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-As,
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 are you gonna sit in 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 4A non-pro,
is what you might think, if you didn't look closely.
See, Qualcomm's branding for their processors has gotten shockingly confusing lately.
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 non-S 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?
Now 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 tetra prism 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 iPhone-like.
But in a good way. Nicely rounded, wobbles on your table 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 kickflip 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 USB-C to C 2.0 charging cable.
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-canceling mic up here,
your peace 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? And I don't find it all kind of like 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 7th generation glass, but for an intermediate device.
So like a mid-range device. Which means what exactly?
How does it compare to Victus? I understand that companies are afraid to tell me
that 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 gotta 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. Alright, 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. Three years of Android and three years of security.
But when you're in a similar price bracket,
something like a Pixel 10a, that is a little tough when Google's offering
what was it, seven 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. Let's 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. Pink is quite serviceable as far as fingerprint rejection goes.
Guess my BBL 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 1,500-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 distortion-y,
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 hertz
for high refresh rate and some even ran as low as 30.
It's 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 would 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 10 or 20 minutes. At least you'll get consistent performance
out of a device like this. Biometric authentication is handled
with an in-screen 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. And I didn't.
It was incredible. Now we just take it for granted.
All right. Yeah, it's quick.
Look at 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. We have a new set. Our new set is way better.
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 doing it 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 par for the course, guys, again, you know,
let's never lose track of the miracle that is
these incredible high fidelity recording devices
in our pockets. It's not the best camera I've ever seen on a phone,
but it's not bad. Ask 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?
Because there is a fair bit of stabilization happening. I just don't know the topical.
Yeah, OIS and EIS. 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 impressive. Whoa!
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 3.5x 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... Ooh, 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 hey, I'm going 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 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 like 12 exposures or something like that.
Oh, sorry, 13. Okay, so high dynamic range pretty much.
I just, 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 going to 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 A.I. 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
to see if it has that classic Android jitter. 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 this, it doesn't know what it is and it doesn't know what to do with it.
The 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 10a 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.
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 WAN Show
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 blah 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 Ken and Zoom Browser. I had a bunch of like detailed, almost like a journal
attached to all these pictures in my Zoom Browser reformatted by computer and it was gone.
Note to self, the essential app actually seems kind of cool.
It's just really tough for me to 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.