ZTE nubia Z20 review

Nubia UI 7 based on Android 9.0 Pie

The nubia Z20 comes with a custom skin on top of Android 9 Pie, but in our book, it's more like a stock-ish looking OS with tons of extra features from nubia. Most of them involve the double-sided fingerprint readers and the two displays.

Other than that, the software looks a lot like vanilla Android. The home screen, lock screen, notification shade, and the recent apps menu are indistinguishable from the stock Android. Looking deeper into the Settings menu reveals the changes that nubia made.

Home screen, recent apps, notification shade, general settings menu

The Display menu gives you control over the color settings, the Night Light feature for after-hours reading, and you can also set up Dark theme. Unfortunately, though, switching over to Dark theme didn't do much for us - only the notification shade went black, whereas the system UI and menus remained white. We suspect that this is a software bug that needs to be fixed when the retail units arrive since we were offered a review unit with pre-production software.

Display settings

Speaking of the display, the handset has an always-on feature that works on both panels. It can be turned on for both sides or just one of them. You can choose between numerous presets and styles or slap a short 10-second clip of your own. Images and gifs work too.

Always-on display settings

Under the Secondary screen space menu, you can set the back screen to act as a mirror or as an extended display for multitasking. For example, a three-finger horizontal swipe will send the foreground app to the other screen, but we didn't find it as seamless as we would expect. After sending it to the other screen, you have to switch off the display you are currently using, flip the phone and unlock the other one. You will find your opened app there.

There's also a floating semi-transparent button that allows you to switch to the other screen on the fly. You can move the button around or remove it completely. You can also use the quick toggle in the notification shade, as well. And if you are bothered by the automatic screen unlock depending on how you hold the phone, you can always set it to turn on the main screen and then switch over to the other one manually. We found that the automatic wakeup works pretty well, but it gets confused from time to time when holding it in landscape ready to take a picture. Sometimes it will turn on the back screen instead of the main one.

Secondary screen customizations and options

But wait, there are more screen-related features. Prettier than functional, though. For incoming calls, during gaming and when listening to music, the back panel can light up with various cool animations. You can also assign custom ones. However, interactive animations during gaming are limited to two games for now - Glory of Kings and Peace elite. We also weren't able to make the animation work during music playback so it must be due to the pre-release software.

A Super Eye Care feature is available for the secondary screen allowing you to choose between three color temperature modes - light, medium, and super. Perhaps for late-night reading, the secondary display would provide the best viewing experience in this regard.

Super Eye Care menu

Enough about the screens, though. There's another nifty feature the nubia Z20 has, and that's pressure-sensitive side frame. Nubia has made the frame right below the fingerprint readers pressure-sensitive, just like the Pixels and some of HTC's phones. You can assign different tasks or shortcut to apps to the available gestures - short and long squeeze. Adjusting the pressure is also possible and goes from 1 to 10, so it's pretty granular. The Pressure border function works flawlessly, and it's pretty flexible, so we are sure you will find a use for it.

Pressure border settings

As far as the fingerprint readers' usability goes, we have a couple of small complaints. The haptic feedback followed by a successful and unsuccessful unlock is identical, so we were often confused whether the phone has been unlocked or not. This leads us to our next complaint. The fingerprint readers are indeed pretty fast, but it takes some time for the screen actually to unlock. A brief press of the button is all it takes for the scanner to get your fingertip, but the screen takes too much time to light up.

Following the footsteps of its gaming-centric sibling, the nubia Red Magic 3, the nubia Z20 also has some gaming-related features and optimizations. The so-called Gamespace lets you add games to your library for a quick launch and offers some built-in features like CPU, GPU, or combined boost of performance, message blocking, and the Touch handle feature. The latter lets you use the back screen as a touch controller eliminating the need for some of the controls on the main screen. A pretty nifty feature for gamers.

Gamespace

The rest of the settings are pretty much standard to stock Android along with the appearance. However, we found one thing missing from the OS, and that's the gesture-based navigation. Nubia could very well bring the gestures with a future update, but for now, you won't be able to use them.

We didn't have any major issues except for the occasional less-than-smooth transition animations that need to be ironed out with a future patch. Also, the English translation of the menus left us confused at times, and nubia needs to do a better job if it wants to draw international users. Otherwise, the OS felt snappy as it should on a flagship phone with the latest Snapdragon SoC. Which brings us to our next chapter.

Performance

Despite its rather low price, the nubia Z20 packs a powerhouse of an SoC - Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon 855+ chipset. It incorporates one big, powerful Kryo 485 core clocked at 2.96GHz, three more Kryo 485 cores clocked at 2.42GHz, and four energy-efficient Kryo 485 cores running at 1.78GHz. The Adreno 640 takes care of the graphically-intensive tasks, and it's clocked at 700MHz, which is higher than the Adreno 640 in the standard Snapdragon 855.

Memory configurations are three - 6GB/128GB, 8GB/128GB and the 8GB/512GB. We are in possession of the second variant with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, which by the way, isn't expandable.

Without further ado, let's dive into the synthetic benchmarks although, we've tested other phones with this SoC, so we know what to expect.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  13882
• Apple iPhone XR
  11437
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  11226
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  11155
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  10800
• Asus Zenfone 6
  10721
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  10174
• ZTE nubia Z20
  10101
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  10014
• Huawei P30 Pro
  9649
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  9375

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  5477
• Apple iPhone XR
  4818
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  4543
• Asus Zenfone 6
  3505
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  3499
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  3493
• ZTE nubia Z20
  3491
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  3479
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  3323
• Huawei P30 Pro
  3270
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  2573

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  3462
• OnePlus 7T
  2932
• ZTE nubia Z20
  2452

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  1333
• OnePlus 7T
  788
• ZTE nubia Z20
  734

In CPU benchmarks, the Snapdragon 855+ is faster than most of its direct rivals, including Samsung's Exynos 9820 and Huawei's Kirin 980 while falling short to Apple's last year and this year's chips. In single-threaded tasks, however, the Exynos 9820 and Apple's Bionic processors are considerably faster.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  419453
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  377024
• ZTE nubia Z20
  371150
• Asus Zenfone 6
  361679
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  357672
• Apple iPhone XR
  341196
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  328366
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  316156
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  314975
• Huawei P30 Pro
  290189
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  288176

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  121
• Apple iPhone XR
  97
• OnePlus 7T
  79
• ZTE nubia Z20
  73
• Asus Zenfone 6
  71
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  71
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  71
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  71
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  68
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  60
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  56
• Huawei P30 Pro
  54

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  62
• Apple iPhone XR
  60
• Apple iPhone 11
  60
• OnePlus 7T
  59
• ZTE nubia Z20
  58
• Asus Zenfone 6
  57
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  57
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  57
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  54
• Huawei P30 Pro
  50
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  50
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  37

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  76
• Apple iPhone XR
  60
• OnePlus 7T
  48
• ZTE nubia Z20
  45
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  43
• Asus Zenfone 6
  42
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  42
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  42
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  42
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  35
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  33
• Huawei P30 Pro
  29

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 11
  60
• Apple iPhone XR
  58
• OnePlus 7T
  41
• ZTE nubia Z20
  37
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  37
• Asus Zenfone 6
  36
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  36
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  36
• ASUS ROG Phone X mode
  31
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  29
• Huawei P30 Pro
  27
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  23

3DMark SSE 3.1 Unlimited

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 3
  6360
• Lenovo Z6 Pro
  6351
• ZTE nubia Z20
  6294
• Asus Zenfone 6 (Zen Power Boost)
  6282
• Asus Zenfone 6
  6263
• Apple iPhone 11
  6162
• Samsung Galaxy S10
  4550
• Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)
  4315
• Huawei P30 Pro
  3522

When it comes to GPU performance, the Adren 640 blows almost everyone out of the water with the exception of Apple's A13 and A12 chips.