Nubia Z11 mini S Specification, Feature, Price, Rating, Review

Nubia that is a sub-brand of Chinese telecommunications equipment company ZTE launched its latest Nubia Z11 mini S smartphone in India last week. The device first introduced in China in October last year and took a little longer than expected to come to India. The good-looking Z11 mini S also features some good specifications on paper. The handset boasts of a 23-megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX318 sensor and a 13-megapixel front-facing camera.

Nubia Z11 mini S Feature

1. Display

The Nubia Z11 mini S features a 5.2-inch full-HD (720 x 1280 pixels) LTPS 2.5 D glass displays with a pixel density of 424ppi. The display brightness levels are good for both outdoors and indoors. We did not have any problem in bright sunlight conditions too. The display touch accuracy and touch responsiveness are flawless, so no complaints whatsoever. However, the nature of the display is little reflective and is glossy, so finger impressions and smudges are normal.

We faced slight issues with the ambient light sensor, especially in bright sunlight conditions where the sensor took a little long to adjust auto brightness. Overall, we feel that Z11 mini S gets a good quality display that does not disappoint much. The only issue we had with it was the little over-saturated display and auto brightness adjustment delay because of the ambient light sensor, which at times was a little slow to react. Rating: 7.0/10

Also Read: Reliance Jio Beats Rivals With Almost Double 4G Download Speed

2. Design

We received the Khaki Grey colour variant. That handset boasts of an anybody metal construction with 2.5D curved glass at the front. The Nubia Z11 mini S features a 5.2-inch full-HD (1080p) display. Since we got the Grey colour, the front glass and the bezels were all black and you will only see a small red colour circle below the display, which is for the capacitive home button. The other two touch buttons are not marked but appear as the tiny red dot when backlit.

The top edge features a 3.5mm headphone jack and secondary noise-cancelling microphone, whereas the bottom edge features a USB Type-C port sandwiched between two loudspeaker grills, out of which the right grill hides the loudspeaker inside while left grill has a primary microphone. The USB Type-C port also supports USB-OTG. Rating: 8.3/10

3. Primary Camera

A 23-megapixel 6P lens Sony IMX318 sensor camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and f/2.0 aperture. It is capable of shooting 4K videos with features like slow-mo and time-lapse. The Sony sensor takes a very little time to focus and the time is taken to in clicking shots and in-between shots were negligible. About the low light performance, we were impressed, look at the low light results below in camera samples gallery. Rating: 7.0/10

4. Secondary Camera

A 13-megapixel front-facing camera with 80-degree wide angle lens, Sony IMX258 sensor and f/2.2 aperture. It does not get a selfie LED flash, but there is screen flash. It can also record full-HD (1080p) videos. Daylight selfies or the shots with ample amount of light got good centre sharpness and decent detailing. Talking about the low-light shots, these were little grainy in low light however the screen flash takes decent shots and these results don’t look terribly artificial. Rating: 7.0/10

5. Performance

Powered by a 2.0GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor coupled Adreno 506 GPU and 4GB of RAM. The Onboard/ inbuilt internal storage on the device are 64GB but users will only get about 52GB of free/ user available storage space on the first boot. Company’s Nubia UI occupies about 12GB and some pre-loaded system apps, which were not useful to us at least.

The Nubia Z11 mini S scored 62500 in AnTuTu, which was quite close to Moto G5 Plus 4GB of RAM variant. However, the Geek Bench Multi-Core results for Z11 mini S were slightly ahead with 4074 compared to G5 Plus’ 3838 scores. Just to compare it further, the Redmi Note 4 had lower multi-core score of 2895 in GeekBench, although it has same Snapdragon 625 and 4GB RAM combination. Rating: 7.0/10

6. Software

Runs Nubia UI 4.0 skinned on top of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. The company announced internal storage of Z11 mini S is 64GB on papers, but a good amount of bloatware and the Nubia skin occupies about 12GB and hence the consumers will get about 52GB (51.69GB) of free/ user available space on first boot.

Other than that, Nubia has put in quite a few tweaking options for convenience. The three capacitive touch buttons (Menu, Home and Back) below the display can be customised to user need, which is that you can interchange the Menu and Back button functionality from the phone Settings> Features> Custom bottom key. Rating: 6.8/10

7. Battery

A 3000mAh non-removable Lithium-Ion battery and uses USB Type-C port, but unfortunately does not support fast charging. For initial 30 percent of charging from zero, the Z11 mini S takes about 30 minutes and the full battery (100%) charged in about a little more than 2 hours.

The battery of 12 hours in video loop test, this is impressive. Our video loop test procedure involves a full-HD (1080p) movie playback on a loop in VLC with 50% volume through headphones, 100% screen brightness, and Wi-Fi enabled. Rating: 8.2/10

Nubia Z11 mini S Specification

Price in India: 16999