The Nubia M2 Lite stands out from other budget smartphones, with its looks. But, that's where the story seems to end...
Smartphones under the Nubia brand has usually been about two things – how the phone looks, and how you look. Priced at Rs. 13,999, the Nubia M2 Lite focuses on selfies and has a 16MP front camera. We have been working on a the review for a few days now, but you’ll have to wait a bit more to learn more about the Nubia M2 Lite’s full capabilities.
In the meanwhile, there are a few pointers that we can give you. Starting with the design.
Design and Build
The unibody metallic design on the Nubia M2 Lite feels much better than most phones in this price range. The phone is sturdy, with a unique design, and is perhaps the only budget smartphone that can stand out with its design.
It’s also a distinctly Nubia-like design, with a full black finish and gold accents around the edges. There’s also a red accent around the camera, all of which makes the M2 Lite unique and distinguishable. It’s a tad flashy, though, so whether you like this phone from a looks point of view, is completely your opinion.
While the Nubia M2 Lite feels sturdy enough, it’s really slippery in your hands. The polished metallic finish all over its body is one of the slipperiest that we have come across. That, combined with the fact that it has a fairly large form factor, makes the M2 Lite quite unwieldy.
Display
Another confounding choice is that of putting a 5.5 inch panel with HD resolution. We questioned the lack of sharpness here too, although that really isn’t the central problem with the display. For what it’s worth, the Nubia M2 Lite has a decently bright display and colours look decent too. However, this is a TFT panel and the characteristic brightness loss is easily visible unless you’re looking straight at the screen. Also, looking at it from a small angle will show a colour shift too, which is quite disappointing for a phone today.
The reddish tint is noticeable enough to affect videos and movies and if you’re buying this, you have to make your peace with it.
Performance
Selfie lovers probably don’t need best-in-class performance, but that doesn’t necessarily justify the choice of SoC here. The Nubia M2 Lite runs on the MediaTek MT6750 SoC, clocked at 1.5GHz. There are two Cortex A53 quad-core clusters running the show here, and they don’t really drum up benchmark scores.
Over the past few days, we’ve noticed lags and stutters on games too, while heating seems another issue with the device and its SoC. We’re yet to finish all our testing on the device, so we’ll hold our judgement for now. However, the Nubia M2 Lite doesn’t seem to pose a threat to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (review), Honor 6X (review) etc.
Camera
The 16MP front camera is supposed to be the highlight of the device, which warrants some more testing. However, on initial impressions the phone seems to focus on brightening your selfies as much as possible, while softening skin toned a bit. On the other hand, the 13MP rear camera doesn’t necessarily impress on this device. It does fairly under well lit conditions, but indoor and low light shots seem sub-par, with substantial noise in images and detail loss.
More on the camera in our review.
Concluding words…
The Nubia M2 Lite doesn’t look like any other budget smartphone, and with that it’ll turn heads. Its front camera seems decent too, although its performance doesn’t impress and it doesn’t seem to make a very good case against competition. The Nubia Z11 Mini before this, had a stand-out camera that made it worth recommending. The same doesn’t ring true for the Nubia M2 Lite.
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Prasid Banerjee
Trying to explain technology to my parents. Failing miserably. View Full Profile
