Nubia Z9 Mini review: A good smartphone suffered by mediocre performance

Design

Nubia Z9 Mini is an attractive smartphone with a bright full HD display and plycarbonate back

Nubia Z9 Mini manages to grab your attention with its design and looks. The front of the smartphone has a 5 inch display with minimal bezels and three touch capacitive buttons at the bottom, which reflects bright red color light on being touched.

The polycarbonate back is prone to smudges and scratches

The rear panel has a shiny glossy finish, looks like glass but it is made of polycarbonate and features a diamond pattern, which looks really good. The Nubia branding rests at the centre and the 16 MP rear camera with the LED flash sits at the top left corner. The circular camera module has a red colored ring which complements the circular home button at the front.

The grey metal frame holds the device firmly and has a matte finish

The grey colored frame with a matte finish holds the device firmly and houses the power button, volume rockers on the right, which are easily accessible and offers good tactile feedback.  The dual SIM card slot is placed on the left edge.

With the measurement of 141.3x69.8x8.2 mm, the smartphone can be used with one hand; however its 147 grams weight makes it a bit heavy when compared to other 5 inchers.

We really liked the overall design, however the rear of the smartphone is prone to smudges and scratches and you have to use a screen guard if you don’t want it to get spoiled.

Display

The 5" display has a full HD resolution and makes text, icons, images and videos look crisp and vibrant

The 5-inch full-HD (1920x1280p) display is the centre point of Nubia Z9 Mini. The IPS panel produce accurate and vivid colors and has amazing contrast levels. We used the display in outdoor conditions and the good brightness level makes the content easily visible.

We were also impressed by the viewing angles of the smartphone as there was no significant color shifting while tilting the display to different angles. The pitch black display makes icons, images and videos look vivid and absolutely stunning. We must say that the IPS panel of Nubia Z9 Mini exhibit saturation and contrast levels of an AMOLED display. We enjoyed our time watching full HD videos and playing graphical intensive games on the vibrant display.

Performances in various domains

Camera

Nubia Z9 integrates a 16 MP rear shooter with Sony IMX234 Exmor RS sensor. The F2.0 aperture and sapphire glass IR filter results in images with crisp details and punchy colors. The daylight shots are quite impressive; we zoomed the images (on PC as well as on phone) and noticed a minute pixilation at maximum levels. However, the colors are on a bit warmer side by default.

The Pro-mode with various settings to enhance the pictures

But you can tweak the camera settings in the Pro mode. There is ISO, Exposure, White balance and Focus, which can be set according to the requirements.

Check out some of the shots taken with different camera modes

Besides this, the camera packs some other interesting modes such as Light painting, Special effects, Electronic, Panorama, Slow shutter, Star Trek and Video maker.

Various modes to play with pictures you take

The front 8 MP is also a decent shooter. The performance is quite better than the other smartphones in the same price range and at par with costliest ones.

Computing and Software

The computing and software performance delivered by the smartphone does not match the other factors such as design, camera and display. It is backed by an Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 CPU, which is not the snappiest chipset but handles tasks quite well. There were minor lags while using the smartphone in day to day usage but that’s mostly because of the highly customised user interface over Android 5.0.2.

We have tested a variety of smartphones with the similar kind of UI i.e. devoid of an app drawer and we must say that the Nubia UI 2.8 is buggiest one. It frequently lags, crashes and becomes unresponsive in between multitasking operations. The multitasking pane takes time to open and does not display the active applications unless you open it again.

The smartphone also lose the game in synthetic benchmarks score. You can check the figures in the below slider.

Another bug we encountered was the continue number of birthday reminders in the notification panel. The smartphone bombarded us with the birthday reminders which had to be closed n number of times from the notification panel. It was quite irritating. Moreover, the typing experience is also very bad. The screen feels unresponsive most of the times and you have to make corrections during typing.

Battery

Nubia Z9 Mini is backed by a 2900 mAh battery unit. During day-to-day usage, which includes 10 to 15 calls, continues messaging, half hour of music playback, casual gaming, navigation, browsing, etc. the smartphone lasted for a little more than 9 hours. And in our video playback test (full HD video playback on Wi-Fi at maximum sound and brightness) Z9 Mini lasted for 5 hours 25 minutes, which is at par with other smartphones in its price bracket such as HTC 820S, Asus Zenfone 2, etc. However, Xiaomi Mi4 beats the smartphone in the battery back-up.

Call quality was pretty fine but the audio from the ear-piece and the speaker unit is not very loud.