Nubia Z11 Mini NX529J Review – Awesome Camera and Design

ZTE’s brand Nubia has attracted the Indian smartphone consumer with its Nubia Z9 Mini which was known for its camera quality. Now again the Nubia come back with the Nubia Z11 Mini to enhance its consumer mobile photography experience with its ultimate camera. Let’s see the detailed Nubia Z11 Mini review to find out how efficient it is in terms camera, design and performance.

Nubia Z11 Mini Price: Rs 12,999/-

• ZTE Nubia z11 Mini – Detailed Specs

Things you want to know before buying Nubia Z11 Mini

Nubia Z11 Mini Review – Design

The Nubia Z11 Mini looks alike iPhone on a first glance. The 2.5 curved glass, round edges and the black antennas strips on the sides of the phone really feel that you have iPhone in your hands in some ways. The Z11 mini has a unibody design and metallic frame along glass panels at both the sides, give its a very premium and stylish look. The back panel is shiny and glossy which makes the phone more prone to fingerprints or smudges. It also makes the phone slippery just like Honor 8(review).  Although its back cover is glass but it looks a little bit plastic to us. The rear panel is accomplished by the camera, LED, and a fingerprint sensor. The camera with red color looks good sits at top left corner along single LED flash.

The matte finishe fingerprint sensor situated at upper middle portion and Nubia branding is at the lower portion.

The curved frames of the phone have ergonomically design and highly tactile volume rockers at the right side whereas the left is used for SIM/SD card (Hybrid tray).

 

The bottom frame is curved out for USB Type C which is flanked by speaker grills. For music, it has 3.5 mm headphone jack at the top.

Coming to the front side of the Nubia Z11 Mini, a gorilla glass 3 protected 5.0 inches Full HD screen is used to design the front side of the phone. The upper portion of the display is almost same to other Android smartphones but the lower area has something different. The navigation space has Nubia’s trademark round red color circle which act as a home button(which also acts as a notification light) whereas other two navigation buttons are in the form of red dots, only visible on touch.

 

• ZTE Nubia z11 Mini – Detailed Specs

Nubia Z11 Mini review –Display

It has  5.0 inches IPS LCD 1080p resolution display for a pixel density of 441ppi. The display is the multi-touch capacitive touchscreen that produces 16m color. The color produces by the display are natural and vibrant, allow you to read the text easily under the direct sunlight. The phone has Adreno 405 GPU to provide the best quality games and videos. The viewing angles are also great .

Nubia Z11 Mini Review – Camera

Nubia is known for the camera and really we are impressed with the detailing and quality provided by its camera. The rear camera of this phone is 16 megapixel f/2.0 and comes with phase detection autofocus capability. It has six-element sapphire glass lens that reduces the probability of scratches on the camera lens. The camera is amazing, the photos it captured both in daylight and night come out with superb detailing and sharpness.

It comes with different options such as Time-lapse,Pro, Slow motion, Camera family and more. The Camera family option has 9 modes: Multi Exposer, Light painting, Electronic Aperture, Slow shutter, Start track, Vidoe Maker, Trajectory, DNG, and Clone. The slow shutter mode can capture photos from 1-second exposure to 21 minutes which is really amazing and prove very helpful to capture stills at very low visibility. The DND mode is manual photo capturing mode that gives you some capabilities like DSLR cameras.

You can set the white balance, ISO, shutter and focus manually in this mode. Overall Nubia Z11 mini has one of the best cameras at this price point. Also, the front 8 MP selfie camera is same as the rear camera and it can also shoot the pictures & videos at 1080p resolution.

Nubia z11 Mini camera images- sample

Nubia Z11 Mini Review – Nubia UI on Android

The Nubia Z11 mini UI is running on the top of Android 5.1 Lolipop which is something that bothers us as the Android 7.0 is in the market. We also didn’t have any news of OS upgrading from Nubia. The Nubia tried to customized and optimized the OS very well to deliver the best performance. The Nubia UI customized in a very best way that eases the navigation and increases the usability. Also, we didn’t find any glitches or lag in the OS.

 

One nice and interesting feature of Nubia Z11 Mini is the Edge feature of this phone. The Edge feature allow switching between different apps by swiping up and down at both the edges. You can set what type of apps should open when sliding the edges.  Also when you repeatedly slide on edges, it will clear all background apps. On sliding fingers on the both the edges simultaneously will adjust the brightness and volume.

Nubia Z11 Mini Review- Performance and battery

Under its stylish hood, the Nubia placed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 chipset with an Octa-core (4×1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.5 GHz Cortex-A53) CPU. To handle the high-resolution video and graphic intensive games it has Adreno 405 GPU. The Z11 mini runs on 3 GB RAM to handle the apps and games. On this configuration, we really did find some noticeable performance issue while multitasking and gaming. During multitasking sometimes the phone stops responding and also give some lag while playing games like Asphalt 8. There is no heating except little bit while playing games. About internal storage, the phone packs by 32 GB which can be expanded up to 200 GB via Hybrid SIM card slot. You can use one SIM card and microSD card  or dual nano-SIM at one time.

About the call quality, the Nubia  Z11 mini didn’t give us any call drop or cracking sound. The call quality of this phone is better than OnePlus 3, we know we can’t compare both the phone but still we want to mention it. Coming to the Audio on the Nubia Z11 Mini again the audio quality is also very impressive but when the phone DTS feature is on.

For security, the Nubia Z11 mini has the matte finish fingerprint sensor on the backside which is a little bit less accurate and responsive as compared to other Android smartphones available in the market.

After the glossy back panel which is prone to fingerprint, the battery backup is another thing which disappoints us. Nubia Z11 mini packed with 2800 mAh battery which just gave us  near about half day on heavy usage. The good thing is that we manage to get more than a day backup on normal usage: low frequency calls 4 or 5 in a day that long for 3 to 4 minutes only, no gaming, 4G on and little bit browsing. So, if you are planning to go out on the night then you need a charger. Moreover, we know that slim phones have some limitation like battery back up.

Review Synopsis:

In a nutshell, the Nubia Z11 Mini at 12,999 is the really a stellar Android smartphone. It offers good specs, performance, and great camera, the only minor issue it has is the battery.  We are not going to recommend this phone if you are a heavy user because it really compels you to carry the charger along with you. But if you in the scenario in which you use the phone as normal or under normal usage then Nubia Z11 mini is for you.

Pros:

• Good camera
• Slim design
• USB Type C
• OTG support
• User interface
• Call quality

Cons:

• Glossy back panel attracts smudges and fingerprint
• Battery backup