After divulging its bold new budget phone plan, the Nothing Phone (4b) has been spotted on a popular benchmarking tool – and there’s reason for cautious optimism.
The past week has brought the not entirely welcome news that there will be no direct successor (this year at least) to our favourite budget phone, the CMF Phone 2 Pro.
Instead, Nothing is streamlining and clarifying its range with a brand new budget phone option. The Nothing Phone (4b) is shaping up to follow in the footsteps of the Nothing Phone (4a) with a similar semi-transparent design and just a single camera – which might actually be good news.
Now the Nothing Phone (4b) has appeared on the popular Geekbench benchmarking website, under the code name of the Nothing A009P, and it’s mostly left us feeling positive.
Nothing has also posted on X to share the 7 July release date (at 11am BST) for the Phone (4b), along with a flickbook-style video of designs, saying: “Pause to see Phone (4b).” However, it’s a tease as there are numerous different designs of the phone’s back flashing past.
Update: The design has now been officially shown, confirming some key features.
What the Nothing Phone (4b) Geekbench showing tells us
This appearance has revealed that Nothing’s new phone will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip. It’s arguable that this represents a step forwards from the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro that powers the CMF Phone 2 Pro, if only a diagonal one.
Nothing has confirmed the Phone (4b) will be powered by Snapdragon, along with a blueprint-style image showing a corner of the device, but not officially said which model.
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip is almost a year younger than the Dimensity 7300, and features a more modern ARMv9 CPU architecture (vs ARMv8).
It doesn’t seem to represent a huge performance boost in practice, with the Dimensity 7300 Pro’s higher clock speed likely offsetting those advantages from the newer chip.
The single core score of 1088 and multi-core score of 3155 listed here only just pips my own CMF Phone 2 Pro scores of 1012 and 2951 respectively. It’s pretty much a tie, though of course there’s room for further optimisation ahead of the Nothing Phone (4b) release.
Whatever the merits of the two chips, at least we can say this: the Nothing Phone (4b) won’t represent a downgrade on the brilliant CMF Phone 2 Pro in the performance stakes.
