Nubia, the sub brand of ZTE Mobiles entered the Indian market in 2015 with the launch of Z9. Z9 carried top the line specifications back then. After that, Nubia has been launching smartphones with good specifications in the Indian market.
Nubia M2 Lite is one the company’s mid range smartphone with the sleek and stylish design packing some good hardware for the price. We tested and used this phone extensively and here’s our full review of Nubia M2 Lite.
Box Contents:
The box itself comes in a white color with Nubia branding at the center. On opening the box, you are greeted with Nubia M2 lite at the first place. The regular booklets like the user guide, warranty information follow. Below that, you will find a 5V 2A travel adapter and a USB Cable. That’s it for the box contents.
Overview:
On the top, there is a secondary noise cancellation microphone. Moving down resides the 5.5 inch HD display. There are 3 buttons below the display. A Home Button which doubles up as a fingerprint sensor and two capacitive buttons to the left and right. The home button and capacitive buttons are completely customizable. The volume rockers are located on the left and the power button is located on the right. On the bottom, you can find a micro USB charging port, a mono speaker, and the primary microphone.
Display:
Nubia M2 Lite comes with 5.5 inch HD Display sporting a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The quality of the panel used by Nubia is very good and the display is quite sharp. The outdoor legibility in direct sunlight is decent. However, we wished to see a FULL HD Display considering the competition in this price range.
The overall quality of the display is good.
Design and Hardware:
The design of Nubia M2 lite is well crafted and looks premium. The phone feels good to hold in hand but on the other hand, as it is a combination of glass and metal, it tends to slip off your hands easily. A good TPU case is highly recommended.
Nubia M2 Lite is powered by MediaTek Helio P10 Octa Core Processor with first four cores clocked at 1.5 GHz and the other four cores clocked at 1.0 GHz. The smartphone is coupled with 4 GB DDR3 RAM. Nubia has packed a good hardware in M2 lite and it reflects in the performance. There are little flaws too and we will see more on that in the performance department.
Performance:
As Nubia M2 lite comes with an Octa Core Helio P10 Processor, it handles day to day operations with ease. It could even handle heavy tasks without any hiccups. We did not notice any sort of lag or sluggishness during our testing. The apps opened up quickly and switching between apps was also fast. The memory management has been handled by Nubia quite well in M2 Lite. It could easily keep 5-6 apps in memory but if there are more than 6 apps, it boots out from the memory.
We noticed that the phone tends to heat up quickly with heavy multitasking and while gaming. Don’t get me wrong. It was not unbearable but due to the metallic back, it felt hot to touch. The temperature was within 41 degrees but as mentioned in the above line, due to the metallic back it felt hot to touch.
The overall performance of Nubia M2 Lite was very good and it was very surprising to see the phone handling any task thrown at it with ease. Good job, Nubia!
Camera:
The optics on this smartphone impressed us during our testing.
The smartphone sports a 13 MP Rear Camera with a f/2.2 aperture and a 16 MP Front facing shooter with a f/2.0 aperture. There are many camera modes to play with.
The shots taken in daylight had a lot of details and the colors were just perfect. The performance in indoors was decent. The video shot with the rear camera was also good and the maximum resolution that the camera can shoot is FULL HD i.e., 1080p. Here are some of the samples taken with the rear facing camera
Nubia M2 lite is marketed as a selfie centric phone and the shots taken with front facing camera came out very good. Selfie lovers will appreciate the performance of the front facing camera. The shots didn’t lack details and the colors were also perfect. Sometimes the shots come out to be over exposed.
The shots didn’t lack details and the colors were also perfect. Sometimes the shots come out to be over exposed.
Battery:
The battery life of Nubia M2 lite was average. The smartphone lasted a full working day on a single charge with heavy usage. With light to moderate usage, it should last 1 and a half days with ease.
The charger supplied with the phone isn’t a fast charger, but M2 lite charges in 2 hours 35 mins. It is a 5V 2 Ampere charger.
Software and UI:
M2 Lite ships with Nubia UI 4.0 on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. This is a custom interface of Nubia and it is heavily skinned. There is no app drawer and all the applications reside on the home screen.
Nubia UI 4.0 comes with gesture features to make things easier. For instance, there is a gesture to take a screenshot, switch quickly between apps, clear all apps at once etc. There is support for Dual apps and Nubia calls it ‘Dual Instance’.
The single button on the center of the smartphone doubles up as a fingerprint scanner. The accuracy is very good but with sweaty hands, it fails to recognize. It can be customized too by adding gestures. The two dots to the left and right of the home button act as ‘Back’ and ‘Recent apps’ key. The capacitive buttons are customizable too.
Conclusion:
Nubia M2 Lite checks almost all the boxes for a perfect mid-ranger. There are some flaws but for the price of ₹12,499, this phone is too hard to ignore. We felt that it is an underrated smartphone at this segment. This phone adds in our recommended phones under INR 15,000.
Nubia M2 Lite
₹ 12,499
Pros
- Sleek Design
- Selfie Camera
- Software
Cons
- Average Battery
- Slight Heating Issues
This phone is the Competator of Infinix Note 4