ZTE owned Nubia has been pushing out some decent mid-rangers to the Indian market, The Z17 mini is the newest addition to the lineup. the device at its price of 19,000 rupees competes with devices such as the Moto g5 plus and the Lenovo p2 while the z17 mini is quite similar in the specification to the competition the device stands by bringing Dual camera system to the table which is traditionally found only on flagships and higher end devices.

Design

Design is another plus point for the Nubia z17 mini it features a premium full metal unibody design and has curved edges all around the phone which helps quite a lot in handling the device, at first glance the device is quite reminiscent of the iPhone 6s plus which may or may not be good thing but it is not all the same though the z17 does have does have some interesting design points like the gold trim all around the edge which adds a flare and the red accents around the camera trim keeps the design consistent with the red navigation button on the front, The quality of the material used and build is also excellent on the Nubia x17 mini, kudos to Nubia here. The device also fares well in terms of handling in day to day use thanks to 5.2-inch display size (which in my opinion is the sweet spot in terms of handling and usability) and curved edges does also help a lot. Over all the build quality and the ergonomics of the Nubia z17 mini are excellent it looks feels good and feels good as well unless you are keeping the device on any sort plane surface which we all do , this phone is notoriously slippery on any sort of plane material so just be aware of that, apart from that you won’t regret anything in terms of design.

Display

The Nubia x17 sports a 5.2 inch IPS 1920×1080 full HD display with pixel density of ~424 ppi which is quite standard in this range and does look good the colors are a bit saturated like display found on Samsung devices which make the display pop a bit, the contrast of the display is decent and the blacks are quite good and the whites are accurate as well and the display is quite legible in direct sunlight and gets dim enough for night usage over all no complaints here.

Performance and software

In terms of Performance, the Nubia z17 mini seems quite decent on paper with its 3gb of ram and Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chipset with 4 high-performance Cortex A72 cores clocked 1.95 GHz and rest of 4 Cortex A53 cores clocked 1.4 GHz and Graphics duties are handled by the quite capable Adreno 510 GPU impressive spec indeed but somewhere it does not feel like the device is performing at its best compared to similarly specced phones in the market, it is decent in day to day performance but compared side by side the app open with a bit of delay and the device does run slightly slower but it does not lag which is good thing, this maybe due to the heavy UI that Nubia has built on top of Android 6.0.1. which leads us to the software section, as I have previously mentioned the UI is a bit on the heavier side of the spectrum  and it does make the device slower adding to it the navigation buttons are very placed very weirdly and does have a lot of learning curve to get used to them which is very annoying but it is not all bad though the UI does have few interesting and usable features such as the ability to run multiple social media accounts, full web page screenshot, and other nifty features, There is a lot of potential in this UI with a bit of optimisation and simplifying the navigation buttons the device and can achieve great performance , hope Nubia addresses these issues in the next update.

Coming to battery life the Device packs in a 2950mah physically battery might seem a bit small but don’t be fooled the Z17 manages to last whole day no problem with lite to moderate usage but if you are a heavy user you might wanna charge it at the end of the day.

Camera

The main USP of the device is the DUAL CAMERA system at the rear sporting two 13MP sensors with aperture of f/2.2 along with dual LED flash, the implementation here is similar to the one found on the Huawei p9 sporting one RGB sensor and another Monochromatic sensor which is meant to improve detail in photos, the device performance quite good in low light condition but images seem a bit grainy in well-lit situations the images come out to be decent but highly lit condition the sensor struggles with exposure , there is lot of potential if you take your time you can get some great shots with this setup, apart from that camera does offer many features in the camera such as MultiExpo, LightDraw, E-aperture Slow shutter, star trail trajectory, time-lapse macro 3d etc which are quite interesting but a bit gimmicky, the phone does offer full manual mode which can be quite handy handy if want to take full control, the front camera is decent on the device you can shoot satisfactory selfies with front facing 16mp camera.

Verdict

Nubia z17 min is an impressive device it tries to pack heap load of features into single device, it checks all the basic requirements and offer bit more which makes it stand out, but the Nubia isn’t a perfect devices given it does offer many features but it does not do any thing perfectly, but still if you are in the market for smartphone under 20000 rupees which look great and has premium build quality you should take a look at the Nubia z17 mini.