Nubia X is an all-screen smartphone with two screens and no selfie cameras

Just recently, Xiaomi and honor had released their own versions of a full-screen smartphone. Both feature edge-to-edge displays without a notch and this was made possible with a sliding mechanism to hide the selfie cameras.

ZTE’s sub-brand, Nubia, doesn’t want to be left out from the all-screen smartphone race. In an attempt to solve the selfie camera conundrum, the new Nubia X is taking a different approach by ditching the front camera completely. There are no external moving parts and you’ll have to take a selfie in a different way.

The Nubia X is slightly smaller than the Mi MIX 3 and Magic 2. It has a 6.26″  LCD display that pushes a Full HD+ resolution of 2280×1080 pixels in a tall 19:9 aspect ratio. It has a screen-to-body ratio of 93.6% which is quite close to the OPPO Find X.

On top of that, the rear also gets a secondary 5.1″ screen that does 1520×720 pixels resolution. The rear screen is necessary so that you can take selfies using the rear camera. This is similar to the YotaPhone but this uses a colour display.

When the phone is in sleep mode, the rear display can be totally invisible. However, it can also double up as an Always On Display which you can customise with various widgets and wallpaper.

You can see the secondary display in action below:

Under the hood, the Nubia X is a flagship-class device with a Snapdragon 845 processor that’s mated to either 6GB or 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM. The internal UFS 2.1 storage comes in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB options, and there’s no microSD expansion.

Since the rear is also touch-enabled, you can utilise the back for extra controls for gaming. Another interesting feature is that it comes with not one but two side-mounted fingerprint sensors. This makes it more flexible to unlock with either hand.

For imaging, it gets an 16MP f/1.8 + 24MP f/1.7 dual-camera combo at the rear with AI scene recognition. Powering the X is a large 3,800mAh battery which is bigger than what you get on the honor Magic 2. It also supports Quick Charge 3.0 via USB-C. Out of the box, it runs on Android 8.1 Oreo with nubia UI 6.0.2 skin on top.

In China, the Nubia X is priced from 3,299 CNY (about RM1,983) for the 6GB RAM + 64GB storage model, while the 8GB RAM + 128GB storage version is going for 3,699 CNY (about RM2,223). The top of the line 8GB RAM + 256GB model is priced at 4,199CNY (about RM2,525).