Nubia Z60S Pro Review: How to make an affordable flagship

We often lament how expensive flagship phones are nowadays, and there's some truth to this, as most top-notch models will set you back north of or close to $1000. What if a company decides to disrupt the status quo and offer a flagship phone for half of that?

Well, that's exactly what Nubia is trying to do with the Z60S Pro. So, we're starting this review with the price in order to put everything that follows in that context. The base model costs $499, and it comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Now, some compromises have been made to reach this particular price point. Let's see if they really impact the overall performance and user experience and if Nubia has succeeded in the quest of making the most affordable flagship out there. Should OnePlus be concerned?

Let's start with an overview of the Nubia Z60S Pro specs:

Those of you who have had some experience with Nubia phones will recognize the design right away. It's very Nubia, which might seem boxy to some, but it has its own appeal. There are some distinctive elements that make this phone stand out a bit more.

For starters, the power button is bright red and textured, and we've always liked such accents. There's also a slider button that opens the camera in Street mode as a default setting.

The back is made of glass, but it's also textured in a very subtle way. If you try to scratch it with your fingernail, you will "hear" the texture.

The back camera system has a circular design that resembles a real camera lens with a coronet. We had the urge to try and turn this thing the moment we saw it, but it's fixed, and the engraved letters read, "Be yourself." We really don't know how to be anyone else, though; otherwise, we would've chosen to impersonate a domesticated cat, as these things are the happiest and laziest creatures in the known universe. Anyway, moving on.

The Nubia Z60S Pro is available in three colors: black, white, and aqua. The black variant is the textured one, the white one resembles mother-of-pearl, and the auqa is a very nice light green-blue hue.

Nubia retail boxes have always been stocked, and the Z60S Pro is no exception. You get the phone with a pre-applied tempered glass screen protector, a fast charger, a cable, and a semi-transparent plastic back cover. Good job for a $569 phone.

Moving to the display of the Z60S Pro, it's a 6.78-inch AMOLED with 2800×1260 resolution, 452 PPI pixel density, and 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate. Nubia calls this thing "1.5K Ultra Retina Eye-Care Straight Screen," and as flamboyant as this might sound, we're putting it through our display test procedure to see what's what.

Now, looking at the result above, it's very clear that this panel is a bit underpowered, compared to other flagship phones, especially in terms of brightness. The Q9+ light emitting material that BOE uses for these screens was able to output 755 nits of real-life brightness, which in 2024 is on the lower side.

Color accuracy is also way off at 4.40 deltaE, and the minimum brightness isn't great either. We're not bashing this panel at all; these numbers are just a bit average, and maybe not strictly flagship-grade, that's all.

In terms of biometrics, you have an under-display fingerprint scanner of the optical type (it's also buried in the menus) and facial recognition. Both work well enough, but bear in mind that Face Unlock uses a simple front facing camera.

The Nubia Z60S Pro can record videos with up to 8K resolution at 30fps which is impressive on paper. The 4K recording looks rather nice, even though there's more to be desired from image stabilization. The focus is fast and accurate, but you can't switch between lenses while recording, which means that the zoom is digital, and you can't zoom out once the recording has been started.

Well, the gap to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is obvious, but it's not as big as we expected. The AC version of the Gen 2 performs excellent, especially in single core benchmarks, and as we all know, single core performance translates to real life much better than all other benchmarks.

Subjectively, the phone feels like a true flagship; there's no lag or any other artifacts of using an older chipset. So, in conclusion, what we thought would be the biggest drawback of this phone - the processor - turned out to be just fine in the end.

In terms of software, the Nubia Z60S Pro comes with Android 14 out of the box with MyOS 14 UI on top, and it's mostly a pretty stock build, with a couple of extra features sprinkled here and there. One of these is called Z-SmartSidebar and it's a floating slider near the edge of the screen you can tap on to bring up shortcuts, apps, and other quick access tools.

The Z-Pop is something similar, but it's a floating point (that's actually quite distractive), and you can access a fixed set of shortcuts, such as Home, screenshot, status bar, restart, sound mode, etc.

Both of these can be useful, but there's a learning curve, and they require a change of habit to be able to take the most of them. And we're not sure many people would go through the trouble of putting in the energy.

Nubia says there are some Google AI features available, such as Magic Eraser, AI Blur, and AI Sky, but they weren't available at the time of review, so we might get them with a future software update.

Speaking of updates, the Z60S Pro offers three years of major software updates, which is a bit short compared to mainstream flagships these days, but not too bad considering the brand and price point of the phone.

Interestingly, the 5,100 mAh battery doesn't perform as expected, specially against the competition. Not that the results are bad, but the overall score is not that impressive for a cell of this capacity. The 6h 38m overall estimate ranks the phone #32 which is almost spot on at the average for the category.

Sadly, another big sacrifice (especially if you're used to having this feature) is the lack of wireless charging. This might be absolutely irrelevant to some people or a dealbreaker for others, but it is what it is. No wireless charging onboard. The good thing is that the fast wired charging is very fast indeed. The 80W bundled charging brick fills up the battery from 0 to 100% in just 37 minutes. Who needs wireless charging when the wired one is so fast, right?