Introducing Nothing Phone 4a

So what are we talking about today then? Back again. Another phone. And the same thing. Always pretty exciting. It's like Christmas morning. I've done it really badly already. It's even got the wrap on it. Best bit. This is for A. A-Series is always a really fun project for us because it's a little bit more playful and you can take a few more risks there. From my perspective that gives us a lot of opportunity to really explore different colours and materials. We're thinking about colour for this. It's something that we've been thinking about for a while is how do we take this iconic colour palette and the basis of which is kind of white and black and red and grey and how do we just expand the appeal of that? If we think about how do we get to something like pink, how do we sell it in? I guess it comes straight from red so that's helpful in terms of acceptability because it's already there. Pink is actually just desaturated red, guys. Don't worry, your masculinity can be intact. Introducing any sort of tinted colour is quite difficult. It really tends to alter how you perceive an object. What we noticed thinking about how to apply tint was that when we put the tint inside the transparency, because of how the light interacts with the resin underneath, you get this incredible sense of depth which makes our products look really lively and we do have all of this detail under the transparency so it's really nice to celebrate that. It's really interesting to start to think about how those two things are related and what tone works well, how the thickness of that glass and the amount of tint that's in it really changes the appearance. So it's quite a complicated process but what we wanted to do was to keep what's underneath as close to white as possible. So we started actually with it being identical. Then we added a tiny bit of tint to the resin. When you have that tiny bit of tint and then the tint that lives in the back, you get something that matches really closely this much more saturated colour that we have on the mid-frame. Because we've applied the colour in this quite different way, it just feels really different and you get this really intriguing visual richness with lots of tonality and it really just highlights all of the details that are underneath. It's a very complex journey of fine-tuning but I think the end result looks great. Inspiration comes from everywhere. I always get made fun of because my camera roll is full of pictures of rubbish but often those piles of rubbish have got really nice colours in them so I keep doing it. There's a lot of amazing old tech references that we go back to very often. There's a really great set of images of this pink iMac which is absolutely sick. We think about trends in terms of global behaviours because obviously we operate on planet Earth but we don't really buy into this more commercialised end of the trend universe where we've got your Pantone colours of the year. Yeah, we're just a bit braver so it goes through this magic pasta maker of the ID team and everybody's pulling references from all different places so we try and keep it unpredictable I guess. The response has been really interesting actually just even when we're receiving models back everybody is really drawn to the pink and I think it's nice just to expand on what we've done previously so that's always a big moment for me. Each of our devices has had this light interface on the back of the phone which is there to prompt you to put your phone face down more often. That's a sign that you're blocking out the screen and the things that can be really distracting on there but the Glyph interface allows you to get just a little bit of important information surfaced to the back of the phone so you can stay connected to the most important things whilst blocking out what you might not need in that moment. Yeah, it's a lot more intentional in terms of the stuff that kind of makes it to the back of the phone on the Glyphs. The Glyph interface on the 4A is six white LEDs and for the first time the red recording LED is on the A-series as well. We care very deeply about this red recording square being recorded or recording someone is quite a big event it's like a thing of a lot of consequence so we kind of always think that this red square in that real estate is very very important it always deserves to be on our devices. Well for a while we were looking at when the Glyphs were off you'd still see these gradiated steps of brightness or I guess the kind of just like colour tone of the film over the Glyphs. As we started to look at some of these animations or some of the more functional stuff like what is the flip to Glyph animation or how would a timer work at that point we felt like it was much clearer from a functional point of view to have this full range of brightness available for every LED. I kind of imagine it as what if you took one column of the matrix on phone 3 and just expanded it, made it bigger so it's this 1 by 7 LED matrix. We get really excited by the idea of being able to express the same fundamental principle of the Glyphs in different shapes and forms. The Glyphs on 4A are kind of a linear expression of the Glyphs where each pixel or LED is kind of set next to each other how they kind of light up and move around communicates information. So yeah these were different kinds of states we were drawing out at the time we didn't necessarily have any ideas on what things might look like exactly so we were just kind of drawing out different ideas for how would you interpret essential notifications on something like this. How would you maybe do a timer for example. I remember we were reviewing down here on this table and I think we had all the lights off and I've got a picture of it of you I think holding one of the prototypes and just being in a dark room and seeing something with these lights flashing for the first time. It's definitely one of those kind of magic moments of oh yeah that could work, that could be it. So yeah for a lot of the functions we're always kind of starting at scratch when we're designing the animations because you don't want to just copy and paste something from a previous device because you might find something new and we've referenced some things from Phone 3 but it feels quite unique. I think a really good example of this is the glyph timer. So on Phone 3 we have this hourglass effect and we've got the same thing on 4A now but it's just this one single column of sand that falls. So yeah the communicative features the more kind of productivity focused features like glyph timer where you can set a timer and see the status on the back. The glyph progress feature which is now powered by Android 16's live updates so we have better compatibility across more apps now and then the more kind of system level things like the camera shutter, the camera countdown. There's another one where we've referenced what we did on the Phone 3 Matrix with this kind of iris shutter closing. A really intentional way to use this phone or the glyph interface on this phone is to just see that you've missed something from someone important. So yeah I think that's something I'd like people to take away is there's many ways to use the glyph interface. It's supposed to be something that you can kind of work into the way you live, the way you use technology and is useful in a very specific way. We look at a lot of references but it's also nice that we create our own references and when someone's making a lot of sketches or renders or concepts and you look at them you're inspired but no one else can see that. A lot of times we're looking at train station displays. One of our bulbs upstairs ran out of mercury so the bulbs have gone pink. Yeah I think we're always just looking at anything that lights up. You can find inspiration in anything Jordan. The main story with 4A is one of refinement. Now when we look back across the whole of the A-series we can see how the design has evolved. The great thing from my point of view is that we have that same kind of core team of designers working on all of the A-series right from the beginning with 2A. So there's this great continuity through the series. I feel like with 2A we kind of found something quite special. It kind of found an audience that it really appealed to and struck a chord with and that's great to kind of have that and then build on that. We were kind of hoping that we're starting to build a brand in the A-series. And then I guess moving on to 4A the natural thing to do was to find a really nice middle ground between the 2A and the 3A and just the right balance of softness and these harder elements and just the right balance of curved lines and straight lines. I guess the big news is that we brought a periscope camera to the base model. It means we've sort of somehow shrunk camera bump down to what you see here. This is the actual periscope camera module that we had in 3A Pro and this is just way, way more compact. It's a tetraprism design. It goes in here and then it bounces up and then it bounces back down and then it bounces up and then I think it does a loop and then it goes in the loop. As much as kind of reasonably possible we tried to show the real components. In reality that is very challenging a lot of the time. So what we do is represent what you see underneath in that particular part of the phone through the way that we design these cover panels. So it does still feel authentic to the hardware. But there was something about this of how we can represent the battery how can we show and represent this engineering the connectors for the FPCs the coil. They are authentic but they're also telling a bit of a story which we think is a good thing. I describe it as this unintentional beauty that comes from the way these products are engineered so when you look at this PCB A bracket there's just so much amazing detail in here that we can kind of feed off for the next phone that we're designing and the way it kind of combines plastic and metal is super cool and the interplay between these two materials was something that we wanted to work more with and kind of bring through to the design a bit more than what we had done in the past. When you look at the actual size of the PCB it's typically about this size so where we have this division line between that top portion and the part below that now kind of lines up much more closely with where the real PCB actually ends with more emphasis put on this lower portion it just elongates the product a little bit there's a bit of an elegance that comes with that and when you look at some of our audio products you see this racetrack pill shape even on the earbuds so it was really nice to be able to kind of introduce that onto the phones to create this kind of real harmony running through all of our products and in fact over the whole back of the product there's some relief there's some three dimensionality in this plane lots of people were unsure about that camera arrangement because it was quite striking you know even quite senior people I think that's fine because all really cool stuff that exists was not a dead set, especially if it's unique if it's unique usually it feels a bit funny before you put it out there. If this camera island isn't perfectly symmetrical we're dead, the design is dead I don't know who, but someone's getting fired Yeah? Why you always gotta be so mean to me? Part of our design language is about looking at the engineering and bringing that through to the outside so that's a lot of stuff which is very now, it's very current it's the latest cutting edge technology but then we're taking inspirations and throwing those in, you know things from 40, 50, 60 years ago and that's I think where the really exciting stuff happens and we get this amazing plurality with what you see in the end result. I feel like so much stuff now is so sort of commercialised, focus grouped looking at what everyone else, the contemporaries are doing, it's almost like no one really has a perspective they're just keeping up with everyone else and really preoccupied. There's different times in the past where people did that a bit less and actually it came from a more optimistic place or it came from a place of trying to discover something I mean we always say this but the worst thing you can do is look at phones, if you're designing a phone it's so uninspiring to just look at other phones and I really like the fact that there's someone reaching for something and someone trying to find a future. I guess we've got to find those people that can remind us that it's not just a mathematical equation where you ask a group of strangers to come into a room and tell you what colour they like because who the hell wants to do that? I think you have to be trying to do something special to make something special so that was a complete rant Oh yeah, Nightrider Can we play the Nightrider theme tune? It's brilliant, yeah