Nothing CEO Carl Pei today confirmed that “some products”, launching before the end of March, will have UFS 3.1 storage. This quite obviously refers to the Phone (4a) series, though which exact device(s) will be blessed with UFS 3.1 storage and which will miss out remains to be seen.
Last year, the Nothing Phone (3a) and Nothing Phone (3a) Pro launched in early March, which is why we assume that their successors are what Pei is talking about. Those devices use UFS 2.2 storage, a decision which Nothing explained at the time as not being “about cutting costs, but about putting resources where they matter most”.
Nothing Phone (3a) Pro
Rather hilariously, the company then went on to say that “UFS 3.1 sounds great on paper, but in everyday use, its benefits are often marginal compared to optimizations in software, battery life, and display quality”. So one year later the benefits are less marginal? We can’t fathom why Nothing couldn’t just own up to the fact that this was, obviously, a cost-cutting decision.
Anyway, that’s all been walked back now. Carl Pei says brands face “a simple choice” now, while confronting the huge increases in RAM pricing driven by investments in AI data centers: “raise prices, by 30% or more in some cases, or downgrade specs”. He goes on to say that “the more specs for less money model that many value brands were built on is no longer sustainable in 2026″.
Translation: the Nothing Phone (4a) devices will either come with downgraded specs compared to their predecessors, or higher prices, by up to 30%. Pei says this is actually good news for his company, as it learned early on that it couldn’t win on spec sheets alone, thus choosing to focus on “perfecting the user experience, proving that how a phone looks and feels matters far more than its raw numbers”. And yet, Nothing’s sales numbers compared to its competitors disagree.