Nubia Z11 review: Work hard, play hard

Telephony and loudspeaker

In the latest version 4.0, Nubia UI seems to have lost some of its former feature set across some of the basic bundled apps as well. The Contacts app, for instance, no longer has the "Yellow Pages" feature form the Z9. However, the latter was undeniably geared towards the Chinese market, so its absence might be tied to us having an international ROM.

Standard Contacts interface

Other than that, the Contacts is a part of the Phone app and is a pretty standard deal. You can assign personal ringtones for each contact and scan a business card to quickly add a new contact.

As for the dialer portion, it shows your recent calls with the keypad on top and a standard num pad on the bottom. Smart dialing is enabled - that is you can quickly search your contacts by typing. There used to be a quick way to search for businesses and listing online from this interface as well, but it might have been part of the "Yellow Pages" feature and is no longer there.

Favorite contacts • Dialer

In our loudspeaker test, the Nubia Z11 only managed to score an "Average" mark. Its results do, however, almost put it in the "Good" segment. Still, we wouldn't count on it at parties. Plus, with a single speaker, it can't really come anywhere close to the impressive experience the ZTE Axon 7 delivers.

Text input

Just like the Nubia Z9, the new Z11 relies on Google's AOSP keyboard by default. However, if that is a bit too plain for you, TouchPal is also pre-installed. In has extensive support for various languages and input styles. There are also gestures and shortcuts. Predictive text has also come a long way and now does a fairly good job trying to automatically switch between languages.

AOSP keyboard • TouchPal

Oh and in terms of looks, the sky is the limit. Practically every aspect of the TouchPal keyboard is customizable. You get a whole Theme store of choices, as well as access to additional styles via the Google Play Store.

Even more TouchPal options

Messaging

Like the dialer, the messaging app lets you easily send a message from either SIM card. Once you open a message thread you also get a clear indication of which SIM card received a given text too. The app itself looks like it belongs on iOS, it has a fairly clean UI but it's functional. A tab shows only starred messages and you can use search to find others.

Pretty standard messaging app

For email, you get a custom solution out of the box. It supports Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, to name a few with practically zero configuration. You can also add any other POP3, IMAP or SMTP server as well. As for the interface, it is pretty standard with nothing really remarkable or noteworthy to mention.

Of course, since a full suit of Google apps is now in place, you can just opt for the familiar Gmail client and have it handle all your inboxes.

Clean and simple email app