Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition Review : The Strongest Ultra Flagship of 2024

1. Introduction: The Most Powerful True Full-Screen Phone – Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition
Nubia may not have been the first to introduce the concept of a full-screen phone, but it has certainly been the brand to popularize it. The notion of the "full-screen" phone emerged in the Chinese market between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017. At a time when mobile phones generally lacked aesthetic appeal in industrial design, this concept was as disruptive as a bombshell, greatly transforming people's sense of aesthetics. Within just a few months, a plethora of full-screen phones hit the market. However, due to the lack of a unified standard, many pseudo full-screen products overly emphasized the 18:9 screen ratio, ignoring the aesthetic destruction caused by large bezels.

At that time, Ni Fei, the then General Manager of Nubia Smartphones, publicly declared to the industry that "a full-screen phone from another perspective means no bezels, or that the bezels are not visible from a front view." Since its establishment in 2012, Nubia had always adhered to narrow bezel designs. This five-year commitment to narrow bezels was suddenly renamed "full-screen" in 2016. From this perspective, Nubia is the earliest mobile phone brand in China to establish the full-screen standard. Calling it the "originator of full-screen" would be acceptable to most who have experienced this phase of mobile phone development.

Today, after several generations of technological advancements, the form of full-screen phones has evolved significantly. In the hottest season of 2024, Nubia once again brings its passion for full-screen phones with a perfect score for today's flagship full-screen phone – the Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition. Although the name only adds "Leading Edition," the new phone's upgrades from last year's Nubia Z60 Ultra are substantial: the world's exclusive sixth-generation under-screen camera (compared to last year's fifth generation), the exclusive Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Leading Edition (with the highest clock speed of 3.4GHz), exclusive AI dialect translation, and exclusive AI translation support for WeChat calls.

Regarding Nubia's well-known imaging capabilities, the Z60 Ultra Leading Edition boasts a 35mm cultural lens, an 18mm starry sky lens, and an 85mm portrait high-end optical triple main camera, complemented by the Sony IMX906 flagship CMOS and the Neovision Taishan 2.0 AI imaging algorithm. This combination shows Nubia's commitment to both hardware and software. In this era where AI is essential, the Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition's AI capabilities are backed by the Nebula AI large model, offering many practical features.

Additionally, it has a 6000mAh carbon-silicon anode battery with an effective capacity of 6300mAh, providing impressive battery life in practical tests. Next, let's see if this highly recognizable flagship lives up to the title of the strongest Ultra of 2024 with hands-on testing.

2. Appearance: The Ultimate Form of a True Full-Screen Phone
The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition continues the true full-screen design, which is commendable in today's market dominated by hole-punch screens. The exclusive sixth-generation under-screen camera integrates the UDC Ultra independent display chip, making the display color transition in the front camera area more natural. The screen uses BOE's new Q9+ luminous material and customized substrate, significantly improving color display stability. During regular use, the front camera is completely unnoticeable.

The phone features COP packaging technology, maintaining consistent width for the bottom bezel and three side bezels, creating a visually borderless effect that unifies the display. The most striking feature on the back is the three large camera modules, extending to the phone's edges, giving a sense of infinite extension. The left-bottom main camera retains the classic red ring design, with the ultra-wide-angle lens above and the periscope telephoto lens to the right. The designer has precisely calculated the optimal distance between the three cameras, ensuring excellent imaging experience and aesthetic appeal.

The "nubia" brand logo is printed at the lower right of the camera module. The racing black color scheme features a custom raster racing pattern, exuding a sense of speed and power. The top of the phone includes an independent infrared remote sensor for controlling home appliances, and a noise-canceling microphone is on the side. The bottom houses the SIM card slot, Type-C port, and speaker from left to right. The Z60 Ultra Leading Edition uses symmetrical earpiece-style dual speakers.

The power and volume buttons are on the right side of the phone, with the classic red power button featuring a crosshatched texture and a customizable camera quick-access button at the bottom. The fast-charging adapter supports up to 80W output.

3. AI Functionality: Nebula AI Large Model for Seamless Multilingual Communication
The Nebula AI large model built into the Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition has a solid foundation in text generation, easily handling everyday writing needs. The voice assistant can creatively and flexibly navigate complex issues, moving beyond conventional responses. When faced with tasks requiring comprehensive search and information integration, like "finding low-calorie snacks," the voice assistant not only provides a precise list but also includes nutritional values, greatly simplifying user decisions and enhancing convenience and satisfaction.

With this AI bidirectional call real-time translation, it's like having a personal translator who instantly understands and speaks another language, displaying it as text. It supports not just English, Spanish, French, but also regional dialects like Cantonese, Hebei dialect, Sichuan dialect, and Shanghai dialect. This function works seamlessly during WeChat, QQ chats, or video calls, making cross-language communication effortless.

The AI recorder transcribes every spoken word into text and offers smart editing features to meet various writing needs, from brainstorming ideas to condensing lengthy passages into summaries or translating thoughts into different languages. This smart assistant acts like a writing partner, organizing thoughts and ensuring smooth, rich content while facilitating cross-language communication.

The AI notebook is like an intelligent writing partner, helping with everything from brainstorming to structuring outlines and drafting press releases. It can continue writing stories, extract key points, create to-do lists, expand content, and refine language for a smoother read, even translating into other languages.

4. Imaging: Combining a New CMOS with Classic Three Focal Lengths for Unique Perspectives
The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition's imaging system combines the classic 35mm and 85mm golden focal lengths with an 18mm ultra-wide-angle lens, forming a full-focal-length triple-camera setup. The main camera features a new 50MP Sony IMX906 CMOS, a 1/1.56-inch sensor, a 1G+6P lens, an f/1.59 aperture, and OIS, with an effective focal length of 35mm. The periscope telephoto lens uses a 64MP OV64B sensor, a 1/2-inch sensor, and OIS, with an effective focal length of 85mm. The ultra-wide-angle lens features a 50MP OV50E sensor, a 1/1.55-inch sensor, and an effective focal length of 18mm. The phone also includes a laser focus sensor and Flicker and multi-spectral color temperature sensors. Let's check out the sample photos to see its imaging performance.

35mm Main Camera Samples:



In common focal length photography, to highlight the subject, we usually choose a 1.2 to 1.5 times focal length. However, the Nubia Z60 Ultra's custom 35mm Sony IMX906 main camera, compared to other phones' 24mm focal length, provides a more focused visual experience. This means we can directly shoot without zooming or cropping. The new large sensor produces images that do not overemphasize contrast and saturation, presenting colors closer to the real world.

Night Scene Samples:



The main camera of the Nubia Z60 Ultra captures light accurately even in direct light, keeping bright areas bright and dark areas detailed, with excellent noise control. The night scene samples capture every subtle detail finely while suppressing noise, making the images pure and deep. Even novice photographers can easily capture stunning night scenes.

85mm Periscope Telephoto Samples:



The 85mm periscope telephoto lens achieves approximately 2.4x optical zoom compared to the main camera, similar to other phones' 3.5x zoom visual effect. This lens captures images with slightly higher color saturation than the main camera, producing well-detailed light and shadow textures.

18mm Ultra-Wide-Angle Samples:


The 50MP ultra-wide-angle lens ensures ample light intake, capturing rich light and shadow details even in backlight conditions, making it ideal for wide scene photography. The lens automatically corrects distortion, ensuring image integrity and avoiding edge deformation.

5. Performance and Gaming: Snapdragon 8 Gen3 Leading Edition, Running Genshin Impact Over 60FPS Smoothly
The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition is powered by the third-generation Snapdragon 8 Leading Edition, with the CPU's peak frequency raised from 3.3GHz to 3.4GHz. Its AI engine's total computing power has reached 73 TOPS, capable of running AI models with up to 10 billion parameters on-device, making it Qualcomm's most powerful chip to date. We have the version with 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS4.0 storage. To evaluate the phone's theoretical performance and gaming capabilities, we disabled the memory expansion feature and enabled "Awakening Mode" during gaming to maximize the phone's performance.

Theoretical Performance Tests

First, we conducted the AnTuTu comprehensive performance test, achieving a total score of 2.0178 million points, indicating a 20% performance improvement compared to the Nubia Z50 Ultra with Snapdragon 8 Gen2. In the CPU theoretical test, Geekbench 6 scored 2295 points in single-core and 7181 points in multi-core tests, marking a 21.1% single-core and 30.2% multi-core performance boost over the Nubia Z50 Ultra. Compared to the previous Snapdragon 8 Gen2, the new Snapdragon 8 Gen3 Leading Edition shows a significant improvement in graphics rendering performance, enhancing it by over 60%, which greatly improves the smoothness of gaming. In the flash memory test, the sequential read speed reached 3.91GB/s, sequential write speed 3.0GB/s, random read 481.95MB/s, and random write speed 712.51MB/s, all at flagship-level UFS4.0 performance.

Gaming Tests


For gaming tests, we selected two representative mainstream games: "Peace Elite" and the hardware-intensive "Genshin Impact". Testing was conducted in an office environment at 28°C, prioritizing frame rate, with frame rate, power consumption, efficiency, and heat dissipation recorded during gameplay.

Peace Elite
We tested "Peace Elite" at smooth quality settings with 120FPS enabled. After an intense team battle, the average frame rate stabilized at 120.8FPS. The frame rate graph shows consistent performance at 120FPS without fluctuations. Power consumption averaged around 5.4W, with an efficiency ratio of 22.37FPS/W, which is impressive given the stable 120FPS frame rate. Post-game, the highest back temperature reached 43.2°C, located near the periscope telephoto lens.

Genshin Impact
Next, we tested the high-load game "Genshin Impact" at maximum quality + 60FPS mode, with dynamic blur disabled, for 15 minutes running around Sumeru City. The frame rate was exceptionally stable, averaging 60.41FPS, indicating smooth, full-frame operation. Power consumption averaged 5.06W, with an efficiency ratio of 11.94FPS/W. Post-game, the highest back temperature was 43.8°C. The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition also supports enhanced graphics in "Genshin Impact" via AI upscaling, improving the native sub-1080P resolution to 1116P for clearer and more detailed visuals.

Comparing AI-enhanced graphics to the native quality, we observed better character rendering, smoother edge transitions, and more detailed accessories.

6.Charging and Battery Life: Full Charge in 42 Minutes, Nearly 14 Hours of Battery Life

The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition made unprecedented advancements in battery life by fitting a 6000mAh silicon-carbon anode battery into its flagship imaging phone, paired with AI Lingxi power-saving technology, significantly optimizing nighttime power consumption. The battery life is greatly improved compared to the Z60 Ultra.

Despite increasing battery capacity, the 80W super-fast charging capability remains. We tested the charging and battery life performance of the Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition.

Charging Test
In our test, the phone charged from 1% to 33% in 10 minutes, 59% in 20 minutes, 83% in 30 minutes, and reached a full charge in 42 minutes.

Battery Life Test
For the battery life test, we used the professional battery testing tool "Battery Dog" by Fast Technology. The test simulates user scenarios with various tasks like CPU high pressure, CPU multi-threading, AI recognition, image browsing, video playback, and web browsing, keeping screen brightness at 50% and volume at 30% for consistency and accuracy.

The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition's 6000mAh battery delivered an impressive performance, lasting approximately 11 hours and 12 minutes from 100% to 20%, translating to nearly 13.5 hours of full battery life. For average users, the Nubia Z60 Ultra can last up to a day and a half without charging, offering a more convenient and enduring user experience.

7.Conclusion: The Strongest Ultra of 2024 So Far
The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition excels in performance, imaging, and display. Firstly, in terms of performance, it inherits the powerful genes of the Red Magic 9S Pro+, with the third-generation Snapdragon 8 Leading Edition chip achieving 60.41FPS in "Genshin Impact", making it the smoothest imaging phone. Secondly, with the support of the Nebula AI large model, it redefines human-computer interaction with advanced voice recognition, real-time translation, and intelligent writing functions, enhancing information processing efficiency and quality. It overcomes language and regional barriers, facilitating global communication and providing efficient, innovative work and thought platforms for individuals and businesses.

In photography, the Z60 Ultra Leading Edition's new Sony IMX906 main camera, combined with the classic three focal lengths, showcases Nubia's advanced photography technology and innovative features, meeting diverse shooting needs and highlighting its expertise and innovation in mobile photography.

The Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition's 6000mAh battery, with nearly 13.5 hours of battery life in our tests, sets it apart in its class. Balancing strong imaging and performance with exceptional battery life is an unexpected achievement. While most flagship phones compromise on battery life, the Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition finds a balance between high performance, advanced imaging, and long battery life.

Overall, the Nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Edition stands out as the most powerful, versatile, and visually appealing flagship phone in its price range in 2024.