Nubia Z80 Ultra Review

Design

• Glass surround with aluminium edge
• IP68/IP69 rated
• Dedicated two-stage shutter button and remappable notification slider

Available in black, white, and a nebula style you’ll struggle to pre-order, it’s the white glass-backed colourway Nubia tossed our way.

This model has a sort of ceramic or porcelain look about it, mirroring not your bathroom sink, but more an expensive kitchen countertop or luxury paving slab. This is a glass surface front and back, with a slightly curved aluminium frame that’s cold to the touch.

Scattered around each side of the Nubia Z80 Ultra is a plethora of buttons. On the right is a central power button, top-facing volume rocker, and a two-stage shutter button tucked into the bottom corner. On the left is not a button at all, but the alert switch popularised by OnePlus devices, which you can easily tweak to launch your favourite apps or the flashlight.

At 164.5 x 77.2 x 8.6 mm, this is a big phone. It’s actually a few millimetres larger than the Z70 Ultra. And because of that sleek back and curved frame, it’s a slippery one. Comfort aside, its striking style stands out.

On the bottom is a large speaker grill on one side, a SIM slot on the other, and a central, speedy USB-C 3.2 slot capable of mega-fast 90W PD3.0 charging for the equally mega 7200mAh battery. The IR blaster returns the previous model, too, turning this into even more of a handy lifestyle device if your TV remote often slides down the side of the couch.

Another returning element from the Z70 Ultra is one of the larger camera arrays on any phone, which occupies a significant portion of the back of the chassis. The lump means you’ll always be sitting this one on an angle, but like the Google Pixel 10, it doubles as a natural place to sit your index finger for a supported grip.

In the box, there is less than we typically expect from ZTE, regrettably, including the omission of a charger. Pre-orders are promised a power brick, but the majority of us are expected to pony up a little more for the privilege of hitting the 90W charging speeds that support one of the major upgrade points of this new handset.

What is still included is a flexible plastic bumper-style case (that doesn’t do much to add grip to its slippery chassis, we’ll add), and a good quality cable in a striking red colourway.

Screen

• 2688 x 1216 OLED display with HDR10 on supported apps
• Up to 144Hz refresh rate
• 89.5% screen-to-body ratio

With so much real estate available, Nubia’s latest rocks another bright OLED panel bursting with premium specs, as no surprise.

Coming in at 6.85 inches with HDR10 support (in select scenarios), 2000 nits of peak brightness, and a joyous 144Hz refresh rate, this near-infinite display carries forward the bold visuals of last year’s model with an ever-so-slightly smaller 89.5% screen-to-body ratio due to its slightly larger chassis.

Palms curling over the edge of the display can be a problem out of the box, but reliable edge detection settings quickly make this a non-issue. And with a pre-installed protection film slapped on top, you won’t risk marring those gorgeous colours by scuffing it up the second you slide it into your pocket.

In-hand, it’s a beautiful and vibrant display with blooming colours and deep shadows. Despite the in-app HD/HDR issue on streamers like Netflix, candy-coloured adventures like K-Pop Demon Hunters and dim, drab dramas like Breaking Bad still look great. The selfie camera hiding under the panel means there’s no eye threatening to eat into the image, too, which is always a bonus.

Hop into the system settings, and you can easily specify whether you want super-smooth 144Hz scrolling, a neat 90Hz middle-ground between fluidity and battery life, or adaptive rates to suit the content in question. There’s no LPTO here, so anything below 60Hz is out of the equation, so some jitter in movies might be visible. And don’t expect a fancy always-on clock face as it sits idle.

Still, this is a silky smooth display you won’t struggle to see in direct sunlight. And with easy access to a reader mode, you can soften the look before bedtime. Just don’t expect a hybrid e-reader experience like the TCL 50 Pro Nxtpaper.

And with one speaker being the earpiece, holding it sideways will usually result in muffling the already so-so speaker setup. At least you can avoid that while gaming with one of the best mobile game controllers in a pinch.

Camera

• 64MP ultrawide
• 50MP main
• Up to 8K/30fps recording

As we’ve come to expect from the Nubia Z devices at this point, the camera system remains incredibly strong.

In utilising strong after-image processing with a penchant for bokeh-style depth, it’s hard to get a mediocre shot from the Nubia Z80 Ultra.

Even whipping it out in a hurry to snap a shot of my disgruntled dog in dim indoor lighting presented a photo that looked like the product of a patient shot as opposed to a split-second decision. That’s exactly what most will want from a smartphone camera: something that takes the guesswork out of snapping a stellar shot. And the Nubia continues to deliver.

Subjects in motion will never be quite as clear, but there’s a Pro mode to dial in precise settings for those situations.

Powering its paparazzi potential is a 50MP main 35mm shooter. If you want to punch in or pull out, there’s a 64MP telephoto lens that climbs to a ridiculous 85x digital zoom, and a 50MP ultrawide perfect for the Street Photography preset.

On the front, you have a hidden 16MP selfie camera with strong outdoor potential and night sensitivity that doesn’t need a streetlight to fight off the veil of darkness. Its depth sensor manages to aid in sharp shots that, while certainly heavy on the bokeh, manage to avoid looking entirely artificial thanks to strong edge detection.

That being said, attempting to focus on smaller objects or those close to the lens rarely worked in our favour. The auto macro detection clearly needs some work.

Thinking of shooting a movie on this thing? The Nubia Z80 Ultra climbs all the way to 8K 30fps. Interestingly, 1080p caps out at 60fps despite 4K climbing up to 120fps for super-smooth playback or slow-motion sequences. Strong image stabilisation makes for smooth panning shots and vlogs with minimal bounce.

But it’s not all shots of sunshine and rainbows. Attempts to view shots taken in Portrait mode while the screen is locked are presented in a laughably low quality, with an obscure “Motion” marker enough to suggest you need the stability of a rock to pull them off—you don’t, but it was nearly a moment of silence for the camera tech before we realised what was going on, and something we hope is patched out.

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC
• UFS 4.1 storage speeds
• Ultra-snappy all-round performance

Running the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU, there’s little you can do to slow this beast of a semi-budget blower down. If today’s top-end 3D adventure games can’t get it to break a sweat, only the largest spreadsheets and heavy datasets could ever stand a chance.

Even notoriously memory-hungry websites like gaming-focused Wikipedia-like copycats can dent its 16GB of RAM, and even then, you’re unlikely to notice any degree of slowdown as you swipe and glide. And with higher storage comes 24GB of RAM to support it.

In the GPU-focused WildLife Extreme benchmark, it returned an astronomical score of 7353, trumping the Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra by around 600 points. Nowadays, we have to turn to ray-traced graphics samples like 3DMark’s Solar Bay Extreme scene to see it crawl to an average of 9 frames per second.

In Geekbench, a single-core score of 3494 was returned, with a multicore sprint skirting five figures at 9915, putting it a smidge above last year’s premium gaming phone, the ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro, and more recent additions like Nubia’s own gaming-grade phone, the RedMagic 10S Pro.

Saying that, if raw performance is your forté, liquid cooling sees the same chip get within touching distance of 12,000 points in the multicore test via the new Redmagic 11 Pro. You’ll sacrifice the clear camera and sleek chassis if you go that route, but if gaming is your objective, that’s the one to go for.

In practice, the Adreno 840 GPU sings. Though simple in theory, new release Stella Sora highlights the display’s bold colours with vibrant visuals and a clean and satisfying interface. Constant enemy spawns and their behavioural AI are at odds with crazy damage numbers, visual flare, and character cut-ins, creating a visual feast that’s also tough on your device.

There are minor hitches here and there, but they are predictable to a point, as they are replicated on PC, suggesting a bottleneck within the app rather than an underperforming GPU. The phone doesn’t heat up at all, either, so we don’t suspect throttling. To prove it, we maxed out more traditionally graphically intensive games like Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, and the poorly optimised Duet Night Abyss, with the Nubia Z80 Ultra losing nothing but battery life in the process.

So, what can you do to push this phone to the brink? Burst-firing shots by holding the shutter button barely phase it, with only the rapid shutter sound signalling that you might be expecting a lot from a 3nm chip.

Simply put, you won’t bring this one to its knees. Post-processing is done by the time you view your photo, and super-fast UFS 4.1 storage means those shots are saved in an instant, too. In simple scrolling and app management, it responds frankly too fast to even comprehend your next move.

Software

• Nebula AIOS 2 Android 16 skin
• Minimal bloatware with some rough UI translations
• No Google Discover

Nubia continues to frontload its devices with its own Nebula skin. That includes cramming in the AI moniker every tech brand now hugs close to its chest. This iteration, Nebula AIOS 2, a fork of Android 16, retains core features like live update notifications.

Tap into the Nubia AI settings tab and you’ll find features like Google’s face-to-face translation, real-time translation and subtitling for phone calls, and something called Privacy Sticker for “one-tap privacy masking” that works like any other manual sticker app. Where the AI part of that one lies is a mystery.

Thankfully, there’s no replacement for Google Gemini as the phone’s default assistant. You might just need to practice with the short-hold summon button if you’re not up for verbally calling on your virtual butler.

Dig into the settings and you’ll find some choice software efforts with stressed descriptions. Things like SmartCast, used to toss your phone screen onto a TV or monitor or act as a second screen, has some bizarre wording attached that does little to explain how it really works.

Elsewhere, you can enable Reader Mode to kick in for specified apps and lightly tweak the swipe-over quick access bar used to jump into your favourite apps. You’re supposed to be able to drop content into an area at the top of this to pull into ‘supported’ apps, but we had no such luck with the Photos app or Discord, suggesting its usability lies in apps like WeChat versus WhatsApp and Messenger.

Outside of what you have to dig around for, Nebula contains little bloat. There’s a hotel booking app and a few ZTE/Nubia apps, including one designed to link to nearby devices for networkless communications, but that’s about it. The biggest downside is Google Discover being replaced with Z-Board. At the very least, it’s easy to disable this in favour of a looping home screen.

Battery

• 7,200mAh battery
• 90W wired charging
• 80W wireless charging

Cramming a 7,200mAh battery under its super-tall chassis marks another big improvement over last year’s model. Wireless charging is also new this year, with 80W support being a frankly absurd feature that most will likely need to part with more pennies to put to use.

What’s interesting here is how it performed. Sipping back 5% during our half-hour gaming test puts it a little above the potential of most other smartphones in this category, while an hour of Netflix saw the meter drop by an entirely expected 6%.

But that’s not what caught our eye. When trying to drain the battery to test charge speeds, we saw the Nubia Z80 Ultra manage close to two hours of video playback with 2% remaining—around 90 minutes of that spent at just 1%. In the end, it was firing up the camera that forced it to shut down, leading us to discover a potential anomaly at the opposite end.

After juicing back to 100% in just under an hour on a 100W charger that the phone drew 45W power from, we repeated the 30-minute gameplay test without losing a single percentage point.

After a second charge, a minute-long 3DMark test would sometimes slurp up 2-3 percent, going against our real-world testing. Though this likely suggests a simple battery calibration issue rather than a problem with maximum runtime, an inaccurate readout can cause uncertainty when you’re out and about. It’s just something to keep in mind.

Should you buy it?