Following the announcement of its audacious new budget mobile plan, the Nothing Phone (4b) has been detected on a well-known benchmarking platform – and there’s cause for measured enthusiasm.
The past week delivered the not-so-pleasant news that there won’t be an immediate successor (at least this year) to our top budget phone, the CMF Phone 2 Pro.
Rather, Nothing is refining and clarifying its offerings with a brand new budget smartphone. The Nothing Phone (4b) is poised to mirror the Nothing Phone (4a) featuring a similar semi-transparent aesthetic and just a single camera – which could indeed be encouraging news.
Now the Nothing Phone (4b) has emerged on the popular Geekbench benchmarking site, under the codename Nothing A009P, and it mostly leaves us feeling optimistic.
Nothing has also announced via X to reveal the 7 July release date (at 11am BST) for the Phone (4b), along with a flickbook-style video showcasing designs, stating: “Pause to see Phone (4b).” However, it’s somewhat of a tease as a plethora of different designs of the phone’s back whiz by.
Update: The design has been officially unveiled, confirming several key features.
Performance Peek: Insights from Geekbench
This debut has indicated that Nothing’s new device will be equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip. It could be viewed as a step up from the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro that drives the CMF Phone 2 Pro, albeit perhaps only slightly.
Nothing has confirmed that the Phone (4b) will utilize Snapdragon, alongside a blueprint-style image displaying a corner of the device, but has not officially disclosed which model.
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chip is nearly a year newer than the Dimensity 7300, and boasts a more contemporary ARMv9 CPU architecture (compared to ARMv8).
In practical terms, it doesn’t appear to yield a significant performance enhancement, as the Dimensity 7300 Pro’s higher clock speed may counterbalance those benefits of the newer chip.
The single-core score of 1088 and a multi-core score of 3155 registered here just narrowly surpass my own CMF Phone 2 Pro results of 1012 and 2951 respectively. Essentially, it’s a draw, though there is certainly scope for further optimization before the Nothing Phone (4b) hits the market.
Regardless of the merits of the two processors, we can confidently assert this: the Nothing Phone (4b) won’t represent a setback compared to the outstanding CMF Phone 2 Pro in terms of performance.
Summary: Discussion on Chips
Well, there you go, the Nothing Phone (4b) is getting a Snapdragon enhancement. While it may not be clinching the speed record, it’s definitely not trailing behind its CMF predecessor either. So yes, worth a look.
