Nubia N2 Review: Good, But Not Good Enough

ZTE has launched another smartphone in the budget range  – Nubia N2 with 5000mAh battery in India in July 2017. We had a chance of keeping the phone for few weeks in our hands. We had a good experience of how it looks and feels and about the performance of the smartphone. Here is the review of the Nubia N2.

Nubia N2 is priced at 15,999/– and sold exclusively at Amazon. Nubia N2 is a mid-range smartphone with 5000mAh battery, metal unibody design with 2.5D glass and runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It has a 5.5 inch HD LCD display with a resolution of 1080×1920 pixels. Powered by 1.5GHz MediaTek MT6750 octa-core processor with Mali T860 GPU, Nubia N2 has 4GB RAM plus 64GB internal storage which can be extended up to 128GB.

First let us see the specifications of Nubia N2.

When we first look the phone, it looks good but when we take the smartphone in hands we feel that it is heavy. The Nubia N2 comes in two colour variants – the Champagne Gold and the Black Gold. The device comes with unibody metal which is made up of aerospace-grade aluminum and has curved edges with a smooth surface and the build quality is good.  It easily fits into ones hand. The red circle in the home button breaks the design language and looks very odd. It is an eyesore in the whole design.

The volume buttons are placed at the left side and the power button on the right. The loudspeaker is present at the bottom and USB type C port on the center and the headphone jack is at the top. The device feels bulky with 180 grams but considering the 5000mAh battery it feels better. At the thinnest point it is 7.9 mm. on the rear panel, there is the camera and LED flash on the top left side and it has antenna bands on the top and bottom of the rear panel. The fingerprint sensor unlocks the device very fast in just 0.2 seconds.

The N2 comes with 5.5 inch full HD AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080×1920 pixels and with a pixel density of 218 ppi. Colours of the N2 looks washed out and there are different modes to change the display. Considering AMOLED display, the display looks unsatisfactory. The display also has colour shifting issue with a yellow tint on the white screen. It looks really odd with the yellow tint.

The Nubia N2 is powered by 1.5GHz MediaTek MT6750 octa-core processor with Mali T860 GPU and the device runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and it is disappointing that it does not run in newer version. We tried to play graphic intensive games and worked pretty well without any lag and the good part is that the device does not heat at all. The quality of videos were also very good and there was no heating.

It also has some features like edge gestures, dual instance, screen split-up, touch sensing, super screenshot and motion sensing. The edge gestures are tough to use and it interferes with the other activites we do in the phone. When we try using edge gestures, most of the time it does not work properly. There are 5 edge gestures available. You can also clone an app using the dual instance feature so that you can use two different logins.

With screen split-up, you can split he screen into two halves and open two different apps in each screen at the same time. You can also adjust the proportion of the screen.

There are different modes of screenshots like long screenshot, free screenshot and screen recording. With this super screenshot, you can not only take photos of the screen, but you can take video of the screen activity. This is very useful for recording what we do in the screen in 720P/480P video clips for easy uploading and sharing. You can make rectangular, oval and heart-shaped screenshots or use your finger to hand-draw unique shapes or add fun graffiti to the screenshot. This helps to customize your screenshots.

Nubia N2 has lots of camera features as it is a camera centric smartphone. Nubia N2 has 13MP rear camera and 16MP front camera for taking selfies. The 13MP rear camera uses PDAF and it is possible to take quick snapshot in 0.2 seconds.

There are different modes in the camera app of the Nubia N2 so that we can take different types of photos. The different modes available are MultiExpo, LightDraw, E-Aperture, Slow Shutter, Star Trail, Trajectory, Clone, etc.

MultiExpo: The multi exposure mode allows you to take photos in two separate pictures and it can be overlayed into one over the other to make a single picture. This is quite interesting as it is rarely available in smartphones. But it is little difficult to figure out how to use it. There are 5 different multi exposure presets which we can choose. For taking multi exposure photos, all you have to do is to take two or more photos of the subjects you would like to merge. Here is the sample picture which we took using multi exposure mode.

Clone: This mode is very interesting but it is little complex to understand. Using this mode we can take photos of a single subject and make a clone. Here is a sample picture.

Some more sample pictures.

The 5000mAh battery lasted well over a day and lasted 2 days in standby. The device comes with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB internal storage and you can expand upto 128 GB Micro SD card.

Verdict:

Nubia N2 has lots of interesting camera options to explore, but it takes a while to understand and use. On the design part, the design is very ordinary and the device feels heavy and it has a very ordinary front panel with an odd red circle for home button. For 15,999 it is not remarkable or impressive enough to recommend. It has very tough competition at that price from a lot of impressive devices. Good, but not good enough.