The Nothing Phone (4b) is here and, with it, what feels like a better attempt at building an even-cheaper budget phone than what came before, though it is a lot more expensive this time.
Nothing’s journey in smartphones brought it to the release of Phone (3a) Lite last year, which was a pretty confusing and, frankly, messy launch. The device was a rehash of the cheaper CMF Phone 2 Pro, with the notable downside of including lockscreen ads that were strange, to say the least. “Lock Glimpse,” as we reported, existed to send users to a truly bizarre and sketchy blog of what appeared to be AI-generated clickbait found across a host of different websites, with a questionable privacy policy to top it all off.
Nothing has largely walked back lockscreen ads and, on Phone (4b), they’re not in place at all (at least on our review unit), and that’s just the start of what feels like a better attempt as a lower-market budget phone from Nothing.
The Nothing Phone (4b) is a pretty simple step down from Phone (4a). It has a 6.77-inch 120Hz AMOLED display (2344×1088) that looks good in person, a Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset that feels fast enough in general use, 8GB of RAM, 128GB or 256GB of UFS 2.2 storage, and a 5,200 mAh battery (except in India, where it’s 6,000 mAh), all with Android 16 out of the box (with 3 years of OS updates and 6 years of security updates – not bad at all).
