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Nubia stacks up as a flip phone with a bargain price
By Tim Biggs
You don’t have to spend big to look stylish when it comes to phones. For years, there have been lower-priced and mid-range options with frames just as thin and screens just as vibrant as the biggest and best.
However, folding screens have remained the purview of devices costing $1500 or more. Until now, with the introduction of the Nubia Flip 5G.
The market for foldables is growing but still small, so it remains to be seen if there’s much demand for a lower-cost modern flip phone. But if there is, the Nubia Flip — designed and manufactured by Chinese electronics giant ZTE — seems like it’s got the right idea. It’s an aesthetic-first device with a satisfying flip, but quite a few compromises elsewhere.
The phone is sold exclusively through Nubia’s website and is priced at $US499 ($764) globally, which, after tax and shipping, winds up being $880 delivered to Australia. That’s about half of what you would pay for a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 or Motorola Razr 40 Ultra.
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that those two phones are superior to the Nubia Flip in just about every possible way. But the question we’re here to answer is whether ZTE’s phone is at least half as good.
The answer more or less depends on how much value you ascribe to the phone’s ability to fold.
The folding feeling
The Nubia Flip gives a pretty good first impression. The sparkling matte finish feels premium, and the front is punctuated by a circular platform housing the main camera and the cover display – a 1.43-inch OLED that acts like a large smartwatch. While closed, it’s the same width as the largest iPhone but half as long, so it’s quite pocketable.
Opening it up, the Nubia Flip reveals a 6.9-inch flexible OLED in a tall aspect ratio, which makes for an awkward hold at first but is great for scrolling and reading articles or stacking a passive app on top of your active one. It’s a nice, bright display that holds up to the best flip phones when it comes to brightness and sharpness.
Mechanically speaking, it’s not quite as smooth to open as the Z Flip5 – it’s almost as though you can feel the gears moving as you unfold it – but it locks in place sturdily, and the soft hinge gap in the middle of the display is no more noticeable than on any other folding phone.
The outer display on the Nubia is much smaller than on other flip phones, but it’s fairly functional.Credit: Tim Biggs
Aside from style and a more compact device, the flip format has a few benefits that the Nubia mostly takes advantage of.
With the device closed, the circular front display gives you a little window into your phone without sucking you all the way in and distracting you with apps. It will show your notifications, let you answer or dismiss incoming calls, and has a few useful widgets you can find at a swipe, such as weather, calendar, timer, audio recorder and music controls. You can also take a quick selfie without opening the phone, using the cover display as an imperfect but workable viewfinder.
If you open the phone to take a photo of a friend, you can activate a preview on the cover screen so they can see what they look like. Although there is a selfie camera on the inside display, the exterior camera is a lot nicer – especially for low-light or portrait mode – so even with the phone open, you can spin it around to take a photo of yourself in the best quality possible and get a preview on the cover screen.
Propped up in a half-folded position, the phone can sit securely with an image preview on both sides.Credit: Tim Biggs
Finally, the phone recognises when it’s half-folded and rearranges the camera controls to bunch the preview onto the top half only. This is handy because it lets you hold it camcorder-style for a better grip during landscape videos or set it down on a flat surface for an old-school self-portrait. You can activate a photo with a two-second countdown by raising your palm. None of this is substantially different to other flip phones, which is a point in Nubia’s favour.
A mixed bag with a lot of bloat
Considering the Nubia Flip as a standard phone is where some of its shortcomings begin to emerge.
There’s no polite way for me to describe my first impressions of its software; things are ugly, overpacked, confusing and full of bloat.
After the initial setup, you’ll find loads of garbage pre-installed on the phone and a home screen filled with icons for suggested downloads, including online gambling apps and cryptocurrency platforms.
Swiping right gets you to ZTE’s “Z-Board” view, which was filled with awful ads and suggested content, plus conspiracy theories and clickbait passed off as news. For a lot of this stuff, I had to hunt for the offending processes deep in the phone’s settings and disable them to stop them from showing up.
However, you do get a lot of control over the phone’s appearance and layout, so if you don’t mind tinkering, you can tune it as you like. After an afternoon, I had corralled it into the more vanilla Android style that I prefer.
Camera-wise, the Nubia Flip is nothing to write home about. Results are competent from the main shooter, and the sensor is big enough that a 2x zoom will turn out alright if you’ve got steady hands, but you’ll get the best photos if you ignore all the fancy modes, turn off the default processing and beautification, and stick to well-lit locations. There are no zoom or ultra-wide lenses.
After tweaking the phone is much cleaner, nicer to look at and easier to use.Credit: Tim Biggs
The phone runs on the mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen1 chip, but it isn’t as efficient or optimised as other phones at its price point. For example, it has a physically larger battery but doesn’t last as long on a charge. It has a 120Hz refresh rate, but scrolling around the phone can still feel jittery or laggy. Some apps are stretched strangely to suit the tall aspect ratio where other phones scale more elegantly.
I’m also a little concerned about the phone’s longevity. ZTE claims its screen and hinge design is sound, but even if that’s the case, the device has no water protection rating. The company also does not have a good track record of keeping its devices furnished with ongoing Android or security updates.
That said, you wouldn’t claim it was fundamentally unsound as a modern smartphone. I had no issues playing all manner of games on it. It’s absolutely fine for listening to audio content or watching videos and movies. Web browsing works great, and all the basics are accounted for, if not by ZTE’s own software, then by Google’s. And yes, it works as expected for making phone calls, too. You can even answer by unfolding and hang up by slamming it shut, which rules.
There’s no wireless charging but wired is very fast at 33W, and there’s a compatible brick in the box (as well as a case for the phone!)
If I were to create a list of the best-value phones you could get for $880, Google’s Pixel 7a would be on top, and I don’t think the Nubia Flip would be in the top five. However, if you’re specifically after a folding screen, this is a competitive option at a very reasonable price.
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