Styled in all lower-case letters, nubia is among many Chinese tech manufacturers that many in the West (me included) may not have heard about, let alone considered a competitive alternative to the established giants of the phone space, such as Samsung, Apple and Google, but after having the nubia Z60S Pro as my daily driver for the last month, I'm adding it to the fast-growing list of new brands to watch, and watch closely.
The best camera phones have long been dominated by well-known brands like the iPhone, Samsung Galaxies, Google Pixels and Sony Xperias, but as last year's Xiaomi 14 proved so emphatically (and Hong Kong-based Infinix in the budget space), we're seeing that space disrupted massively right now.
And now, after a month of using the nubia Z60S Pro for communications, photography, some photo and video-editing and a healthy dose of gaming, I'm starting to wonder who's really leading the world's tech charge right now...
nubia Z60S Pro review: Key specifications
Design and build
Arriving in a fairly understated box, the nubia Z60S Pro emerges as a surprisingly big and bulky handset, black with red accents on buttons and switches, with a 6.78-inch screen at the front and one of the biggest camera notches I've ever seen at the back. It's a circular design, with a main lens in the centre and three others (portrait, ultrawide and macro lens) at the 12, 3 and 9 o'clock positions around it.
It's a bulky, sturdy thing, weighing in at an old-fashioned 220 grams as opposed to the usual 175-195 of most recent models, and will feel either reassuringly or frustratingly big, depending on the size of your trouser pockets. Pop the included case on, and it becomes a proper big boi.
There's a dual SIM slot on the bottom, right next to the single USB-C charging port. Along the right-hand side you'll then find the usual power button (ooh, shiny red), the volume button... and a mystery switch? What's that mysterious switchy-slidey spectre I've encountered, I hear you scream at your screen. I'll tell you, in the next section.
Switch the thing on, and a big, bright screen greets you enthusiastically with up to 1200 nits of brightness, not a match for the latest iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Xiaomi 14 flagships, but certainly bright enough to use outside on a bright day and more than a match for almost all its midrange rivals.
The resolution for the 6.78-inch AMOLED screen is 1260 x 2800 pixels, and the refresh rate tops out at 120Hz, good enough for any games you might want to install.
Features
Fine, I'll tell you about the switch.
Flip it, and the phone, by default, opens up the camera in Street mode. Very snazzy, especially if you're buying the phone for its mahoosive protruding camera. Go into Settings, though, and you'll find that you can customise the switch's function to any of five quick commands. You can open/exit the camera (to either Street Mode or the rear camera video or photo, whichever go-to you prefer, you can open/exit the phone's GameSpace, switch the torch on or off, open/exit the voice recorder app, or switch it between sound on and vibrate modes. Again, very snazzy.
There's also some impressive internals on board here. First to get a mention is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor (4nm one), which is the same chipset you'll find in last year's Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (and still sets you back about $800/£999 today), and three power/storage configurations, between 12 or 16GB of RAM and 256, 512GB or 1TB of storage. The model I had was the base version, and based on that fact, this phone will have no performance complaints from any reasonable user.
There's Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 on board, with NFC, under-display fingerprint scanner, electronic compass, gyroscope and compatibility with every major satellite-location service.
The OS is a re-skinned Android system called nubia MyOS 14.0, and once you clear it of the usual bloatware, it's pretty nice and nifty. There's an always-on display that can be switched on or off in settings (I have the clock on there, as I have found that I check my phone dozens of times every day just to check the time), and it supports up to 80W fast charging. No wireless charging though, boo, but concessions have to be somewhere, I guess.
Camera
One area I can't see many concessions or compromises, though, is the truly impressive camera featured on the nubia Z60S Pro. With a 50MP main camera using a 1/1.56-inch sensor, a 50MP ultrawide camera and an 8MP ultrawide on the back, and a 16MP selfie cam on the front, it's specced very competitively for a the midrange market, and the resulting images certainly didn't disappoint me.
The 35mm lens gave me detailed, light-rich and vibrant images with an effective portrait mode, and the 13mm ultrawide and 80mm telephoto modes are easily switched to in the intuitively laid-out on-screen menu. The macro mode is always my favourite, and I was glad to see it well executed on this camera. You can also go fully manual if you're brave.
It also supports up to 8K video recording, so matches much more expensive flagships there, and the on-board editing suite is silly-rich in different shooting and editing features. There's even a dedicated 'Milky Way Night' mode for hobbyist astrophotographers. There are lots of automatic settings that use 'AI-powered' software to enhance your photos and videos, and most work pretty much exactly as you'd expect. I was very impressed by the filters on offer, and could get most pictures to look almost exactly like I wanted.
As my colleague and photographeur extraordinaire Beth will attest to, almost no phones meet the required standard for true professional photography, but for a £/$500 phone, the nubia Z60S Pro comes much closer than it has any right to.
Benchmark scoring
Using last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, the nubia Z60S Pro ekes more performance out of this handset than any other midrange phone on the market right now (and since the Google Pixel 9 Pro has just been released, I want to mention that this model obliterates that phone's benchmarking scores), posting Geekbench 6 CPU scores that match the Samsung Galaxy S24 in single-core numbers and handily outdoes last year's S23 models, and that are the results using the base 12GB model. It matches the averages for the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus, underlining the performance for value you're getting here.
OpenCL scores also outperform last year's S23, trailing only the S24 models and the Xiaomi 14 among its Android brethren.
In practice, this means that even with a hunka buncha apps loaded and running and me playing a game on top of that, the Z60S Pro rarely felt sluggish, and to further aid my performance ambitions, the phone proactively and eagerly offers to switch off apps that refresh frequently in the background to keep everything running smoothly.
Ironically, just about the only area of complaint here was that my phone seemed to lose the network signal a little more easily than my regular phone, the Infinix I tested recently and the Xiaomi 14 before that.
Price
The nubia Z60S Pro model I tested, the least powerful of the trio on offer, costs $/£499 on nubia's own online store, ranging up to $/£699 for the top-of-the-range variant, with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The 12GB/256GB did everything I needed and then some, so I'd readily recommend that as the choice of the bunch. You save some money, it undercut rivals on either price or performance or, in many cases, both, and get a handsome (if bulky) phone that takes good photos and will serve you well in most other arenas too.
Who is it for?
Honestly, it's for pretty much anyone looking for a capable phone without having to spend the four figures a flagship model will set you back. If you like your social-media content creation, the camera takes bright, sharp photos with lots and lots (and lots) of features and editing options on board and is capable of up to 8K video. It's not for fans of compact phones, though, because the Z60S Pro is a burly ol' thing.
Buy it if
- You want a content-creation-ready camera phone for under $500
- You like a nice do-it-all phone
- You enjoy people going 'it's a what phone? I've never heard that brand name' whenever you show it off
Don't buy it if
- You want absolute top-of-the-line performance
- You are allergic to Android bloatware
- Your trouser pockets are small
