Nubia Z11 Hands On Impressions

I’ve been using a new phone, and I like it quite a lot! Here are my first impressions of the Nubia Z11 smartphone.

Nubia launched the Z11 in China and more recently India, and availability around the globe should be becoming better in the next few months, which is good because this is a great phone that you should consider buying.

I’m not ready to publish my full hands on review yet, but just wanted to give you all an idea of my impressions of the Nubia Z11 so far.

The version of the Nubia Z11 which Nubia have supplied me with is the ‘standard’ model i.e this is the white gold version of the phone with “just” 4GB RAM. 4GB RAM is plenty, and Nubia have done a great job of optimisation and even the rather cool split screen feature works perfectly fine with this amount of RAM, but if you did lust for 6GB RAM there is the Black and Gold version of the phone to choose from.

Back to the specs of the standard Nubia Z11. The phone comes with a Snapdragon 820 chipset and 64GB internal memory which is still good for a flagship phone and I seriously doubt anyone will know you don’t have the latest Snapdragon 821 pumping away inside.

The unibody is crafted out of alloy with a fingerprint scanner on the rear, 16 megapixel main camera and dual tone flash. The main camera is a Sony IMX298 CMOS with F2.0 aperture and Sapphire glass IR filter and 6 lens stack. The front camera is an 8 megapixel F2.4 with 5 lens stack and both cameras are complimented with excellent photography features in the Nubia ROM.

Turn the phone over and you will be graced with a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 display with a tough Gorilla Glass 3 screen. As you can see from these photos, this is an edge to edge display so its good to see that extra protection is there in case you drop the phone. Below the display is the main ‘Breathing’ halo that acts as a notification light and home button.

The final external details are a power button and volume toggle on the right side, USB Type C, headphone jack and IR remote. You may have also noticed a SIM tray and yes there is space in there for an SD card also.

Nubia ensured that they sent me the international version of the Nubia Z11 for review, so I have all Google services installed as standard, and I’m happy to report that setting this Nubia up was much easier than the last model we reviewed. I’m also happy to report that I’ve already had my first update to the phone OTA as well! This might not sound like much but for a Nubia device to get any updates is quite impressive.

Speaking of updates, the Z11 runs on Android 6.0 out of the box, yet the highly customised ROM means you get a heavily featured packed ROM to play with that includes Nubia’s own edge features, and even a split screen mode that other phones won’t get until Android 7.0.

So far I’ve been impressed with every aspect of the Nubia Z11. It’s a quality phone with decent hardware. It’s a joy to use and boast tons of powerful features, and performance is top notch!

Over the next few days I’ll get some photos samples up and also keep you posted with how my full Nubia Z11 review is going. In the meantime, if you have any questions let me know in the comments section!