Nubia N1 Lite first impressions: An average Joe with a few shortcomings

Chinese handset and mobile equipment maker ZTE just **announced** a new smartphone for the Indian market under the Nubia brand. The company has offered some promising smartphones in the past but somehow almost all of them get lost in the crowded market. The new Nubia N1 Lite is a sub-Rs 10,000 offering with which the company seeks to make a spot alongside Chinese smartphone rivals. But is the smartphone good enough to match handsets like the Xiaomi Redmi 4 or the Lenovo K6 Power? Here’s a quick look at the smartphone. Build and design While smartphone makers have started offering premium design including a metal finish, the Nubia N1 Lite offers a plastic finish. It doesn’t look that bad though, as the overall finish seems pretty decent. There’s a golden chrome rim around the edges and the plastic back-panel has a matte finish. The handset offers a nice grip, but I found it quite bulky and comparatively larger than most 5.5-inch smartphones. Surprisingly it is heavier than the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 which has a metal finish and a larger battery.  The front is covered in glass which curves slightly at the edges with the 5.5-inch display underneath. Above the display is earpiece, front camera, LED flash and the usual set of sensors. The back panel comes off to reveal the two SIM card slots, the microSD card slot and the sealed battery. The panel is a bit flimsy and gets tricky to re-attach. At the back there is also the primary camera, a dual-LED flash and the fingerprint sensor. Moving around the edges, the power and volume buttons are placed on the right, the headphone jack on the top and the microUSB port on the bottom.  Overall the company has tried to make best use of in-expensive material, but I personally wasn’t impressed. Display Most sub-Rs 10,000 smartphones offer a 5-inch display but the N1 Lite comes with a 5.5-inch LCD panel with a 720p (1280x720) resolution. While this does bring down the pixel density to 267 ppi, it should help in offering a better battery backup. The display panel quality is just average with a bit of color shift at certain angles. Having a low resolution on a large display doesn’t make it really crisp either. Brightness levels are good though under the bright sunlight it does get washed out. Chipset, RAM and storage The hardware package includes a MediTek MT6737 quad-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, a Mali-T720MP2 GPU and 2 GB of RAM. There is 16 GB of internal storage along with a microSD card slot which supports cards of up to 128 GB. This is fairly a similar configuration that most handsets at this price offer. However, smartphones like the Xiaomi Redmi 3S and the Lenovo K6 Power, both offer chipsets from Qualcomm which preferred in terms of reliability and performance.  OS and software The N1 Lite runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow which is slowly starting to age. There is no specific UI layer on top and overall it looks stock with a few custom icons. The company has done well to keep the UI light and hasn’t added any such bloatware, although the performance doesn’t seem to be that good. Scrolling is a bit slow and there is some visible lag when scrolling through menus and the homescreens. The company will have to push out updates to address this issue. Camera The smartphone packs an 8 MP primary camera with a dual LED flash. According to the company the camera features a 4P precision lens arrangement along with an F/2.0 aperture. It can shoot 1080p videos and offers electronic image stabilization and time-lapse.  At the front there is a 5 MP camera with a soft LED flash, a 3-piece lens, f/2.8 aperture and 84-degree field of view and some beauty filters for selfie lovers. The camera app is something that used be on Android Gingerbread handsets and it isn’t very quick either. The camera quality also isn’t impressive. Focusing takes time and pictures are a bit grainy and lack details. Connectivity and battery Connectivity features include Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, dual-SIM support, GPS/A-GPS, FM Radio and microUSB 2.0. The battery is a 3,000 mAh unit and I was expecting a larger one considering the smartphone’s large size. The Xiaomi Redmi 3S/3S Prime offers a larger 4,100 mAh battery in a smaller packaging. There is no mention of fast charging either. Conclusion Nubia is going to find it difficult to take on the competition with the N1 Lite. The hardware package is decent and the company has tried to make use of a plastic design, but overall there are a number of shortcomings I found while using the handset. The UI is a bit buggy and the camera isn’t very impressive. Of course I need to properly test it out to see if it is worth the money. I think the Redmi 3S, Redmi 3S prime , Redmi 4 and the Lenovo K6 Power are all solid offerings and seem to be better than N1 Lite.