ZTE Nubia Z9 mini review: No small affair

Phonebook with Yellow Pages built in

The phonebook is fairly standard, a part of the same multi-tabbed app as the dialer. You can assign personal ringtones for each contact and scan a business card to quickly add a new contact. Since there are no Google Play services don't count on getting your phonebook synced with the initial setup. Thankfully there are third party solutions for that, but you do have to side-load them as well.

Standard phonebook

The final tab of this app is titled "Yellow Page." It looks like local listings, complete with search, but it was in Chinese only and it didn't seem to work in our area so we couldn't really try it out.

Built-in Yellow pages

Dual-SIM telephony

The dialer shows your recent calls with the keypad on top (which can be hidden to make more room for the call log). Smart dialing is enabled - that is you can quickly search your contacts by typing - but the phone also pulls numbers for various shops and businesses from the Internet. The Info button next to each number shows more about that business.

Smart dialing with local business search

The ZTE Nubia Z9 is a dual-SIM, dual-standby phone. Each SIM gets its own ringtone and call button so it's easy to tell which number is getting called and calling from the right number. Call recording is available from the settings menu and can be set to begin automatically with each call.

You can also switch which card is used for data from the notification area.

The ZTE Nubia Z9 mini scored below average on our loudspeaker test. It is on the quiet side and we wouldn't really count on it in a noisy environment. When DTS is turned on, along with volume enhancement, the device does reach an average score, quite close to what the bigger Z9 managed to accomplish.

Messaging and text input

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.

Clean messaging app

Incoming messages (including MMS, naturally) are showed in popups and you can enable delivery reports. Creating a new message simply pops up an input field at the bottom and doesn't really switch to a new interface, which is kind of confusing at first, but is easy to get used to. There is a wide array of multimedia content that can be attached to a message, automatically converting it to MMS.

Creating a new message and attaching content

For email there isn't the usual Gmail app, instead you get a custom solution that supports Gmail but also a number of providers popular in China (163, qq, sina, etc.) along with Hotmail and Yahoo. Multiple accounts are supported and you can view the messages in a combined inbox.

Built-in email app

The app is attractive (again with iOS aesthetics) but it lacks some goodies of Gmail - push notifications (i.e. instant delivery of emails) and swiping between messages.

The ZTE Nubia Z9 uses the standard Android Keyboard, but also comes with Sogou, which handles Pinyin and handwriting input for eastern languages. The Android keyboard is quite good at that itself and has customizable appearance and button arrangements, plus swipe input. Sogou on the other hand has more knobs and switches than the Starship Enterprise.

The options menu houses screen upon screens of toggles which often make little sense due to bad translation. There is even an option to use an old-style num-pad layout. Remember those? The convenience of having to press each button a set number of times to type a letter? Anyone? Well, it is in there.

Vast array of keyboard options

Voice dictation is not available though. Additional goodies like split-keyboard mode or changing the size of the keyboard are not present either. The one-handed mode scales the whole screen, including the keyboard, there's no dedicated small keyboard (not that you'd need one at 5.0").