ZTE has finally unveiled the nubia Z11 smartphone globally in IFA 2016, a powerful 5.5-inch smartphone that the company claims to be the slimmest in its class. At 7.5mm thin, it has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor paired to either 4GB or 6GB of RAM with storage options of 64GB or 128GB respectively. Despite of its already huge built-in storage, the nubia Z11 offers micro SD expansion and dual SIM support, which makes it a rather great phone for power users. On top of that, the phone sports a gorgeous bezel-less 2.5D curved 5.5-inch display that produces a 1080p resolution and is protected by Gorilla Glass 3, a 3000mAh battery is included with Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 support, and there’s a rear mounted fingerprint scanner that unlocks the phone as fast as 0.1 seconds.
While the phone’s hardware isn’t something new in devices this year, ZTE has taken the opportunity to focus its presentation a lot more on the phone’s software and camera features. The nubia UI 4.0 comes preloaded on the nubia Z11 and is based on Android Marshmallow, two main features were highlighted in the presentation, Super Screenshot allows the user to capture long web articles, record the screen in video and reframe screenshots in different shapes and sizes, while Split Screen will let you open multiple apps without closing them.
With the phone’s bezel-less design, ZTE has included a feature called FiT (frame interaction technology) 2.0 that allows users to interact the phone with gestures on both sides of the phone’s frame, the company has demonstrated in video that you can use it to switch between apps, adjust screen brightness, measure your heart rate and taking pictures, it may look like a cool gimmick but it is really ingenious of ZTE to have thought of such design.
The nubia Z11 is fitted with an optical stabilized 16-megapixel Sony IMX298 sensor, it has phase detection autofocus, a f/2.0 aperture and protected by sapphire glass, while the front facing camera is a 8-megapixel camera with 1.4 micron pixels, a f/2.4 apertutre and 80-degree wide-angle field of view. The camera software and algorithm is powered by its NeoVision 6.0 photography system, it introduces Hand-held Electronic Aperture, powered by nubia’s Hand-held image stabilization feature and allows a long exposure time of up to 72 seconds, ZTE claims that you will no longer need a tripod for taking light trails with this feature and have also showed off an impressive image taken with the phone’s camera.
A few months back, the nubia Z11 was in fact already announced in China and retails from RMB2,499 (RM1530), while ZTE has never made plans to bring in its nubia smartphones to Malaysia, let’s hope the company’s launch in IFA 2016 might actually change that fact.