I thought about doing a prank of being like there's nothing here. But that I
feel like that's probably been so overdone and maybe that's the intro is
me just talking about what intro to do. In my hands is the Nothing 4A. Nothing's
newest entry-level budget phone. Whatever term you want to use, but this
bad boy starts at a pretty affordable price and as you'll find out is a bit
better than last year's. Well, which color should we do? Let's do I think the
blue. We're going to do something fancy.
Welcome to nothing. What are you talking about? There's something, right? Okay.
Okay. We got open it up on the top part here. Hey, it comes with a little
plastic case. That's kind of nice. As well as a USBC cable, which appears to
be How long is this? Yeah, about 3 ft.
Not the longest cables we've seen with phones, but at least they're still giving you a cable. The bare minimum
nowadays. A bunch of propaganda, especially for the EU. And then finally,
the phone itself. Like nice little paper wrapping.
Oh, okay. Picking the blue was the right choice. Oh, this is like a flexi case. I
thought it was more of like a plastic more brittle case. Kind of just fun to
play with. I just Let's take an exterior tour of the phone first. So, on our
right side here, you've got your power button and your volume rocker. On the
very bottom, you've got a USBC 2.0 port, and you've got your SIM card tray there
as well. And on the left side, they have one more button here, which they call the essential button. I think by
default, you can just tap it and it takes a screenshot, but we'll play with
that a little bit later once we get the phone on. On the top, looks like you've
just got your microphone/ speaker. And
other than that, the real shining part about the phone is the back. Man, woo,
look how pretty that is. One thing that was very controversial amongst people
here, they changed how the light bars work on the back. If you remember from
some previous Nothing phones, they kind of had more options that were like
around the camera bump. Now it looks like it's these How many squares is
that? 1 2 3 4 5 6 Seven. Sorry, it's the
seven squares along the side here, and that does the similar functions as the
light bar before. It's kind of nice that they include just a clear rubber case,
so at least you can still see which color you picked. Based on this type of
material, it'll probably offer a tiny bit of drop protection. I wouldn't uh
you know yeet it though. And gh it kind of looks gross when you get it covered
in fingerprints. Oh my gosh. And it looks like they've also pre-applied a
screen protector. I see a little lip that I could peel from there. That's
very nice to be included, especially on like an entry-level budget phone. As for
the rest of the specs of the phone, it remains in line with some other budget
phones. It starts at 128 GB of storage with 8 GB of RAM. Or you could buy the
256 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of RAM. And the CPU in this thing is a
Snapdragon 7S Gen 4, which is a slightly
different one than last year's 3A phone. And one of the bigger things that
they've upgraded from last year is the type of glass on the front. Last year it
was called Panda Glass, and this year they've gone to a Corning Gorilla Glass,
which is a bit more standard in the phone space. But we're going to power
this up and we're going to see exactly what nothing has to offer. Maybe they
have something. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. Apparently, this phone wasn't fully set
up by Labs. I have to switch to the the white nothing phone. That's fine. All
righty. And we are in brightness test.
That is very bright. My god. I mean,
that is one of their claims that they are very proudly boasting on this
display. I'm going to turn it back down so you guys can actually see anything.
But they claimed a peak brightness of 4500
nits. We'll get into that a little bit later. They also said that their outdoor
brightness is about 1,600 nits and their typical brightness is 800 nits. Again,
we'll have those results a little bit later because nothing has always boasted
that their absolute peak brightness is crazy. Last year's 3A was 3,000 nits. To
go from 30,000 to 4500 is crazy if they
hit it. As for the rest of the screen specs, it is a 6.78 inch screen with a
resolution of 1224 by 2720, which is
actually a pretty high PPI/resolution
display we've seen. It's not quite the highest we have. I know the S26 Ultra
was like a 1440p screen. That was also like three times the price of this. So,
this is pretty good for this price. As for our refresh rate, it can go down to
30 Hz and up to 120. Typically, that'll be dynamic for maybe a type of game
you're playing or if it's in like a low power setting, you can clock all the way
down to 30 Hz, which again, for a budget entry phone, if you're wanting 120 Hz, I
think that's fantastic. I had kind of a hot take with my 17e unboxing where I
said 120 on budget seems weird, but
there are options out there for people who want it. But with how bright it was,
we need to watch a YouTube video first. That's the first thing we're going to
do. And I need to connect to the internet. At full brightness, it looks
really good for the price of the phone. But you can tell this is a budget
display. It's an LTPS flexible AMOLED compared to their last year's just
flexible AMOLED, but it looks really dark. It looks good quality, but again,
I feel like if you wanted an actual good brightness, you have to crank that
brightness up. And then you're like, "Yeah, this is a good-looking screen." But again, like I said, I would worry
about battery life. I guess while I was bringing up the brightness about that
video, I should go over our Labs results for brightness. So, while we didn't hit
their peak brightness claim of the 4500 nits, we did get specific instructions
from Nothing about how to hit it, and we still couldn't hit it. We have been able
to hit peak brightness on like past nothing phones, but it's always been an
insanely specific test. Realistically, it's definitely a marketing push thing
to just say that they can hit this brightness versus a realworld scenario
you'd probably be interacting with. But what you will be interacting with though
is this segue to our sponsor. PC building has never been the cheapest
hobby, but with the way things are going right now and the price of parts, it's only gotten worse. So, it helps to have
a case that can do everything you might need while still being budget conscious.
Like Corsair's 3200D RS, it's built for optimized air flow with nine fan mounts
and AIO radiator options on both the top and front of the case. It even comes
with three pre-installed RS120 fans. There's up to 400 mm of GPU clearance or
375 mm with fans installed. And it has a
built-in anti-sag arm to support even the heftiest of GPUs. You can learn more
and grab your Corsair 3200 DRS with our link in the description. Can you hear
this in the mic? >> Button clicking. >> Yeah, I'm not clicking it.
>> Wait, what? >> I'm rubbing my finger over the button. It's like the tolerance is loose on the
button. I like brushed my finger over it and I thought I clicked it because I
heard it and you guys can hear it, too. I'm not clicking the button. I don't
know if it's the same on the other ones. Yeah, it's such a minor detail, but like
caught me off guard, that's for sure. Let's listen to Crab Rave. Enough about
the buttons. Volume. We got to start with the max. That's what I usually
start with.
Those are pretty poor. Uh my my initial
impression was like not good when I heard that first little ramp up in the
music. They're a lot quieter than other
phones, too. It's not as loud as I've heard on some other phones, but the
quality was much worse as well.
It's this part, that snare there. That snare is really bad. Sounds like sand.
Let me let me turn the volume down. Sometimes by going like 50% volume or
something, you can kind of get rid of those weird crisps or sand sounds, but
the snare sounds a lot better now at 50% volume.
It sounds a lot better at 50% volume. I will say it's still quieter than some
other phones we've tested at 50% volume. So, I don't know. Maybe it's not much of
like a showing friends videos phone, right? You're not going to be like,
"Hey, everyone listen to this." One thing you might be doing with your
friends, though, taking lots of photos. So, let's take some quick photos here.
As for the camera specs themselves, we've got a couple cameras on the back
here. The main one is a 50 megapixel Samsung sensor. The periscope camera is
also a 50 megapixel Samsung sensor, and then the last ultrawide camera is an 8
megapixel Samsung sensor. And as for the front-facing selfie cam, it is a 32
megapixel, also Samsung sensor. Starting to notice a pattern here. That selfie
camera might be controversial to you depending on if you like the whole punch
style look or a whole notch bar or whatever, but basically every camera has
some sort of hole punch. Now, can't really complain too much. Let's take a
photo of Lucky. I always like taking a photo of Lucky. Okay, so the first photo
we took was on a 1x. And if I try to zoom in here, you know
what? The post-processing on this is a lot better than I thought. When I was
taking the initial photo, I was looking at it like, ooh, it doesn't look very
good through like the preview, but now that I'm actually in the photo itself,
it looks a lot better than I thought. So, whatever post-processing magic
they're doing on this photo is actually doing some work here. 2x, same thing.
Yeah, zooming quite in. Again, once you start getting this close, you can
definitely see some of the issues, especially even some of the lines and
like the ShortCircuit style tiles we have. And as for as for our ultra wide,
holy cow, bro turned his FOV to like 80 in Minecraft. We got to take a selfie.
>> Jeez. >> That's a pretty good selfie camera. I'm
not saying the subject is that good, but like, man, my hair is crazy today. And
it's done a pretty good job at being able to highlight individual hairs and
whatever processing it's doing to these dead eyes. Feel like one thing I haven't
done in a while is take a video on one of these phones. It defaults to 1080p
30. We can do 1080p 60 or 4K 30. We'll
take a quick video of Lucky. Oh, wow. Hi, Lucky. Look how cute you are. Is it
stuttering? I can't tell if it's stuttering just because of the zoom or
if it's actually stuttering. I'm going to try doing one more video where I
don't zoom in and we'll see if that stuttering is still there.
>> Oh, the light comes on on the back. A RED RECORDING LIGHT.
>> OH, YEAH. LOOK AT THAT. >> COOL. >> YEAH, you got a little red recording
light that it's recording. Anyways, I've been recording a long time now. We
should uh we should see if it looks stuttery. It's got pretty good
stabilization. That's not bad. I've seen worse
stabilization on phones. The stuttering that I was experiencing when I was zooming in on that first video appeared
to only be on the zoom in. It's fine.
We're pretty spoiled. Like listen, I'm trying to take a new attitude with tech.
I'm trying not to buy into the hype of the overexpensive. I can't really say
that about a Pro Max, but you know what I mean? I'm trying to like look at these
entry level and these budget phones and find the highlights. This is going to be
good enough for like 95% of people out there. We're going to try the essential
button here. I think by default, Yep, it just took a screenshot, which is kind of
cool. You can add a note or whatever. But can we change that if I hold it? Oh,
now I'm recording. I I think I just took a voice memo. Maybe I have to go into
the settings to change it. I want to make sure that I can actually like configure it to do a bunch of different
stuff. I would probably just use it as a dedicated screenshot button. I don't think I'd do anything else with this,
but it looks like it's got its set limits on what it's going to do. OH, WE
SHOULD OH MY GOSH, we should talk about the light more on the back. Duh. I don't
care about the freaking essential button. Glyph interface ringtones. Oh,
yes. So, you can actually bind it to have like different ringtones make it
light up in different ways. Combining that with having different contacts that
you could bind different ringtones to, you could reach new peak laziness level.
Okay. Phone on the counter. You just see
what light is kind of going, what pattern. You're like, "Ah, that's the
old ball and chain. I can ignore it." Right? Versus, "Oh, that's the old ball
and chain. I can ignore it. Sorry." Oh,
there you go. So, there's an example. That's like one of the ringtone examples
that you can have. Let's try a different one. There's ripple. It's a fun gimmicky
feature, right? It's not something I think is like really practical, but I
think it's cool. One of the other practical things that they have about the glyph though is it can be used as
kind of a countdown timer for a photo. So let's say you have it set up on a
tripod, whatever. You hit the go, you run to get into place, you can see the
little bar go and then take the photo. So you kind of
have a more accurate time of it. That's kind of cool. You can have certain
notifications have it light up. Volume indicate apparently. Oh yeah, look at
that. I can adjust the volume and you can see the light go up and down. All
right, let's plug it in. Let's see if it like does charging. No, I CAN'T SEE MY
CHARGE LEVEL. NOTHING. Thought nothing would go wrong today.
>> You could have it bound to Uber so you can see how far your Uber is. Okay.
>> How is there an Uber integration and not a charging? There has to be a charging.
>> Actually, that's a good point. Yeah. The three glyph progress apps that they show
are Zomato, Uber, and Calendar. Where
the hell is charging? Nothing. We should go over the battery specs right now, I
guess, while it's charging. It is a 5,080 millia battery for the entire
world except for India. You get a 5,400 mAh battery. Not sure why you guys get a
bigger battery and we don't. features 50 watt fast charging and it claims that it
will do a 100% charge from zero in 64
minutes and 50% in about 22 minutes. Our
Labs results for that 100% charge were about 2 minutes slower, which I don't
know that's within variance in my opinion, but it is a little bit slower.
And the entire battery duration was 17
hours and 14 minutes, which is actually a pretty big improvement over last
year's 3A. It's again a lot lower than we've seen in some other phones. I think
recently we did the S26 Ultra and that one lasted like almost a whole day if
I'm not mistaken, but those are two different classes of phones. I I
shouldn't even be comparing them, right? As for that 50 watt charging claim they
had, it did hit it, but for like.1 of a
second, it basically went right back down to 40 watts after that and was able
to kind of maintain that charge until, you know, as it got more and more full,
it kept dropping down lower and lower. But it seemed like they kind of just hit
that 50 watt and they're like, "Woo, we got it. We hit it, boys. 50 watt
charging. Again, I don't know if it was down to our charger or or what it may
have been, but we didn't quite hit their claim. So, for an entry- level or budget
phone, it feels like you're getting some pretty cool premium features like that
120 Hz screen or just in general the size of the screen is pretty nice. It's
a lot bigger than some of the other budget phones, but the only one that's going to be able to determine if it's
budget enough is you if you think the price is acceptable. The base
configuration, which we have here, is $470
with the top config being 540ish. It's
536. So, it's a bit cheaper than the entry-le iPhone we looked at earlier,
but it's a bit more expensive than something like Samsung's A56 or Google's
10A. I've actually seen the Google Pixel 10a as cheap as like $270
when it was on sale, which I think a lot of things are going to struggle to
compete with that price. But, let me know what your guys' thoughts are down below. And hey, maybe which color you
prefer. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out the iPhone 17e, which I
unboxed a couple weeks ago. That was also a entry-level or budget phone, but
it was probably on the more expensive