When nothing's founder and chief executive left OnePlus to found a new
company, it seemed crazy. I mean, who
would leave the protective umbrella, not to mention near unlimited resources of
OPPO, to do your own thing, much less to
do nothing? And yet, with the recent news that
OnePlus is rumored to be ceasing global operations in the imminent future, it's
starting to look like a pretty smart move. And today I've got their latest
not flagship specifically that the Nothing Phone 4A Pro. So it's part of
their A- line, meaning it's more budget compared to the non A's. But it isn't
part of their CMF budget brand, but it's pro. So it's like better budget. Can we
call it that? It's for your better budget lifestyle, your BBL. Let's go
with the cute pink one. This is my cute pink BBL.
>> How long have you been sitting on that joke?
Hello. I love how many products come with a free IQ test these days. There we
are. Probably the biggest benefit that nothing boasts for the phone for a pro
is its gaming prowess, which doesn't make a ton of sense if you just look at
the spec sheet because it actually uses the same processor as the Nothing Phone
for a nonpro. Is what you might think if you didn't
look closely. See, Qualcomm's branding for their processors has gotten
shockingly confusing lately. See, I'd forgive you for seeing Snapdragon 7 Gen
4 and thinking, "Well, what the heck? Nothing. Why did you downgrade from the
Snapdragon 7s Gen 4? Surely the S is for
speed." Well, no. It turns out the S is for slower. The nonS is clocked higher
and has a significantly better GPU, which helps drive the up to 144 hertz
1080p plus class display that can reach
up to 5,000 nits peak brightness. Where do you want to put the asterisk in the
edit? Should we put it here? Here? Here, or here? >> No, the second spot looked nice.
>> Okay, we're going to put it here. We'll get to that later, though. First, let's
have a look at the star of the show, which, as you might expect from nothing,
is of course their latest take on their glyph interface. This is the Glyph
Matrix. It has 137 mini LEDs, and is
designed to do everything from showing a custom icon when you have a particular
person calling to having a progress bar for your Uber pickup. It can also be a
clock, show battery status, or be used as a timer countdown. Isn't that just
another clock? Also on the back we have a 50 megapixel main shooter, 50
megapixel three and a half times optical tetroprism telephoto lens and a mystery
meat ultrawide. Seriously though, nothing doesn't give a spec for this. We
had to get the 8 megapixel spec from a third party. Why also got a flash and
actually a really pleasing construction. Very, very extremely iPhoneike, but in a
good way. nicely rounded. Wobbles on your table like you like like you like
actually quite a bit better than some of the recent iPhones thanks to the wider
camera bump here. It seems quite usable. Dude, my Fold 7 has been driving me
bananas. Look at this. Are you seeing this?
>> How could we not see it? >> It's like I could practically do like a kick flip with this thing without even
>> Oh, that would be gnarly. >> We'll look at it a little closer in a second. First, let's have a look at
what's included in the package. Nothing knows that there is no accessory
ecosystem for their products. So, they give you a clear plastic case. Thank
you. Nothing. You also get a USBC toC 2.0 charging cable. Um, that's to go
with the USB 2.0 charging port, a SIM
removal tool, and that's it for the accessories is what I would say if I
didn't notice that there does in fact appear to be a pre-applied screen
protector. You'll love to see it. Outside of the phone, we've got a noise
cancelling mic up here, earpiece speaker here. Ah, yes, the essential key. This
takes you straight to your essential space, which is pretty much a quick way
to annotate voice memos on top of things like screenshots and photos. It can also
be used, seriously though, like old school voice recorder style, where you
flip the phone upside down, hold it, and record a memo to yourself. Future line
is here. Holding the button to record works in any orientation. What this note
was about was their flip to glyph, which is putting it down, holding the button,
and then this cute little red recording light goes on, and it does this, and
then you can hold it again to turn it off, maybe for like recording an
interview or something. It uses AI to record a transcript or summary, and can
be synced with your Google calendar to remind you later. At the bottom, we've
got our SIM tray, charging port, and speaker. And then over on the right,
we've got our volume rocker and lock button. Wow, is it ever iPhone. Like I
mean, you know, phones all kind of look the same these days. I get it. I haven't talked about RAM. It gets either 8 or 12
gigs of RAM with 128 or 256 gigs of
storage, which is pretty well aligned with its positioning as a budget
flagship. It's got Wi-Fi 6, which is not the latest and greatest, but probably
good enough for a phone, as well as Bluetooth 5.4. As for NFC, it was a
little confusing. The 4A seems to have it, except not in India, and then the 4a
Pro seems to have it everywhere. Nothing. Can you just make this more
clear? That'd be great. On the subject of things that are clear, let's talk
about the front glass. It's using Corning's Gorilla Glass 7i, which is yet
another product with a confusing name. What is 7i? I can find almost no
independent analysis of it with pretty much everyone just quoting Corning's
press release, which is to say that it is seventh generation glass, but for an
intermediate device, so like a a mid-range device, which means what
exactly? How does it compare to Victus? I understand that companies are afraid
to tell me that, you know, one of their products is worse than the other, but
they also really, really want me to believe that one of them is better than
the other. You see the problem here, right? You got to tell me what's worse
about this one so that I understand what's better about Victus. Anyhow,
let's have a look at what's under that glass after this quick message from our
sponsor. Look at your desk. Look at your case. Something is missing. Whatever
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he'll already know yes, you are. You can
use it to show things like system metrics, chat channels, weather apps,
how much you owe on your finance burrito. You name it, you can display
it. It's super easy to install either with the included stand or screw it into
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ball. Add another display to your setup with the Corsair Xenon Edge at the link
below. All right, I guess we'll get to using it in a sec, but this gives me a
perfect opportunity to talk about system updates. Like other economically
conscious devices, nothing is not offering the longest of software support
Windows for this device. It's not bad. 3 years of Android and 3 years of
security. But when you're in a similar price bracket as something like a Pixel
10a, that is a little tough when Google's
offering what was it 7 years I believe of full software updates. So I'm really
counting on Nothing OS and the Essential Button to elevate the experience, which
isn't impossible. Pixel OS is not the
clean stock Android that it once was. This is taking a really long time, so
hear me out. We'll just show you the black one. Oh, I like the black
actually. This is nice.
Wow. Other than that, definitely with Marquez on this one, the black one is a
fingerprint magnet. The pink is is quite serviceable as far as fingerprint
rejection goes. Guess my BPL stays pink after all. Nothing OS. It's been a
while. I love the look in theory. It's so cool. In practice, I kind of rely on
the colors of my icons as a visual cue for quickly finding them within folders,
but your muscle memory mileage may vary on that. Let's fire up the display.
Let's talk about that. Yep, that's HDR.
All right. Unfortunately, what it isn't is 5,000 nits. We were able to reach
about the same as last generation. So, in the 1500 nit range in regular
content. In order to achieve 5,000 nits, we actually had to use a specific file
that nothing provided and we had to watch in portrait mode. So, take it for
what it is. A marketing bullet point that ultimately doesn't affect the fact
that this is a pretty nice viewing experience. For most people, this will
still probably be one of the nicest displays in your house. Let's check out
the speakers. Oh, I think it's got an amplified earpiece, too. Yeah, it does.
Not always a given on non- flagships.
Really not bad. Past about 70%, it gets kind of distortiony, but
that's about 70%. It's pretty freaking loud and pretty freaking good. That's a
really pleasant surprise. Coming back to the visuals, as you'd expect from a high
refresh rate display, scrolling is nice and smooth and natural. Although, it is
worth noting that while nothing does boast up to 144 hertz refresh rate, you
are not going to get that in all games. We found that most games were capped at
120 Hz for a high refresh rate and some even ran as low as 30s because even
though it does have a really strong GPU for a mid-range phone, it is still a
mid-range SOC. To nothing's credit, though, the cooling on this mid-range
SOC seems to be extremely well managed. They're using a vapor chamber, and we
found that from our first run of Wildlife Extreme all the way to our what
what did we do 20 runs or something like that, it never throttled. So beware of,
oh, this flagship phone is so fast compared to a mainstream phone. As long
as you don't play your game for longer than you 10 or 20 minutes, at least
you'll get consistent performance out of a device like this. Biometric
authentication is handled with an in-creen fingerprint sensor. Remember when this was like space age technology
and now it's on quote unquote budget phones? I'll never forget that showcase
behind like the main CES show floor in this little booth where they're like,
"Oh, you're not going to believe this." some and and I didn't it was it was
incredible. Now we just take it for granted. All right. Yeah, it's it's
quick. Look at Look how quick it is. Never lose the sense of wonder, guys.
Just because something is, you know, mainstream now doesn't mean we should stop appreciating it. Let's talk camera.
Need a new set. Our new set is way better lit. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's good
that that did a little bit of processing on that image. Wow, it hates your
sweater, Sean. I mean, I'm zooming in a
lot, though. Skin tones are a little
funky in some cases. Also, you've got a little bit of kind of like wide line of
style distortion over towards the edge of the image here. It's part for the
course, guys. Again, you know, let's never lose track of the miracle that is
these incredible highfidelity recording devices in our pockets. It's not the
best camera I've ever seen on a phone, but it's not bad. As for the telephoto,
yeah, that's pretty good. Oh, actually, your skin tones are way better on the
telephoto, too, Lucas.
He looks sickly in this one. Do they claim OIS on the telephoto as well? Cuz
there is a fair bit of stabilization happening. I just don't know if it's optical.
>> Yeah. OS and DIS. >> What I'm bound to be less impressed by
is what is it they claim? Up to 140x zoom. It's so zoomed you actually need
like a context viewfinder so you can know exactly what the crap it is that
you're looking at. The electronic stabilization is pretty impress.
It actually looks like AI generated like
text like the older AI when it couldn't do real text. Okay, but what if I just
used the 3 and 1/2x telephoto and cropped it? Yeah, I think this is more
readable than what we had before. Yep, I can read this. I could not get the word
Commodore out of that before. Now that I know what it is, I can see it. But here,
I can actually read it. It's such a simple test. You'd think phone
manufacturers would do it. Hey, let's try out the take better selfies with
glyph mirror. Sure, I'll try it now. I
don't know if it'll do anything about like the crow's feet, but uh hey, I'm
willing to try anything at this point. Oh,
obviously we don't have a ton of resolution here. If I wink an eye, is it
changing >> a little bit? Let's Let's try to take a picture. I assume I use the volume key.
Oh, yeah. They're right. That is better. In all seriousness though, I think I'd
rather have a full color viewfinder if I'm trying to take a selfie. I'm going
to actually try to take a good picture. Did I take a picture?
Dude, I feel like a complete boomer right now. Okay, that time I took a
picture. What the crap is going on here? This picture is like crazy like softened
with what looks like a bunch of fake bokeh. Is this their ultra XDR? It can't
be. So ultra XDR is their kind of high dynamic range thing. They take what was
it like 12 exposures or something like that. Oh, sorry. 13. Okay, so high
dynamic range pretty much. I just I I wasn't in portrait mode. I'm so confused
why it went and it did portrait modey things. More realistic look. Okay, I'm
gonna turn ultra XDR off and see if I get a normal freaking looking picture of
me. This the bokeh actually looks real
and somewhat natural. Here it's obviously done in post. And here it also
looks done in post. And I don't understand why that would be. Huh. Very
confusing. And I guess I can just avoid the whole thing by just using the selfie
cam. Yes, there's just a normal selfie. Like seriously, does this look like AI
Linus or what? Well, guys, your mileage may vary with the camera. To be clear,
it's not like I can't get good results out of it. There's some good-looking
pictures here. It's just you might need to play around with the settings a
little bit and find what works for you. I just want to do a quick video recording just to see if it has that
classic Android jutdder. This is not a
useful amount of resolution. Nothing. So, have you guys seen those cool like
rear displays that you can get for some phones? This is not that. Okay.
Definitely some anomalies and a little bit of that classic Android hitching.
You can really see it doing weird sharpening stuff. Actually, with uh with
this, it doesn't know what it is and it doesn't know what to do with it. That light was like at this price, it's not
going to be an iPhone 17 Pro, though. We've got to be realistic. And that also
applies to battery life. We got just over 17 hours in our endurance video
playback test. And as for charging, nothing claims up to 50 watts. We didn't
see 50 watts for more than a very short period of time. But it's worth noting
that this is actually pretty normal to have a charging curve like this. Labs
did a wonderful article on it and we did manage to see a full charge of the 5,000
plus mAh battery in about 65 minutes
which I think is like super reasonable. No wireless charging though. Pixel 10
has wireless charging and that's a big feature for some people. I still plug my
phone in every night but I think I'm the weird one. Now let's try out the essential button.
I made a screenshot. This is a screenshot of my desktop that I wanted
to save for posterity and that's in my essential space now which I believe is
this. Yeah. You know what's funny is this is actually really close to the
photo app that I want. I had this idea I talked about on WHO and apparently there
is some stuff that's kind of similar to this. I haven't tried any of it yet, but
the idea was like I take a picture and then I go, you know, blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah and then that's stored in the metadata for that picture
so that when I'm looking at it again later, I could like see the context of
it. Hey, this was that time the kids did that funny thing. To be clear, this can
take photos like that, but I would want something that's baked right into the metadata of the photo file, not some
third party app that I mean, hey, I'm wishing nothing nothing but the best. I
hope that they succeed and exist forever, but they might not. So, I don't
want to put all my metadata in that. I made that mistake with Canon Zoom browser. Ah,
>> had a bunch of like detailed almost like a journal attached to all these pictures
in my Zoom browser. Reformatted my computer and it was gone. Note to self,
the essential app actually seems kind of cool. It's just really tough for me to
um lock into a function like this that
is not necessarily going to be supported on my next phone. That's something that
Apple does a really good job of having continuity in their ecosystem. Maybe
there's an opportunity for nothing to make this app available, but you know,
as a paid app across the rest of the Android ecosystem, I don't know. I can't
tell them how to run their business. But what I can tell you guys is to subscribe
to ShortCircuit.