Nubia Z9 Mini

We’ve been seeing a ton of loaded budget smartphones flooding the market of late, but very few of these excel in the design department. Which is why nubia deserves full credit for the Z9 mini. Encased in a glass and metal body, the smartphone feels incredibly sleek and well built. It features a glass sandwich design, with a metal frame that’s made of aircraft-grade aluminium alloy. On the front panel, you’ll find the earpiece, front camera and sensors above the display. Underneath the screen you’ll find nubia’s trademark ‘Breath light’ – a circular red capacitive key that doubles up as a home button and a notification LED. When you get a new notification, the button pulses slightly – almost as if it were breathing – giving it the unique nomenclature. When the display is activated, you’ll see two red dots on either side of the Breath light, which work as the menu and back buttons. By going into settings, you can interchange the functions of the two buttons.

The Z9 mini features a 5-inch display with 1080p resolution, equating to a pixel density of 441ppi. The display is crisp and clear, and undoubtedly one of the sharpest in its price range. Whites look visibly cooler, but colours border on oversaturation, which most users won’t mind since photos and videos look gorgeous on the screen. By going into display preferences, you can tweak the saturation and hue to your liking. The brightness levels were adequate, but the auto-brightness was a bit sluggish, often taking a couple of seconds to adjust to the ambient lighting.

The nubia Z9 Mini features a 16MP primary camera and an 8MP front shooter. The primary camera shoots in 16:9 at full resolution, and if you want to shoot in 4:3 format, you’ll need to bring the resolution down to 8MP.  The camera app features the NeoVision 5.0 UI, which packs in a host of creative controls. When you open the app, you'll see the shutter button, video mode, gallery and PRO mode on one side, and controls to switch between the cameras, turn on the timer, adjust the flash and go into settings on the other.

The nubia Z9 mini runs Android 5.0.2, layered with nubia UI 2.8.1. The UI completely masks the stock Android interface, and while there are a few Lollipop elements like the drop-down notification bar and quick settings menu, everything else has been modified.

The Z9 mini is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, consisting of two quad-core clusters clocked at 1.5GHz and 1.0GHz respectively. The processor gets 2GB of RAM for company, while graphics is handled by an Adreno 405 GPU. The smartphone handles day-to-day tasks easily, without any visible slowdown while multi-tasking with 8-10 apps running in the background. However, there were always minor lags when we switched between apps, launched the keyboard or performed basic tasks. We're talking about a delay of a second or less, and while it's something you can get used to over time, it doesn't feel as zippy as we would have liked. As far as the gaming abilities are concerned, we tested a few titles, including Riptide GP2, which played without any jitters or freezes. The smartphone gets warm after 10-15 minutes of gameplay, but didn't overheat to uncomfortable levels in our experience.