nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Version in for review

30 July 2024

Update, 19 Aug: We have published an analysis of the differences between the new nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Version and the original nubia Z60 Ultra. There won't be a dedicated review of the Leading version as the differences are too small to warrant an enture multi-page review article.

The original text follows...

The nubia Z60 Ultra arrived in December 2023 as one of the first phones with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. The next month Samsung announced its Galaxy S24 lineup with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chipset, which features slightly higher clock speeds.

Either an exclusivity deal between Samsung and Qualcomm had ended, or the San Diego chipmaker has simply managed to produce enough units of the faster chipset as it's now also available for other makers. Obviously a reband was in order and it's now known as "Leading version" rather than "for Galaxy."

nubia was quick to take advantage of that and it relaunched the Z60 Ultra but with an overclocked chipset and a number of other improvements, most notably a bunch of AI features. The phone is called nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Version, and it is with us for a review.

The design is essentially unchanged - we are thankful for receiving the Silver variant of the Leading Version because otherwise, we would've had a hard time differentiating the new phone from the old one, which we already reviewed.

It does come with a hard plastic case for protection, a red USB-C cable and an 80W charger in the box.

The Leading version the same 50 MP 35mm main camera, a 64 MP telephoto with 85mm equivalent and a 50 MP ultra-wide camera. It claims to have improved the optics of the main camera however as well as the general performance of the 12 MP selfie camera that sits underneath the display.

The CPU of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a Cortex-X4 core that is clocked at 3.4 GHz, while the Adreno 750 GPU is 1 GHz, instead of 900 MHz.

We'll do our best to determine how much of a difference these make.

We will also test the NeoVision AI camera features that include AI Blur, AI Magic Eraser and AI Sky.

Once we are done with the review of the nubia Z60 Ultra Leading Version, we'll have a verdict on whether the phone is worth its starting price of $599.