nubia N1 review: bets big on battery, but not much else

When ZTE’s sub-brand nubia first landed in India with the Z9 mini (review), we were impressed by the affordable all-rounder. But that was in mid-2015, and since then, we haven’t heard much from nubia, until recently. The brand has made a comeback with the powerful, practically bezel-less nubia Z11 (review) flagship, and the mid-range N1. The latter, with its massive 5,000mAh battery, aims to capture the segment that was made popular by the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. But does it have enough to take on the big guns? We find out.

Specs at a glance

Design and display

Barring a couple of signature nubia additions, the N1 looks like the regular metal slab with rounded corners and a rear-facing fingerprint sensor the market is flooded with these days. The phone measures a chunky 8.9mm around the waist, which isn’t too bad considering the massive battery tucked away inside, but it’s quite heavy at 190g.

The one differentiating design feature is the red ‘Breath light’ that also doubles up as a home button. It glows when the screen is activated and when you get a notification, replacing the notification LED. The same colour theme is carried over to the rear, where a red metal ring surrounds the slightly protruding primary camera. The nubia N1 sports a 5.5-inch LTPS IPS display with full HD resolution (~401ppi), protected by a sheath of Corning Gorilla Glass 3. While we’ve got no complaints about the sharpness and clarity of the display, we did find it to be extremely oversaturated – even more than a standard AMOLED panel. You probably won’t notice this when looking at the homescreen, but it’s apparent when viewing photos or playing videos. Skin tones take on a distinctive orange hue, despite the display settings being configured to ‘standard’ and ‘natural’. There’s no way to manually adjust saturation and hue either, so you’ll have to live with it.

Software 

The nubia N1 runs nubia UI 4.0 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. We’ve become accustomed to Chinese UI’s over the past few years, and while most of them now have slick international ROMs, we can’t say the same for nubia UI. It’s packed with a head-splitting range of features, most of which we disabled, and is full of badly translated English to boot. Our biggest peeve is the screenshot feature – press the power and volume rocker for longer than a second and you get ‘Super screenshot’, with options like scrolling screenshot, rectangular/heart shaped/circular screenshot and screen recording. We don’t dispute the usefulness of having these features available, but the implementation is annoying, and there’s no way to turn it off.

nubia UI also features something called ‘Edge gestures’, which let you perform a variety of actions by holding and swiping on the edges of the phone. Here too, the execution is clunky and hit and miss in most cases. The one useful feature in the UI is ‘Dual Instance’, similar to the dual apps feature we’ve seen from Coolpad and Xiaomi earlier. This allows you to run two instances of the same app, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. At this stage, nubia UI is a minimally adapted version of the Chinese ROM, and nubia will need to polish it a whole lot more to get it up to par with the competition.

Cameras

The nubia N1 features 13MP cameras both at the front and rear. The rear camera gets PDAF and f/2.2 aperture, while the front shooter is fixed focus. The camera app has the usual filters, HDR, time lapse, panorama and pro modes. There’s also something called ‘Camera Family’, with options like multi-exposure, light painting, star trail and more. Here too, the badly translated instructions make these modes difficult to understand, and therefore mostly unusable.



Coming to the image quality, while some of the images – particularly macro shots ­ – did look impressive on the phone’s display, transferring them to a computer revealed the truth. The saturated screen can be very misleading when it comes to actual image quality, which was usually washed out and lacking detail. While the camera focusses quickly enough, most images displayed a fair bit of grain, even those taken in daylight. The selfie camera, despite its impressive pixel count, fared even worse. Selfies were rarely focussed and were quite grainy. There is a screen flash feature if you want to take low light selfies, but overall, we weren’t impressed by the cameras on this one.

Performance

The nubia N1 is powered by an octa-core MediaTek Helio P10 chipset, paired with 3GB of RAM. On our 32GB storage model, we had 24GB of free space available. You can expand the storage up to 128GB via microSD. The Helio P10 is a decent chipset, but it doesn’t offer the same performance as the Snapdragon 625, or even the Snapdragon 652 for that matter. The phone can handle regular usage and light games, but more intensive games take a toll with lags and frame drops becoming apparent. Overall, the nubia N1 is fine for casual usage, but it’s not a powerhorse. The fingerprint sensor on the N1 was quite accurate, but the phone takes a bit longer to unlock than we’d like.

But real prowess of the N1 is its battery life, which is exemplary. With both SIMs inserted and a mix of Wi-Fi and 4G usage, it lasted nearly two full days. You definitely won’t need to worry about carrying a powerbank with this phone, and if long battery life is your priority, this phone won’t disappoint. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t support fast charging. In our video loop battery drain test the smartphone lasted for an impressive 19 hours and two minutes. Recharging the smartphone with the built in charger took two hours and nine minutes, which isn’t too bad considering the battery’s 5,000mAh capacity.

As far as the connectivity options are concerned, you get dual (hybrid) SIM, 4G, VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS and USB Type-C (with OTG).

Verdict

With the N1, nubia aimed to cash in on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3’s immense popularity. The two phones have a lot in common – similar build and design, 5.5-inch displays and huge batteries. But unfortunately, nubia got the timing wrong. The newly launched Redmi Note 4 (review), which is priced at Rs 9,999 onwards offers far more compelling features and performance, and the powerful Snapdragon 625 chipset makes it a no-brainer. The N1 will also have to compete against other devices like the  Coolpad Cool1 Dual (first impressions) and the upcoming Honor 6X (first impressions), both of which feature dual cameras for a slightly higher price. All things considered, the N1 is a good comeback attempt by nubia, but the brand will need to polish up the cameras, performance and software of its phones if it truly aims to make a mark. 

Editor’s rating: 3 / 5

Pros: 

• Excellent battery life
• Premium build
• Decent performance

Cons:

• nubia UI needs work
• Subpar cameras
• Screen is oversaturated