ZTE lost a lot of ground to Xiaomi, Huawei and Meizu over the past year or so, hence the Nubia Z9 is a rather important device for the Chinese company. 

Luckily, it seems to tick all the right boxes for an alternative flagship - good value, decent specs and premium looks.

Nubia Z9 Max spec

The Nubia Z9 Max features a 5.5-inch 1080p display protected by Gorilla Glass 3. It is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 SoC and sports 3GB of speedy LPDDR4 RAM, along with 16GB of storage, expandable via a microSD slot.

The phone sports an aluminium body, 16-megapixel rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, front camera with an 8-megapixel sensor, NFC, FDD LTE and TD LTE, along with Bluetooth 4.0 and MHL 3.0. It also has a 2900mAh battery.

The launch price is 2,499 CNY, which is about 360 EUR at press time, or 330 USD.

The Nubia Z9 Mini isn’t really "mini"

The Mini model comes with a smaller 5-inch 1080p display and the same cameras. However, it lacks the powerful 20nm SoC of its bigger sibling. The Nubia Z9 Mini is a mid-range affair, so it ships with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC, backed by 2GB of RAM (mot LPDDR4). The phone also supports two LTE standards.

However, the price is what makes the Mini really interesting. It’s launching at 1,499 CNY, or about 218 EUR at press time. Basically this is a 250 USD phone with mid-range specs and a premium build, which doesn’t sound bad at all.

Both phones ship with Android 5.0, with Nubia UI 2.8 on top. The latter is our only concern, as ZTE’s previous Android skins weren’t that good. The new Nubias will be available in black and white colour options, with silver or gold aluminium trim.

Since this is an ongoing event, we have no proper press pics, but you can check out MyDrivers for live coverage -  but remember to bring a translator.

Nubia Z9 launch pic via MyDrivers