The European Union's battery regulation requires portable batteries in devices sold after February 2027 to be removable and replaceable by the end user, and most phone makers have spent two years lobbying for exemptions or planning minimum-effort compliance. Nothing took the opposite approach. The Phone 4, announced Wednesday in London at EUR 649, has a back panel that releases with a slider and a 5,400 milliamp-hour battery that lifts out on a pull tab. No adhesive, no heat gun, no screws. It took me 84 seconds the first time. The phone still carries an IP68 rating, which is the detail everyone assumed was impossible.
How the sealing works
The back panel seats against a compressible gasket that runs the full perimeter, held by twelve spring-loaded latches that engage when the slider moves. It is closer to how a rugged camera body seals than how a phone does. Nothing's hardware lead, Adam Bates, said the team spent eleven months on the gasket compound alone, testing degradation across 500 open and close cycles at temperatures from minus 10 to 45 degrees Celsius. The published rating assumes the panel is properly latched, and the phone warns on screen if it detects otherwise through a contact sensor.
The battery itself sits in a rigid frame with a board-to-board connector rather than a flex cable, so insertion is a straight push with no alignment fussing. There is no separate SIM tray; the physical SIM slot is inside, which saves a sealing point. Nothing sells replacement cells for EUR 34 and has committed to stocking them for seven years, which is longer than the regulation requires and longer than most people keep a phone.
What it costs in thickness and weight
The phone is 8.9 millimeters thick and 208 grams. A comparable sealed flagship, the Pixel 11, is 8.2 millimeters and 194 grams. So the removable design costs about 0.7 millimeters and 14 grams, which is a real difference you can feel in the hand and a smaller one than the industry has implied for a decade. Nothing recovered some of the thickness by using a stacked board layout that puts the modem beneath the main SoC package.
Battery capacity is the other trade. At 5,400 milliamp-hours the Phone 4 is competitive but not class-leading, and a fully sealed design at the same dimensions could have fit perhaps 6,000 by using a shaped cell that conforms to the internal cavity. Removable cells must be rectangular and rigid enough to survive handling. In practice the phone ran 7 hours 40 minutes of screen-on time in my testing, which is a full day for anyone and short of the Pixel's 8 hours 50.
The story is rarely the launch. It is what breaks, what ships, and who owns the mess at 2 a.m.
The rest of the phone
The Phone 4 uses a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 4 rather than the newest part, which keeps the price down and costs perhaps 12 percent in sustained performance against 2026 flagships. The 6.7 inch LTPO OLED runs 1 to 144 hertz and reaches 1,600 nits in highlights. Nothing's Glyph interface, the light strips on the back, survives in reduced form because the removable panel constrains where LEDs can sit, and the company turned it into a single wide bar that handles notifications and charging status.
Cameras are the usual mid-flagship compromise. A 50 megapixel main sensor with optical stabilization is good in daylight and merely acceptable at night, a 50 megapixel ultrawide doubles as the macro, and there is a 3x telephoto that Nothing added after two generations of complaints. Processing has improved substantially from the Phone 3, with less aggressive sharpening and better skin tones. Against a Pixel it loses. Against anything else at EUR 649 it competes.
Software and support
Nothing OS 4.0 runs on Android 16 with an Android 17 update promised within four months of release. The company commits to five years of major Android versions and seven years of security patches, matching Google and Samsung, which is a meaningful promise from a company founded in 2020 and one that depends on Nothing existing in 2033. The interface remains the cleanest third-party Android skin, with a monochrome aesthetic that is either distinctive or affected depending on taste.
The company also publishes a repair manual with part numbers and sells display assemblies, charging ports, and camera modules directly, with iFixit as a second channel. iFixit scored the Phone 4 at 9 out of 10, the highest for any phone since the Fairphone 6. That is the second half of the repairability argument: a removable battery matters less if the screen replacement still costs 60 percent of the phone.
Whether anyone else follows
The regulation's text allows an exemption for devices meeting an IP rating, which is the loophole every major manufacturer has been walking toward. Nothing shipping an IP68 phone with a removable battery makes that exemption harder to justify, and European Commission staff have already cited the product in a working group. Samsung and Apple both have compliance plans that rely on the exemption plus improved repair programs.
The commercial question is whether buyers care. Surveys consistently show consumers say they want replaceable batteries and consistently show they buy on camera and screen. Nothing sells roughly 3 million phones a year against Samsung's 220 million, so a success here proves the engineering rather than the market. What it does do is remove the technical excuse, and regulators tend to remember which arguments turned out to be false.
Skarvonix will keep following this beat with reporting grounded in how systems behave outside the launch keynote.
