While foldable smartphones have made huge strides in terms of technology and design, most of them are still far from accessible to the masses due to their premium price tags. That’s where the Nubia Flip comes in, with a new retail of only RM2,499. I say new because it was initially sold by a different distributor for RM3,999, so the new price makes it the most affordable foldable smartphone in Malaysia at the moment.
Given that this was my first time using a clamshell foldable, I had some high expectations, regardless of how much it costs. Unfortunately, once you start using it, it’s pretty obvious how they were able to make it so cheap. Spoiler alert: they cut a lot of corners.
Specifications
The Nubia Flip comes with a 6.9-inch main display with an OLED panel and a 120Hz refresh rate while the outside, it has a 1.43-inch circular OLED display which houses the cameras within the large bezels. It runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 chipset, which is already over two-years-old, paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
For imaging, its gets a very basic setup with a 50MP camera and a depth sensor on the cover screen and a 16MP selfie shooter in the inner display. Powering the flip phone is a small 4,310mAh battery with support for 33W charging. On the software side, it ships with MyOS 13 based on Android 13.
Looks & Functionality
At first glance, the Nubia Flip looks to have very good build quality. It has a texturised back cover that gives it some grip as well as anti-fingerprint qualities, which does feel quite nice. As for its form factor, the phone nearly folds completely flat with almost no gap in-between.
Unfortunately, that’s where the pros of this phone ends. For one thing, when you open it up, half it the time it doesn’t open up completely flat and you have to manually adjust it, which is already a red flag by itself. Then there’s the crease in the middle, which wasn’t that noticeable at first but after a couple of weeks, it did start to get deeper. The most concerning part is that sometimes, the hinge actually creaks when I opened it.
The main display of the phone is your garden variety screen, with a high refresh rate and acceptable colour reproduction. However, with its 1,100-nit global peak brightness, it could be brighter at this price, with the screen barely legible in bright, outdoor settings. As for the cover screen, it’s real-life usage is quite limited to the few apps that it supports, and frustratingly, you can’t change how long the screen stays on for before going to sleep.
Some of the features of the cover screen include the camera app for selfies, a step counter, a music controller that supports Spotify, a weather app, and a calendar app. There’s an Always-On Display feature, but it doesn’t stay on for more than five seconds at a time, which you also can’t change.
Of course, there are some fun upsides to having a clamshell foldable. You get to snap the phone shut to lock it with no need to actually use the home button and you can also do it to satisfyingly end a phone call. Additionally, the cover isn’t only useful for selfies, but also so that the subject of your photos can see what they look like before you press the shutter.
Performance & Battery
The Nubia Flip is equipped with a relatively aged mid-range processor, which translates into bad real-word usage. It regularly lags and stutters even when I’m just doing something mundane like browsing the web or scrolling on X. Heck, it sometimes freezes up when I unlock the phone.
Its abysmal processing power is apparent when you look at its synthetic benchmark results, with it scoring less than 900 on the 3DMark stress test. During the test, the phone heated up significantly, which suggests that despite its lack of power, it may not be very efficient.
Speaking of efficiency, the battery life on this foldable is quite a mixed bag. With daily use, the phone can comfortably last a whole day.
Mind you, it can’t last a second day even with light usage, unlike many phones nowadays, but whole-day battery life isn’t something to complain about.
However, the results of its endurance test tell a different story. I put it through the usual YouTube streaming test with the brightness and volume set at about 25% and, oddly enough, it only lasted a little over 12 hours. I ran it twice just to make sure and got similar results. I say odd because this is the worst result I’ve personally seen running this test, despite the phone’s real-world battery life not reflecting this.
Camera
While this phone is comfortably in the mid-range price point, its camera setup is equal to that of an entry-level device in the RM500 range. Honestly, it is not one of the best smartphone cameras I’ve used in a while, from the main sensor to the selfie snapper.
Any photo you take with this phone will be a blurry mess with low solution, regardless of the lighting conditions. In well-lit outdoors settings, shots can be oversaturated while the opposite problem occurs with indoor conditions. Suffice it to say, this isn’t a smartphone you’d buy for its photography capabilities.
Camera Samples
Competition
Tecno Phantom V Flip
The Tecno Phantom V Flip is the closest competition the Nubia Flip has, as they are both budget foldables with very similar designs. However, despite the Tecno phone costing RM500 more, it does offer much better specs that bring it closer that bring it closer to being a mid-range device instead of entry-level.
The Phantom V Flip sports a similar 6.9-inch 120Hz display but with an LTPO AMOLED panel and a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. However, the AMOLED cover screen is a bit smaller than the Nubia’s, being 1.32 inches in size. Under the hood, it runs on a MediaTek Dimensity 8050 SoC paired with 8GB RAM and 256GB of expandable storage.
For optics, the clamshell phone features a 64MP main camera alongside a 13MP ultra-wide lens on the back, as well as a 32MP selfie shooter. For the battery, it is backed by a 4,000mAh cell, which is smaller than Nubia’s, but with support for faster 45W charging.
Conclusion
The Nubia Flip is, frankly speaking, a budget smartphone with a folding form factor, with the latter contributing the most to justify its price tag. It has a weak processor which can’t even perform everyday tasks smoothly and consistently, a below-average battery life, questionable long-term durability due to its poor build quality, and an unusable camera.
Yes, the flipping is fun and other clamshell foldables cost a massive premium, but that alone is not nearly enough to make up for it being a generally bad phone. My suggestion? Get a regular, non-flip phone in this price range, which will serve you much better.
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