Nothing launched its newest budget phone on July 7, and it's landed in the strangest spot the company has ever put a device in. The Phone (4b) costs £299 / €329, keeps the brand's signature glowing back, and by most accounts is a perfectly pleasant phone. The problem? What sits £50 above it on the shelf.
What £299 buys you
The Phone (4b) is built around a 6.77-inch AMOLED screen running at 120Hz (2344×1088). Inside: Qualcomm's Snapdragon 6 Gen 4, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of UFS 2.2 storage. The battery is 5,200mAh in most markets — India gets a bigger 6,000mAh cell.
Cameras are a 50MP main and 8MP ultrawide on the back, 16MP up front. It ships with Android 16 and a support promise that's hard to argue with at this price: three years of OS upgrades, six years of security patches.
Early impressions are warm, too. 9to5Google found performance and build quality satisfying, and reviewer Ben Schoon raved about the blue version — "easily my favorite blue since Google's 'Really Blue' on the original Pixel."
A cleaner launch than last time
The (4b) also fixes a self-inflicted wound. Its predecessor, the Phone (3a) Lite, shipped with "Lock Glimpse" lockscreen ads that pushed users toward junky AI-generated clickbait sites. The backlash was loud, and Nothing walked the feature back in January. On the (4b), the ads are simply gone.
The £50 problem
Now the awkward part. At £299/€329, this phone costs £50/€80 more than the (3a) Lite it replaces — and just £50/€20 less than Nothing's own Phone (4a).
That tiny gap is the whole story. The (4a) beats it nearly everywhere: a third rear camera with a 50MP telephoto, a sharper display, a better selfie camera, a faster chip, faster storage, stronger water resistance. For the price of a takeaway dinner, the upgrade argument makes itself.
Blame the memory market
Nothing didn't want to price it this way. Memory costs have exploded — AI data centers are gobbling up supply, and the industry has taken to calling it "RAMageddon." Budget hardware gets squeezed hardest, because there's no margin to absorb the hit. Nothing said as much a few weeks back when it canceled an upcoming CMF phone over RAM costs.
So the (4b) would've been an easy recommendation at £249. Instead it sits in a dead zone: too close to its better sibling, too far above the phone it replaces.
What happens next
The Phone (4b) won't be sold in the US, where the Phone (4a) Pro stays Nothing's cheapest option. Elsewhere, its fate probably comes down to patience. Discounts tend to show up within a few months, and a Phone (4a) price hike — which 9to5Google calls increasingly inevitable given component costs — would flip the comparison overnight.
Until then, this is a well-made phone with a strong update policy and no obvious buyer. And it's a neat snapshot of what the memory crisis is doing to budget phones: the hardware keeps getting better, the prices keep getting worse, and somewhere in the middle the value math quietly broke.
