nubia Z70S Ultra review

Unobstructed 6.85-inch OLED display

With the X70S Ultra, nubia continues to be one of the few makers to offer an underdisplay selfie camera, which let's you have a display without any visible cutouts - in most applications, at least. It's seemingly the same panel as the one on the Z70 Ultra before it, which is no bad thing.

The display has a 6.85-inch diagonal and a 2,688x1,216px resolution in a 19.9:9 aspect ratio, and pixel density stands at 430ppi. Unlike the majority of other handsets, the nubia has a 144Hz maximum refresh rate, the extra 24Hz being available in compatible games.

In our brightness testing, we measured just under 1,400nits in auto mode and a little over 600nits when you set it manually with the slider - virtually the same numbers as on the Z70 Ultra. Neither number is anything special, but neither is a cause for concern either.

Refresh rate

The Z70S Ultra supports refresh rates up to 144Hz, but that peak value is only available in gaming. In our experience, the in-house utility reported fps values up to 144fps in both arcade and 3D titles, so you can expect mostly trouble-free high fps gaming, courtesy in no small part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, of course.

Outside of that, you get fixed refresh rate steps at 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz and you can essentially set hard ceilings on each of those values from the display settings. The phone will switch down to 60Hz when idling, regardless of mode.

Streaming and HDR

The Z70S Ultra supports HDR10, but it lacks HDR10+ or Dolby Vision compliance. It's Widevine L1-certified and it should support high-res video playback of DRM-protected content - we checked and Netflix did allow FullHD playback, which wasn't our experience on the Z70 Ultra, so you can count that as an improvement. We didn't get HDR in Netflix though.

The phone (kind of) supports the Android Ultra HDR standard for displaying HDR photos with enhanced tone mapping and a brightness boost for highlights. It works in both Chrome (which was buggy on the previous model, but here it's all good) and Google Photos. The thing is, though, that the phone's own images don't appear to support the standard, and the boost only shows up in compatible photos from other sources.

nubia Z70S Ultra battery life

The Z70S Ultra has gotten a 600mAh battery capacity upgrade, with the new model's 6,600mAh number being higher than most. It's a silicon carbon type of battery too, as before.

The capacity increase didn't appear to bring much of an improvement in our Active Use test, though - the overall score has remained virtually the same. However, for one reason or another, the new model arrived at those nearly 13h along a different path compared to that of the Z70 Ultra.

We clocked a small improvement in video playback and a more substantial increase in voice call time, but web browsing turned out a little worse, and gaming wasn't as good either. Overall, the Z70S Ultra's results remain somewhere around good to very good - it's not a standout showing, but it's not strictly bad either.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

The Z70S Ultra is rated for 80W charging but ships without an adapter, so it will be up to you to procure one. We had one of nubia's 80W chargers from an older phone, so we tested with that one.

The Z70S Ultra took 49 minutes to reach 100% and we were looking at 79% at the half-hour mark - a little bit slower than what we clocked on the Z70 Ultra, but still more or less average for 2025. The charging rate peaked at a little over 61W for a few moments only. We also tried a good third party USB PowerDelivery adapter and got essentially the same overall speeds, even though that one only maxed out at 46W of power draw. Rated wattage does not mean a whole lot as is usually the case.

There's no wireless charging capability on the Z70S Ultra, just as it was on the previous model. If that feature is important to you, you'll apparently need to look elsewhere.

The Z70S Ultra has its fair share of battery protection features. There's the Charge separation capability, which can have the phone only draw enough power from the adapter to meet its current needs without sending any to the battery, thus avoiding unnecessary heat build-up when gaming, for example.

That same feature can be used to sort of ensure that the phone's battery doesn't charge beyond a certain percentage, potentially helping with the cell's long-term health. You can set the stepless slider to any number between 20% and 90% and the phone will charge the battery to that level and go into separation mode. There's a more straightforward path to a similar destination too - a simple toggle that will limit charging to 80%.

Speaker test

The Z70S Ultra features a stereo speaker system with a bottom-firing unit and the earpiece chining in as the second channel. The phone maintains channel separation (no opposite channel playing back from each speaker at a lower volume) and will also adjust channels to account for its orientation in space.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker/earpiece

While the Z70 Ultra narrowly made it into the 'Very Good' category for loudness, the Z70S Ultra missed that mark by a tiny bit, earning a 'Good' score in our test. The two do sound very similar, and it's overall a pretty decent performance, with an okay amount of bass and only minor hints of bathroom vibes in the midrange.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.