ZTE Nubia z9 review
Introduction
Screen bezels are an inevitable imperfection of modern smartphones. That is unless you get the ZTE Nubia Z9, the phone that magics the side bezel away. This mobile David Blaine has flagship ambitions with a design - and price! - to match.
ZTE's designers employed optical effects to hide the bezel. The chamfered 2.5D glass bends the light from the screen in a way that makes the image appear wider than the actual screen itself. That's Arc Refractive Conduction or, simply, ARC.
It's more than vanity though, the non-bezel screen lets you touch the screen glass to perform gestures - a thing called FiT (Frame Interactive Technology). What makes this system special is it ignores unintended touches, while waiting for gestures. You can squeeze the phone to unlock it, swipe to switch between apps, swipe with two finger to adjust the volume. A new, tactile way of interacting with a smartphone we've only seen in crude prototypes before at trade fairs. That alone should count for something.
Key features
- Unique bezel-less design and a metal unibody
- Dual Sim
- 5.2" 1080p IPS LCD (424ppi) capacitive touchscreen
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 810: quad-core 2GHz Cortex-A57 & quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A53, Adreno 430 GPU; 3GB of RAM, 4GB on the Exclusive version
- 16MP autofocus camera with OIS, LED flash, IMX234 Exmor RS sensor f/2.0 aperture, 2160p video recording, manual mode
- 8MP front-facing camera, IMX179 Exmor R sensor f/2.0 80° lens, 1080p video recording
- Android OS v5.0 Lollipop with Nubia UI 3.0
- 32GB of built-in storage, 64GB on Exclusive version
- Fingerprint reader (Exclusive version only)
- Cat. 6 LTE (300Mbps); Dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac; Bluetooth 4.0; GPS/GLONASS/BeiDou (BDS); FM radio; NFC; microUSB port with USB On-The-Go
- Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic, AK3861 Hi-Fi music chip
- 2,900mAh battery
Main disadvantages
- One of the heaviest phones we've handled in a while - 192g!
- Fairly thick too - 8.9mm
- And yet the battery capacity is nothing special
- No microSD card slot
- Current software is intendent solely for China
Besides the bezel disappearing act, the Nubia Z9 boasts a metal frame sandwiched between two panes of 2.5D glass, a fast chipset and an optically-stabilized 16MP Sony camera with 2160p video recording.
That's just what you get in the Classic edition, but there's a higher tier. The Exclusive edition brings a fingerprint sensor, goes from 3GB of RAM to 4GB and doubles the storage to 64GB. The fingerprint tech is called TiO - Three in One. ZTE certainly likes its abbreviations. The brand name gave that away a long time ago. TiO refers to the phone's ability to read your fingerprint when you are pressing one of the three buttons: Power, Volume Up and Down. Unfortunately, we only have the Classic edition so we won't get to give this one a try. Sigh!
But we can't wait to walk you through what the Classic edition has on offer.
Special thanks to HonorBuy.com for providing the review unit.
Display
The display is definitely the defining feature of the ZTE Nubia Z9, as good as unique. The company first made the bezels impressively thin, then employed a clever optical trick to make them appear non-existent. The result is something you'd normally see in a Sci-Fi movie or an exaggerated ad, except this one is real and you can have it right now.
The display is an IPS LCD with great viewing angles. Its diagonal measures 5.2" while the resolution is 1080p. If you plug those into the equation you get 424ppi - not impressive in a "my number is bigger" kind of way but as sharp as you practically need.
The glass used to achieve the optical effect is quite thick, 1.7mm whereas most other phones use sub-millimeter panels. This certainly adds to the thickness.
A bigger issue is the brightness - even at max setting it's just not all that bright. It's quite okay for indoor use but on a bright, sunny day we wish the slider went over 100%.
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| 0.257 | 225 | 875 | 0.440 | 394 | 895 | |
| 0.289 | 258 | 893 | 0.490 | 440 | 898 | |
| 0 | 208 | ∞ | 0 | 363 | ∞ | |
| 0.09 | 108 | 1240 | 0.43 | 532 | 1238 | |
| 0.065 | 89 | 1372 | 0.322 | 450 | 1398 | |
We assumed that having such a thick glass would have a negative effect on reflectivity, but the Nubia Z9 screen looks good in sunlight.
Sunlight contrast ratio
The colors are vivid and saturated without going overboard. That's by default - you get three levels of saturation to choose from in the settings. You can also adjust the white balance, going from natural to cool to warm.
The thick front glass over the display doesn't have an increased scratch-resistance so do be careful with it.
Another issue is a prism effect visible at certain angles. Looking at the screen dead on is okay, but at an angle you can see a shifting rainbow of colors where the final few columns of pixels are on the left and on the right. This doesn't get in your way really, but some would consider it mildly annoying.
Connectivity
The ZTE Nubia Z9 is based on a Qualcomm chipset and that company is a leader in wireless connectivity so everything is covered. Both SIM cards get 2G and 3G access, so either can be used for data connection (just not both).
Faster speeds can be achieved with LTE, both the western hemisphere and the Chinese flavor. Additionally, there's CDMA (including 1x and EVDO) and TD-SCDMA, which allows the phone to work with Chinese carriers but will help in other countries that use CDMA too.
On a local scale you get the usual combo of Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1 and NFC. DLNA is available via the Screen projection app, the phone can work as either a source or as a player. Android Beam is supported for quick sharing with NFC.
For a wired connection, MHL 3 is supported through the microUSB 2.0 port. It can output UHD TV footage (i.e. 2160p) at 30fps.
Battery life
The ZTE Nubia Z9 packs a 2,900mAh battery - not bad for a 5.2" phone (especially with 1080p screen resolution), though given the weight we wouldn't have been surprised at a higher capacity.
The screen is quite sane by today's standards though the Snapdragon 810 chipset doesn't have a battery-friendly reputation. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are two SIM slots. When using only one the standby power draw is quite good and the phone lasted 70 hours. The second SIM had 11 hours' worth of impact on battery life.
For actually talking on one of those SIMs, the Nubia Z9 is one of the better phones, matching or topping some current flagships. The web browsing stat is also among the better ones we've seen, close to the top. It's the video playback that was the big letdown - the Z9 barely made it over 7 hours.
Don't forget the charger from the retail box puts out 9V @ 1.5A, that's 13.5W (compared to 15W for Quick Charge 2.0).
Our proprietary score also includes a standby battery draw test, which is not featured in our test scorecard but is calculated in the total endurance rating.
The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritties.
bia Z9 in our photo quality compare tool
Video camera
The ZTE Nubia Z9 is capable of shooting videos up to 2160p resolution with 1080p and HFR options too. At 2160p the framerate is set at 24fps and videos aren't quite as smooth as 30fps videos shot by competing phones.
They are recorded at 42Mbps bitrate so that's not the problem (though 96Kbps is a bit low for stereo audio). Snapdragon 810 is capable of 2160p @ 30fps and so is Sony's sensor, so we don't know where the weak link in the chain is but there is one.
The camera gives you an option to lock the focus while recording, but even then we noticed some focus hunting in the beginning of videos (this could be the optical stabilization messing up, we shot from a static tripod). There's an option to zoom during video capture too.
The level of detail in 2160p videos is quite high and the camera's tendency to smear detail is less visible here. Colors are richer than reality and audio sounds a bit hollow.
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