Nubia Z11 finally official: the return of the infinity pool smartphone
So, the Nubia Z11 is made entirely out of metal, as it can be expected from any one of today's flagships. The manufacturer has done away with the glass panel on the back, which probably helped slim down the profile, and placed a fingerprint-scanning dimple to keep up with the modern trends. The handset does feature a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the top — we feel weird that this needs to be pointed out — and has two speaker grilles (probably for speaker and mic, though) at the bottom, surrounding a USB Type-C data port.
Despite the handset's rather slim profile, the camera is flush to the body, which should make more than a couple of perfectionists out there smile. It rocks a 16 MP Sony IMX298 sensor, assisted by OIS and PDAF. The lens has an aperture of F2.0, and is protected by a sapphire glass cover. The selfie camera has an 8 MP resolution and the sensor is outfitted with huge, 1.4μm pixels. This should translate into better-lit selfies and faster shutter speeds, resulting in less blur. The front camera has a narrower aperture of F2.4, but does shoot in an 80-degree wide angle.
The smartphone is, of course, loaded with the latest version of Android — 6.0.1 Marshmallow — with a heavy re-skin on top, which the manufacturer calls Nubia 4.0 UI. It offers advanced features, such as touch gestures over the screen's side edges, true split screen, fine display color temperature adjustments, app cloning, so that you can use specific apps with two different user logins, and other specific little oddities. The handset also offers dual SIM dual standby with 4G+ and VoLTE, but if you opt for a microSD expansion card, one of the SIMs is going to have to go.
The phone is currently up for pre-order in China in gray, silver, gold, and rose gold, with a launch date set for the 5th of July. Its pricing starts at $376 (¥2499). We have no information on possible availability to the Western crowd. Last year, Nubia was reported to be gearing up for a US launch of the Z9, but the phone still remained pretty hard to obtain. Its Mini and Max variants do pop up on Amazon, but the actual flagship is as obtainable as a magical liopleurodon. Maybe this year the company will be able to make a bigger splash?
source: Nubia
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