS och191xmagnetometer and compass combo and a Sensortek stk6b1x light and hardware proximity sensor combo. There is no barometer.