nubia Z50S Pro review

MyOS 13 on top of Android 13

The nubia Z50S Pro runs Android 13 with a proprietary layer of MyOS on top, also labeled 13 (but more specifically 13.5.6). We have no specific information as to the nubia's update policy, which we're interpreting as not a great promise for long-term support, though certain sources online suggest the phone will get 3 years of updates.

In any case, MyOS as we're seeing it here, is not very different from what we've encountered in the past on ZTE or Red Magic phones (minus all the gaming add-ons on the latter).

Among the familiar and most obvious customizations in MyOS has been in the quick toggles area, where the initial swipe would get you 4 large bubbles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, and flashlight. That meanwhile became the default Android look, though MyOS' take still has its own personality.

There's also a large brightness slider with an Auto toggle - something missing in the default Android shade and in a lot of custom builds.

The settings menu is also custom, with ZTE/nubia opting for their own iconography and colors and a menu system that's a little different from Google's but still entirely logical. The About screen is ZTE's own and is pretty nice.

Quick toggles • Quick toggles • Quick toggles • Settings • About screen

The customization options are wide-ranging and all of them are grouped in the Personalization settings submenu. That's where you'll find the Always-on display settings - the feature can be set to show all the time, observe a schedule, or just light up for 10 seconds after a tap - standard stuff. You get a host of different clock styles, which you can further customize. The fingerprint recognition animation is also customizable.

Also, here you'll find the themes, of which there are just two pre-installed and no obvious way to get more. You can change app icon shapes and the shapes and colors of other UI elements independently; you can choose between different clock styles for the lockscreen. A nice touch is the ability to set the animation speed without going into developer options.

Personalization

Fingerprint recognition is the obvious way to unlock the nubia Z50S Pro. It uses an optical sensor, and we had no unusual run-ins with its operation - it unlocks quickly and virtually every time. The rather low placement is less than ideal, but something you won't get used to in a day.

There's a feature that lets you assign up to 5 app shortcuts that will be available directly after unlocking when you press and hold the fingerprint sensor. It's somewhat quirky because the phone unlocks and takes you to the homescreen for a brief instant first and only then shows you the shortcuts, but it could be handy for the right situations.

You can also set up face recognition as the sole authentication method or have it work in conjunction with the fingerprint reader - whichever works first. Of course, this being a simple 2D camera-only face recognition, it's less secure than the fingerprint option.

Passwords and security

The lockscreen has a clock-style setting of its own and offers standard functionality, including a camera shortcut in the lower right corner. In the lower left, there's a pull-up tab of sorts, which gives you shortcuts to the flashlight (again) and a voice recorder, but no dialer or a way to change these.

The homescreens are simple, and the leftmost pane is the Google feed which you can disable. You can choose whether to have all your apps on your homescreens or take the two-tiered approach with homescreens for shortcuts and an app drawer to keep all apps. The app drawer does none of that MIUI category sorting, nor is there a row of frequently used apps, but you can sort it by frequency of use.

Lockscreen • Lockscreen shortcuts • Homescreen • Folder view • Google feed • App drawer

There are few in-house apps on this build of MyOS. Most key functionality is outsourced to Google's apps, including Photos, Contacts, and Messages, but the File manager is custom.

File manager • Storage settings • Battery settings • Privacy dashboard • RAM expansion

There is a fair number of proprietary features in the Features menu in Settings. That includes the Z-POP arrow shortcut that gives you access to some actions from the sides, but we found that to clash with the back gesture for navigation, plus it feels like a fairly niche feature to begin with.

A standard set of gestures is available, including raise to wake, and flip to mute. There's also a double-shake to start the flashlight from the lockscreen, and that's the third way to access the flashlight so far (stay tuned for a fourth one). This one is kinda picky, though, because it only works on the lock screen - not on the always-on display and not with the phone already unlocked.

There's a mistouch prevention setting, too, and not just for when the phone is in your pocket. The phone can be set to disregard input from strips on the sides with three pre-set levels and a 0-10 slider, but going too far to the right is counterproductive - it's almost enough to make the end keys in the keyboard inoperable. This seems like a remnant of a feature set designed for a curved-edge phone, and not very applicable to the flat and boxy Z50S Pro.

Z-POP • Z-POP settings • Screen recorder • Gestures • Mistouch prevention

What has been designed for the Z50S Pro is the slider on the right side of the phone, and there's a menu item where you can set what it does. As is, the options include launching the camera (specifically and only in Street mode), switching the sound mode, opening the sound recorder and, you guessed it, turning on the Flashlight - there's four for you.

We can swear that when initially setting up the phone, it gave us the option for the slider to activate the Game space utility, but after a software update later, that possibility is no longer there. For that matter, neither is the Game space utility itself - it could be region-specific, or the company could have decided to only offer it on the Red Magic lineup, who knows.

Sliding switch settings

Benchmarks and performance

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 ticks inside the nubia X50S Pro, and it's the extra-special version of the chipset SM8550-AC with the higher CPU clock on the prime core - the 3.36GHz Cortex-X3 is joined by 2x2.8 GHz Cortex-A715 & 2x2.8GHz Cortex-A710 & 3x2.0GHz Cortex-A510 CPU cores. The Adreno 740 GPU is in charge of graphics.

There are three memory configurations of the nubia Z50S Pro that we know of - the 12GB/256GB base version, our review unit's 12GB/1TB spec, and another one with 1TB of storage but 16GB of RAM.

In our benchmark runs, the Z50S Pro proved very competitive, usually placing towards the top of the charts. In both GeekBench and Antutu, this nubia was more or less tied with the Red Magic 8S Pro for the top spot, with a Zenfone 10 around the same ballpark in GeekBench, and slightly behind in Antutu.

In the offscreen runs in GFXBench, the nubia shows another small advantage against competing models, even if the difference is typically too small to matter.

In the onscreen tests, however, the Z50S Pro's higher display resolution puts it at a disadvantage and phones with 1080p displays (and the SD 8 Gen 2, of course) post notably higher scores.

In the offscreen 3DMark, the nubia Z50S Pro returns to the top spot, solidifying the impression of being one of the most high-performing handsets around.

The nubia Z50S Pro also proved to be able to handle prolonged heavy loads with grace. After an almost immediate 10-ish percent drop in performance in the CPU throttling test, we observed a gradual decline to around 80% of the initial result, which the phone maintained for about half an hour and then dipped ever so slightly further to around 75%, which we reckon it can maintain indefinitely.

In the 3DMark Wild Life stress test, the phone also showed a gradual decline in results with a couple of nice stable plateaus, ultimately making it to an okay stability rating of 71%.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test