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 $569, 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 Hubia has succeeded in the quest of making the most affordable flagship out there. Should OnePlus be concerned?

Nubia Z60S Pro Design and Display

Like a box of candy

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.

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.

Nubia Z60S Pro Camera

Neovision photography

Main Camera

The main camera sensor is a flagship-grade Sony IMX906 and this shows in the day photos. They look great, with good level of detail, exposure is also decent, and the colors are true to life. The dynamic range is also flagship-grade.

When the night falls, the main sensor is still able to capture a lot of details, although there are some artifacts around light sources, and the images look a bit on the softer side. The dynamic range isn’t great but on the other hand, night images look much more realistic and close to what we saw when taking them, than many HDR-enhanced samples from other phones.

Ultrawide Camera

The ultrawide camera has a really wide field of view, which can lead to distortion at the edges of the image. Object look quite stretched and there’s a difference in quality, compared to the central region of the image. On the other hand, there’s a good level of detail, the colors look good, and the white balance and exposure also look pretty decent.

Zoom Quality

The zoom camera uses an 8MP sensor, and the aperture is not the fastest out there either. In good lighting conditions you can get passable results but overall, there’s a perceivable lack of detail, images look washed out and sometimes a little overexposed, too. The level of magnification is also not that great compared to the main camera, and overall, it might be better to use 2x crops from the main sensor.

Selfies

The selfie camera is nothing to write home about. It’s a 16 MP, f/2.5, 26mm camera with a rather small sensor. There’s a beauty mode, and a portrait mode as well, but both produce unnatural, squashed and plasticky-looking images. We suggest using the front camera in normal mode, without beauty filters or portrait bokeh algorithms applied.

Video Quality

Nubia Z60S Pro Performance & Benchmarks

Old gen Snapdragon but overclocked

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.

Nubia Z60S Pro Battery

Solid

PhoneArena Battery Test Results:

PhoneArena Charging Test Results:

Nubia Z60S Pro Audio Quality and Haptics

Should you buy it?