On occasion, I make the wrong call. Like the time I claimed Disney Plus would never take off, saying, “Who wants to pay yet another subscription for a bunch of kids’ movies?” Or the occasion I passed on an interview with Ed Sheeran because I’d “never heard of him”, months before he became a household name.
Well, here’s another thing I’m happy to add to the list: I’ve realized I was totally wrong about the design of Nothing’s phones. While I once thought the brand’s debut phone was more about style than substance, getting my hands on their latest model, the Phone (4a) Pro, has utterly converted me.
Don’t get me wrong: I was fully convinced by Nothing’s mission. Phone designs have become polished, but their iterative improvements have also become incredibly predictable, resulting in a lot of identical-looking handsets. And that’s why I was definitely open to some of the rule-shattering rhetoric leading up to the release of Nothing’s first handset, the Nothing Phone 1.
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And yet on the release of that device in 2022, I’ll admit I wasn’t totally blown away. While the brutalist-looking design dreamt up in collaboration with Teenage Engineering was definitely distinctive, I didn’t feel like it quite matched up to either the hype of a whole new direction in phone design, or to the best phones of the time in terms of hardware.
The much-vaunted transparent design didn’t seem to actually be, you know, transparent, while the limited utility of the Glyph Lights made them feel flashy yet a little gimmicky. It looked decent, but it wasn’t quite trailblazing enough to make me want to trade in my staid but still gorgeously refined flagship.
Putting the phone through its paces, I quickly realized how wrong I’d been in my judgments of Nothing’s debut. Not only does the company’s latest handset feel incredibly well built, but I actually think its design is pitched perfectly, looking distinctive enough to draw comment when you draw it out of your pocket while feeling wonderfully polished. And Nothing has put serious work into making features like its evolved Glyph Matrix feel actually useful, offering you countless ways to utilize it during your everyday activities. Its design feels smart without tripping into the self-seriousness so many smartphone brands fall into these days.
Honestly, I enjoyed using the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro so much, I was actively a little sad when the time came to switch back to my old handset. Don’t get me wrong — my trusty iPhone offers superior photography with richer, more consistent colors and a more powerful chipset. But still, Nothing’s handset is the first Android phone I’ve genuinely missed when switching back to my usual phone.
Why I’ve been converted by the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro
So why have I become such a big fan of this handset? Well, there are several reasons, all of which connect to smart design choices made by the brand.
First off, the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro exhibits a seriously premium-feeling build for its price. I know some Nothing purists will miss the trademark transparent back plate that its phones are known for, but the aluminum unibody here is gorgeous, feeling weighty and premium even compared to my titanium iPhone 16 Pro. And its industrial-looking camera module keeps enough of that unorthodox Nothing design, so it still stands out from the crowd.
My appreciation of Nothing’s design nous doesn’t just run skin deep, though. I also love how elements of its design center your experience as a user, rather than just focusing on the next big trend.
Often, newer tech like folding phone screens seems flashy, but few brands have successfully managed to persuade consumers that these innovations offer significant utility in return for their higher price. Conversely, the (4a) Pro’s Glyph Matrix adds very little to the cost of the device, and yet Nothing has found a whole heap of ways for it to add to your experience, whether that’s displaying caller ID on a shake or showing a real-time progress bar for your inbound Uber.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying every smartphone brand should rush to copy glyph lighting into their own phones. But having the guts to innovate in these small ways and really thinking through how each addition can be tied into the user’s everyday experience could really shake up the homogenized smartphone market.
But, really, the biggest factor that’s won me over is that the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro is just flat-out fun. A lot of the new features to hit phone handsets in recent years have felt very po-faced, with incremental improvements framed as groundbreaking advancements.
Conversely, Nothing’s design doesn’t take itself too seriously, offering many ways to customize your phone that feel trivial yet joyful. Whether you want custom AI backgrounds to increase the scale of your most-used apps on your home screen, or, like I did, to set a custom cat glyph every time someone mentions your pet’s name, the (4a) Pro makes interacting with your phone a far more engaging experience.
I’m not ready to give up my flagship for a mid-market phone — at least, not yet. However, using the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro has got me excited again about the variety of forms phones could potentially take. After so long being resigned to uniform, incrementally updated candy-bar phones with ballooning camera modules, the changes feel like a real step in the right direction to me.
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josh.russell@futurenet.com (Josh Russell)
