Nubia has launched the NaviX Ultra in China, its second attempt at an AI-first phone built around ByteDance's Doubao Mobile Assistant.
The phone arrives weeks after Nubia's president teased it as the company's "world's first AI agent phone."
Nubia calls it the second-generation "beanbag" phone, a nickname inherited from its predecessor, the M153.
That earlier model sold out quickly last December before running into problems when several major Chinese apps limited what its Doubao Mobile Assistant could do inside their apps.
Pricing and AI Features
The NaviX Ultra comes in three versions at launch.
The 12GB + 512GB model costs 5,999 yuan (around $840), while the 16GB + 512GB version costs 6,499 yuan (around $910).
The top model with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage costs 7,499 yuan (around $1,050).
Nubia calls the NaviX Ultra the world's first AI intelligent smartphone.
The phone uses ByteDance's Doubao Mobile Assistant for its AI features, aiming to let users hand off multi-step tasks across different apps with one spoken sentence.
This is the consumer version of Doubao Mobile Assistant, following the technical preview ByteDance put out last December.
Nubia says the update brings changes to interaction, personal memory, task execution, and privacy controls.
The assistant can recognize products on your screen and take you directly to a shopping page.
It can also handle calls using custom response scripts and sort important notifications so they stay at the top.
The assistant is optimized to work with third-party services such as Cao Cao Mobility and Lark, letting users book a ride or check a schedule without leaving the chat window.
It can run some tasks in the background and handle multiple requests in a queue.
For meetings and notes, the assistant can start recording and use Lark Notes to transcribe and summarize the content.
Later, users can search through the recording using normal language instead of going through the entire transcript.
Hardware and Design
The phone's defining hardware feature is a dedicated orange-accented AI button that also works as a fingerprint sensor, something Nubia calls an industry first.
