Nubia Z11 Review – the affordable Chinese flagship phone

Have you guys seen the new Chinese flagship phone? Meet the Nubia Z11. This phone has been out for a while now in other regions like China but it’s just now coming to the states to compete with other flagship Android phones. But what does this phone do differently from the myriad of other high-end Android flagships that make it worth buying? Let’s find out in our Nubia Z11 review.

So, the Nubia Z11 doesn’t have the most original design but it is a pretty good-looking phone with solid build quality. It’s an all metal unibody rectangular slab that’s really thin, at 7.5 mm. It feels great in the hands and puts build quality on par with a lot of other flagships. It’s got rounded corners and slight tapers around the back and sides, which makes it more comfortable to hold, but because it’s bare aluminum and there aren’t any sharp or flat edges to help with the grip, the phone can be a little slippery and tough to hold onto at times.

Both the front and back design look very sharp and modern.

Because this is a Nubian phone you’ll notice some red accents on the phone like the ring around the camera lens and the bright-red capacitive keys along the bottom of the display to make the phone stand out a little more.

The Z11 also comes in a black and gold color if you want something a little more flashy or the standard silver and gray. Personally I think this second color option looks much nicer and makes the phone look a little bit more unique.

As usual on these devices, you’ve got the power button and volume rocker on the right side which are also made of metal. The material makes the buttons very cliquey and tactile and the position is good enough that they’re easy to reach and press with your thumb. On the left side is the SIM card slot that also houses a microSD card slot for expandable storage.

On top you have the headphone jack and IR blaster which can be really convenient for controlling your TV and other peripherals especially considering a lot of phones nowadays don’t have this feature.

Finally on the bottom you have the USB type-c port and what looks like dual speakers but only the right side houses a speaker while the other is just a microphone.

The speaker sounds fine and doesn’t get distorted when used at max volume but it’s a little on the quiet side and at half volume or less it becomes pretty tough to hear.

One the back of the device you also have a fingerprint sensor which has worked surprisingly well. It’s really fast, accurate and takes very little time to set up. So far we’ve had no issues with it and it’s been very reliable, being on par with some of the best fingerprint sensors on the market.

We love the fingerprint sensor placement on the Nubia Z11.

One of the most eye-catching parts about the Z11 is the display: it’s a 5.5” LCD display but instead of quadHD, like most high-end flagships, the Z11 display is actually 1080p. It’s very bright, it has very saturated colors, good viewing angles and it looks really sharp when browsing the web, playing games or watching YouTube videos.

The Z11 bright display featuring a nice blue effect photo.

What really makes the screen stand out though is that it’s basically bezeless on both sides and part of the reason why Nubia has been able to achieve this bezeless look is by curving down the sides of the display. If you’ve used other Nubia phones in the past you’re probably used to seeing this but it’s still really impressive to look at it, simply because we haven’t seen this from many other phone manufacturers and it really feels like you’re holding just a screen in your hands.

Due to the thinness of the side bezels, this phone feels a lot smaller and more compact in comparison to other 5.5” smartphones. The curves on the sides of the screen aren’t as drastic as what you might find on the Samsung S7 Edge or the Note 7 but that didn’t stop Nubia from adding some additional software tweaks to take advantage of the super thin side bezels.

You can do a variety of really cool things like adjusting the screen brightness by sliding two fingers up and down along the edges of the display, swipe up or down from the edge to switch between apps that you have running in the background, swipe repeatedly from the edge to close all the recent apps or hold along the edge and swipe in words to quickly switch to a specific home screen.

They all sound really useful but can be a little awkward to use and some of them aren’t that much faster than doing things the traditional way. We also ran into a lot of issues with accidentally triggering these features from just holding the phone but fortunately all these features can be disabled if you run into the same problems.

Inside its got the typical specs for a 2016 flagship: you have the usual Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage and if you get the higher-end black and gold model this actually comes with 6GB of RAM and a 128GB of internal storage.

While we can’t evaluate what the performances are like on the 6GB model, performance has been perfectly fine on the 4GB of RAM version. Even with Nubia’s very heavy default android skin it’s been very fast during all sorts of operations from launching apps, web browsing, watching videos and playing graphically intensive games. It does all those things without much of a problem with the only exception being multitasking.

The multitasking experience on this phone feels a little slow and clunky. There’s also no recent apps key, which is a major problem if you’re used to having one, so instead you have to long press the back key to get to your recent apps and the loading of the recent apps usually takes a good couple of seconds.

As far as battery life goes it’s nothing out of the ordinary. It features a 3000mA battery and Nubia says their battery optimization system will allow you to get two days worth of battery but during our review it never lasted more than just a typical day worth of use. With texting, social media, email, web browsing, a couple hours of YouTube and gaming, the phone usually lasted between 12 to 13 hours off the charger which is far from Nubia’s two day claim.

The Z11 also features a Quick Charge mode.

Nevertheless it was always good enough to get comfortably through a day and yes, of course, with this being a flagship phone and running a Snapdragon 820, it does come with a Quick Charge 3.0 to make it really fast and easy to get this phone back up and running.

The camera isn’t rocking any fancy dual lens setup, like the ones that we’ve been starting to see on a lot of other smartphones, but it is packing some rather interesting features: the front camera is an 8MP lens and, if you’re into taking selfies, it is definitely more than good enough to do that. The rear camera comes in at 16MP with f2.0 aperture, optical image stabilization and face detection autofocus.

The camera app is pretty straightforward and easy to use but it does look very iOS like. You can swipe left or right to switch between different camera modes and there are some modes built into this camera that make it unique and fun to use, for example there’s a clone mode that will overlap several photos to make it appear as if there are multiples of a person or object in one photo and for the most part it does a pretty good job of stitching these photos together but it isn’t always perfect.

Great little camera on the Z11 and the red accent looks very good.

Another interesting mode on the Z11 is called “electronic aperture” and this mode lets you dial in an aperture from as wide as f2.8 to as narrow as f44. Changing the aperture will effectively change the shutter speed from as little as 3/10 of a second to 72 seconds long and the longer shutter speeds will allow you to capture some very silky smooth motion blur.

The Nubia Z11 has 3 types of stabilization built-in to allow to use this feature with just your hands but in my experience the results were still much better with a tripod, especially if you’re using shutter speeds that are over a minute long.

In terms of general picture quality it’s actually quite good – the pictures that it takes are pleasantly sharp and detailed and there’s a good amount of color to make them look pleasing to the eye but not so much that they look over saturated or unnatural.

It does, however, have the tendency to overexpose and blow out highlights which can be alleviated by using HDR. The thing I like the most about the HDR mode on this camera is that it will automatically take a standard shot and an HDR shot for you in one take, which can ultimately save you a lot of time and hassle from having to switch back and forth between HDR and standard photos. In low light environments, the camera does tend to focus out a lot and that makes the camera experience feel a lot slower, but the pictures that it takes in low-light still have a relatively good amount of detail.

There isn’t a whole lot of graininess or noticeable noise reduction but it still has problems with properly exposing highlights just like it does in daytime shots.

The Z11 is currently running Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Nubia’s UI version 4.0 which drastically changes the entire Android experience. It’s filled with very bright and cartoonish looking icons and a lot of transparency effects. The default UI comes jam packed with some pretty interesting features, for example, if you long press on the fingerprint sensor or hold volume down and power this will give you the option to take a long screenshot, which is great for web articles. You can also edit a standard screenshot and crop it into different shapes like hearts and circles or even create a screen recording.

One of our favorite features is the way this phone handles split-screen multitasking. To enter split-screen multitasking mode, all you have to do is swipe up from the bottom of the display but instead of giving you a list of applications, like you get on other smartphones that have split-screen multitasking, the Z11 splits the screen into two completely separate desktops.

It’s a very different approach but by doing it this way you’re able to use virtually any application that you want. The only exception being the camera but just because you can use any apps that you want it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Heavy apps like graphically intense games can open up in split screen view but they aren’t exactly split-screen friendly.

Other lighter apps like social media, email, text and chrome work just as you would expect.

Pricing for the Nubia Z11 in the US is still to be determined. In other countries the official price is around 499 euros for the standard version. The black and gold edition is listed at 599 euros. At the time of writing this review we found that the Nubia was going for 385 euros (around $420) on sites like GearBest and AliExpress.

Hopefully these prices aren’t an indication of what the US prices might be. If they are, the Z11 is going to be fairly expensive for an unlocked phone.

Time for the big Nubia Z11 Review question: “Is this phone worth getting over other flagships”.

Yes, the Z11 is a great flagship phone and it does as well or better than the phones in its category and if the price fall is confirmed then the offer is “unrefusable”.