Nothing Phone 4b’s Sleeker Glyph Bar Hides a Razor-Thin Discount

Nothing’s Phone (4b) goes on sale in India today, priced at ₹34,999 with a redesigned 45-LED Glyph Bar brighter than any light strip the company has shipped before. The phone launched globally on July 7 and reached UK and European buyers this month at £299 (around $400) and €329, undercutting the pricier Phone (4a) by a slim margin.

That margin is the story. Nothing’s own numbers show the 4b costs roughly £50 less than the 4a while dropping a telephoto camera, a faster chip and a brighter screen, a gap opened by a global memory shortage that also killed the company’s cheaper CMF phone this year.

Nothing Reworks the Glyph Bar

The redesigned light strip is the headline feature. Nothing packed 45 individually controlled mini-LEDs into the bar, delivering up to 3,500 nits of brightness, a sleeker and tidier look than the segmented Glyph Interface on the Phone (4a).

Functionally, nothing changed. The bar still pings for notifications, tracks charging progress and displays custom light alerts, the same jobs Nothing’s Glyph lighting has always done.

Nothing’s own announcement calls it a signature Nothing look, built around a polycarbonate unibody borrowed from the pricier Phone (4a) Pro. The phone weighs 210 grams, measures 8.6mm thick, and comes in black, white and blue, alongside a red RCB Edition sold only in India.

It carries an IP64 rating, sealed against dust but officially rated only for splashes, not submersion. The 4b also packs Nothing’s biggest battery yet, a 5,200mAh cell globally and a 6,000mAh cell in India, charging at 33W through a 4,400mm² vapor chamber Nothing says keeps the phone cool under load.

Nothing rates the global battery for up to 18 hours of mixed use, including 22 hours of YouTube playback, and promises an 80-minute recharge from empty. Software leans on artificial intelligence: the phone ships with Nothing OS 4.1 on Android 16 and bundles ChatGPT integration, Google Gemini, Circle to Search and Nothing’s own Essential AI suite behind a dedicated Essential Key shortcut.

Nothing also says the stereo speakers deliver a 20% improvement in stereo effect over the Phone (4a), paired with 160 levels of volume control.

The Corners Nothing Cut to Reach £299

The Phone (4b)’s price comes from real trade-offs. Nothing reached £299 by downgrading the chip, the camera and the screen while keeping its design language intact.

The phone runs a Snapdragon 6 Gen 4, which GSMArena’s testing found is essentially a downclocked version of the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 inside the pricier Phone (4a). Camera hardware took the bigger hit: the 4b keeps a 50-megapixel main sensor with optical image stabilization but drops the 4a’s telephoto lens entirely, and selfie resolution falls from 32 megapixels to 16.

The 6.77-inch AMOLED screen still runs at 120Hz, but peak brightness drops to 2,000 nits from 4,500 nits on the 4a, and the panel swaps Gorilla Glass 7i for Dragontrail Pro Glass. Storage tops out at 256GB of UFS 2.2, a slower standard than the 4a’s UFS 3.1, and RAM caps at 8GB against the 4a’s 12GB option. The screen also supports a 1,000Hz touch sampling rate and 480Hz PWM dimming, paired with an Adreno 810 GPU.

Software tries to make up some of the difference. Nothing’s TrueLens Engine 4 processes photos with Ultra XDR, combining 13 RAW frames per shot to recover detail in harsh lighting, and a new Dual Capture mode records from both cameras at once.

The Phone (4b) also costs more than Nothing’s actual budget option. The three-way budget comparison including the Phone (3a) Lite shows that model launched at €250, a full €80 under the 4b, even though the 4b now carries the newer branding.

A Memory Shortage Forced Nothing’s Hand

The pricing squeeze traces back to a components crunch. Nothing confirmed earlier this year it would not launch a new CMF phone in 2026, canceling what had been expected as the CMF Phone 3 Pro.

Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis said the company could not build a phone that felt like “a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF,” given surging memory costs. Nothing co-founder Carl Pei has separately suggested smartphone prices are unlikely to fall soon because of the same crunch, according to Basic Tutorials, a German tech outlet.

Instead of raising CMF prices or cutting features further, Nothing folded its entry-level ambitions into the main lineup, creating the new “b” series with the Phone (4b) as its first member. 9to5Google senior editor Ben Schoon called the underlying pressure “RAMageddon” in his hands-on review, part of the same AI-driven rally in memory chip stocks that has squeezed device makers all year.

The realignment leaves Nothing with three tiers: numbered flagships, the upper-mid-range (4a) series, and the new (4b) budget line, replacing the two-brand structure of Nothing and CMF that carried the company through its earlier growth.

Nothing has already raised prices elsewhere in the range. The Phone (4a) now starts at $421.60 and the Phone (4a) Pro at $527.02, both up from their original launch prices, which the company ties to the same memory costs.

Is the Nothing Phone 4b Worth Buying Over the 4a?

Reviewers mostly say no. The Phone (4b) costs about £50 less than the Phone (4a) but loses the telephoto camera, a faster chipset, a brighter screen and stronger water resistance, and several outlets argue that gap is too thin to justify what buyers give up.

The Spec Sheet Downgrades

It’s impossible to recommend buying Phone (4b) when Phone (4a) is better for basically the same price.

9to5Google senior editor Ben Schoon wrote that verdict in his hands-on review, published the week both phones went on sale in the UK.

GSMArena’s own reader poll flagged the same gap, noting the 4b’s main sensor is smaller (1/2.76 inch versus 1/1.57 inch on the 4a) and that it drops the 4a’s 50-megapixel, 3.5x telephoto camera entirely. One GSMArena reader put it more bluntly: “Design superb, hardware crap.”

What Reviewers Found in Daily Use

Beebom’s review found real strengths. Its stereo speakers sounded louder and fuller than the pricier 4a’s, and the battery held up well across daily use, though the 2,000-nit peak brightness made the screen hard to read in direct sunlight.

Gaming performance struggled. Beebom clocked frequent frame drops in BGMI and Call of Duty: Mobile at 90 frames per second on the lowest settings, and Genshin Impact could not hold a steady 60 frames per second. Forbes contributor Prakhar Khanna also flagged non-uniform bezels with odd curvature at the corners and default camera tuning that leaned too contrasty out of the box.

For shoppers cross-shopping outside the Nothing lineup, GSMArena pointed to the Poco X8 Pro, a budget phone from Xiaomi’s Poco brand, which uses the same Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip but pairs it with a 108-megapixel camera, a 7,500mAh battery and a higher IP69K water-resistance rating for about €350.

Where the Phone 4b Goes on Sale First

The rollout is staggered market by market. India’s sale started today, July 14, through Flipkart and retail partners including Croma, Reliance Digital and Vijay Sales. Nothing had teased the original event months earlier, telling followers to mark their calendars for the launch on 7 July, when the phone debuted alongside the Nothing Ear (3a) earbuds.

UK pre-orders are already live at £299, with retail sales beginning July 17. Nothing confirmed pricing for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the same time, though it has not shared exact sale dates for each country.

• India – on sale now via Flipkart, Croma, Reliance Digital and Vijay Sales
• Germany, Austria, Switzerland – pricing confirmed, exact sale dates not yet set
• United Kingdom – pre-orders live, retail opens July 17
• United States – no release date or pricing announced
• Nigeria – no pricing or availability announced

Nothing also sold a matte red RCB Edition, made with the Indian Premier League cricket team Royal Challengers Bengaluru, exclusively at its Bengaluru store.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Nothing Phone 4b Have a MicroSD Card Slot?

No. The Phone (4b) ships in fixed 128GB or 256GB configurations of UFS 2.2 storage with no memory card expansion, matching the Phone (4a) but leaving buyers unable to add storage later.

How Does the Phone 4b’s Benchmark Score Compare to the Phone 4a’s?

In Geekbench testing cited by Basic Tutorials, the Phone (4b)’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 scored around 1,088 points in the single-core test and 3,155 in multi-core, compared with roughly 1,259 and 3,339 for the Phone (4a)’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 4.

Is the Nothing Phone 4b Actually Waterproof?

Not officially. Nothing rates it IP64, covering dust and light splashes only, though GSMArena reported internal testing survived submersion under 25 centimeters of water for 20 minutes.

Can I Still Buy the Nothing Phone 4b RCB Edition?

No. The matte red edition made with Royal Challengers Bengaluru sold for a single day at Nothing’s store in Bengaluru and was never listed online, according to TechCabal.

Will the Nothing Phone 4b Come to the United States?

Nothing has not announced a US launch. The Phone (4a) Pro remains the brand’s cheapest phone sold in the United States, and multiple outlets reported the 4b has no confirmed American release date.