Nothing Phone (4a) Pro review

Nothing OS on top of Android 16

Nothing has its own Nothing OS skin layered on top of Android. It has matured nicely over the years without losing its distinctive visual identity. The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro runs the latest Nothing OS 4.1, which brings further refinements, particularly to animations, making them feel smoother and more natural, often thanks to frame interpolation.

Among the newer additions are more flexible sizing options for home screen elements, password recovery for Private Space, hidden apps within the Smart Drawer, separate ringtones for dual-SIM users and a redesigned lock screen with widget support and an optional depth effect for wallpapers.

Unfortunately, the software support commitment isn't particularly impressive. Nothing promises just three major OS updates, which falls a bit short of what some competitors are offering these days.

Nothing OS itself sticks close to a clean, near-stock Android (AOSP) experience in terms of functionality, but stands out with its distinctive visual identity. The interface leans heavily on Nothing's signature dot-matrix typography and cohesive design language. That said, it's not short on extras.

Users get access to 19 custom widgets, covering essentials like clocks, calendars, contacts and weather, all styled to match the overall aesthetic. For reference, the Nothing Phone (3) offered 18 widgets, so there's a slight increase here. Interestingly, the CMF Phone 2 Pro we reviewed previously came with an even larger set of 24 proprietary widgets.

One of the newer additions, which arrived during our review period, is the Relaxation hub. It's essentially a set of three widgets focused on guided breathing exercises, each offering a distinct mode - Focus, Relax and Calm - complete with its own haptic pattern.

The notification shade and quick settings menu are based on a familiar stock Android layout, albeit with a touch of Nothing's custom styling. Starting with Nothing OS 2.5, the two main quick toggles at the top switched to a rounded-square design from the previous circular look - a change that carries over into version 4.1.

Nothing OS also features a custom icon pack with a consistent monochrome aesthetic, perfectly in line with the brand's overall design language.

Nothing OS 4.1

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro offers an always-on display feature, though it's fairly basic in its implementation. You only get a clock and a handful of notification icons, with no real customization options to speak of.

Special features and Always on display

Nothing OS also offers a Monochrome UI mode for those after an even more distinctive look. While it ties into features like Do Not Disturb and Bedtime mode, it can also be enabled independently. It's purely a visual effect, though - screenshots and captured photos remain in full color.

A recent update has also brought app recommendations to the Essential Apps drawer, along with a new lock screen clock face borrowed from the Nothing Phone (3), complete with a bespoke typeface and a wake-up animation. Additional tweaks include a Depth Effect, as well as adjustable clock sizes and alignment options for further lock screen customization.

The Nothing X app provides seamless integration with several audio products, including the Ear (1), Ear (stick), Ear (2), Buds Pro, Ear, Ear (open), Ear (a), Ear (3), Headphones (1) and Headphones (a), CMF Buds, Neckband Pro, Buds Pro, Buds Pro 2,, Buds 2, Buds 2a, Buds 2 Plus, CMF Watch Pro, CMF Watch Pro 2, CMF Watch 3 Pro and Headphone Pro.

Unlike the rather basic 63-segment Glyph Bar on the vanilla Nothing Phone (4a), the Pro model gets a graphical, display-style Glyph Matrix. It is much more similar to what the Nothing Phone (3) has, though with fewer LEDs - 137 LEDs instead of 489.

Arguably, it remains one of the most distinctive visual elements of the phone. You can adjust the LED brightness across four levels and set it to react to various events, such as incoming calls and notifications. The Glyph interface also doubles as a practical visual tool, acting as a volume indicator, a timer - including camera countdowns - and even as a cue for the optional flip-to-mute feature. Nothing has also added a handful of third-party integrations that make use of the Glyph as a progress indicator.

Glyph Matrix settings

In fact, while we were working on this review, Nothing pushed an update that further expands the Glyph progress indicator. Any Android app that uses the native system progress bar within its notifications can now mirror that progress directly onto the Glyph interface. It's a logical and welcome improvement in our book.

There's plenty of AI onboard the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro, very much in line with current trends. Nothing has even introduced a dedicated "Intelligence Toolkit" section in the settings menu, which groups most of these features under one roof.

We already touched briefly on Essential Space. It's an AI-powered hub aimed at helping you organize everyday tasks, built largely around the idea of quick memo capture. Using the Essential Key on the left-hand side, you can send photos or screenshots directly to Essential Space, optionally adding text annotations. A long press of the same button lets you attach a voice recording to the captured image, making it a fairly versatile tool for quick note-taking.

The AI is designed to ingest all of this input, organize it intelligently and even generate appointments or schedules on your behalf. It works fairly well in practice, though it does require a certain type of user willing to adapt to this particular workflow.

Essential Space also includes an Essential Recorder, capable of recording, transcribing and automatically analyzing conversations. Nothing also mentions a feature called "Playground", where so-called "Essential Apps" live - AI-driven tools that can be created via natural language prompts to handle automated tasks, along with a repository of user-created ones. Unfortunately, at the time of our testing, neither Playground nor any Essential Apps were available on our review unit.

We do wish Nothing offered the option to remap the Essential Key for added versatility. On a more positive note, Essential Space now supports cloud sync, allowing your content to be seamlessly shared across multiple Nothing devices.

Essential Space

ChatGPT in particular gets quite a bit of attention, with deep system-level integration. There's a dedicated widget that lets you quickly send text, images, or voice notes straight to the assistant. Even more interestingly, you can invoke ChatGPT directly from the screenshot interface, where it can extract and analyze text, as well as perform basic image edits.

ChatGPT integration

It's an interesting integration and partnership, but to really make the most of it, you'll need an active subscription to OpenAI's services.

Wallpaper Studio is a neat generative AI addition. It's very straightforward to use - you pick a couple of keywords, and the system does the rest.

The Essential News widget is a rather neat addition. While it doesn't allow you to pick specific sources and instead relies on topic selection, it still does a solid job of curating, summarizing, and even reading out news stories. We're not entirely sure whether the narration is AI-generated or pulled from actual audio feeds, but either way, it sounds convincing and works reliably.

With the latest software update, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has gained an AI Eraser feature within the Gallery app. The on-device tool can automatically detect and remove unwanted elements from photos, while also allowing for manual selection when you want more control over what gets erased.

Benchmarks and performance

Despite the Pro moniker, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro was never meant to be a truly powerful device. Still, it does offer a slight chipset upgrade over the vanilla Nothing Phone (4a) and uses the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 instead of the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4.

The two chips are actually not that dissimilar. They are both modern parts, based on an efficient TSMC 4nm node. The CPU configurations differ slightly. The regular Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 has one "prime" Cortex-A720 core, clocked a bit higher than in the 7s Gen 4 at 2.8GHz. Then there are four "middle" Cortex-A720 cores, working at up to 2.4GHz, instead of the three inside the 7s Gen 4. Finally, we have three Cortex-A520 cores, clocked at up to 1.84 GHz. So, definitely some difference in the CPU department. However, the GPU difference is arguably even more significant. The Adreno 722 inside the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is rated for around 1177 GFLOPS of FP32 performance, while the Adreno 810 inside the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 is capable of around 589 GFLOPS. So, roughly double the raw performance.

Just like the vanilla, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is available in three memory configurations: 8GB + 128GB, 8GB + 256GB, and 12GB + 256GB. The storage chips are UFS 3.1. Our review unit is the top 12GB + 256GB one.

Nothing says that the chipset, backed up by OS optimizations and a custom CPU scheduler, delivers 27% better CPU, 30% better GPU and 65% better AI performance than the Nothing Phone (3a). As for the new storage chips, those are apparently 147% faster in read operations and 380% faster in writes than the Nothing Phone (3a).

Looking at some actual benchmark results, the CPU performance difference is not massive between the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro and the vanilla Nothing Phone (4a), but it is still very much notable. The GPU delta is much more significant with the Pro, roughly delivering twice the performance. Well, perhaps, a bit less than double.

Thermal-throttling

The Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has a 5,300 mm2 vapor chamber, which is the biggest one Nothing has put inside one of its phones to date. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 might not be a chart-topper performance-wise, but it doesn't run particularly hot. During our torture testing, the chip lost almost none of its performance.

Thermal-throttling

Plus, whatever heat is there gets handled masterfully by Nothing's cooling solution. The phone's surface never gets more than lukewarm.