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Nubia’s follow-up to its ByteDance-powered AI phone is here. The NaviX Ultra launched today in China, just weeks after Nubia’s president teased it as the company’s “world’s first AI agent phone” ahead of the launch.
Nubia calls it the second-generation “beanbag” phone, a nickname that came from its predecessor, the M153. The latter sold out quickly last December before running into problems when several major Chinese apps limited what its Doubao Mobile Assistant could do inside their apps.
The NaviX Ultra comes in three versions at launch. The 12GB + 512GB model costs 5,999 yuan (around $840), while the 16GB + 512GB version costs 6,499 yuan (around $910). The top model with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage costs 7,499 yuan (around $1,050).
Nubia calls the NaviX Ultra the world’s first AI intelligent smartphone. The phone uses ByteDance’s Doubao Mobile Assistant for its AI features. The goal is to let you hand off multi-step tasks across different apps with one spoken sentence, rather than tapping through each app yourself.
This is the consumer version of Doubao Mobile Assistant, following the technical preview ByteDance put out last December, and Nubia says the update brings changes to interaction, personal memory, task execution, and privacy controls.
A dedicated AI button
The phone’s defining hardware feature is a dedicated orange-accented AI button that also works as a fingerprint sensor — something Nubia calls an industry first. It recognizes dialects, wakes on voice, and runs on Seed’s latest full-duplex voice model, so you can talk over the assistant mid-response instead of waiting for it to finish, similar to interrupting a person. Nubia also moved the button’s placement to make it easier to reach one-handed.
Nubia claims the phone has a 48% higher wake-up rate than competing phones in noisy places, such as crowded subway stations. It also claims 21% better sentence recognition. The assistant supports more than ten dialects, including Cantonese and Minnan.
The AI assistant can also understand images and what’s happening on your screen. You can ask about something displayed on the phone, point the camera at an object for information, or use it during a video call to understand what the camera is showing.
Display, cameras, and battery
As for hardware, the NaviX Ultra has a 6.78-inch LTPO 2.0 display with a 1-144Hz refresh rate. It covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color range and reaches up to 4,500 nits of peak brightness. The screen also supports DC dimming and 2160Hz PWM dimming.
Under the hood, it’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. For cameras, the phone has a 200-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and a 64-megapixel periscope telephoto camera.
The phone uses Nubia’s Galaxy Cooling System with a 7,100mm² vapor chamber for cooling. And despite being just 7.62mm thick, it packs a large 7,100mAh battery. Charging includes 90W wired and 50W wireless charging.
More AI features
The AI features go beyond the main assistant. The phone can recognize products on your screen and take you directly to a shopping page. It can also handle calls using custom response scripts and sort important notifications, so they stay at the top.
The assistant is also optimized to work with third-party services such as Cao Cao Mobility and Lark. This lets you do things like book a ride or check your schedule without leaving the chat window. It can also run some tasks in the background and handle multiple requests in a queue.
For meetings and notes, the assistant can start recording and use Lark Notes to transcribe and summarize the content. Later, you can search through the recording using normal language instead of going through the entire transcript.
For those concerned with privacy, Nubia says the NaviX Ultra is the first device to complete registration for its intelligent agent large model with Chinese regulators. The phone also includes lock-screen permission controls and international security certifications.
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