Nubia will launch the NaviX Ultra on 16 September, and pre-orders are already open on Chinese e-commerce platforms. Nubia is ZTE’s phone brand, the one behind the RedMagic gaming range. ByteDance built the software side with it.
Doubao is ByteDance’s assistant app in China. On this phone it arrives as the Doubao Phone Assistant, which reads what is on screen and taps for you, so one spoken request becomes a sequence of actions across several apps. You give it a request in ordinary language and it finishes the job across whatever apps it needs, instead of answering and leaving the tapping to you. A dedicated orange button on the side calls it up, and so does a voice command.
The phone cleared network access approval in China on 1 September, and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has certified its large language model. Doubao is the same brand that switched off its AI companion characters in July under China’s new rules on anthropomorphic AI services.
What happened to the first one
ZTE and ByteDance already shipped this idea once. The Nubia M153, an engineering prototype carrying a preview build of the assistant, went on sale on 1 December 2025 at CNY 3,499, about KES 67,500. There was one configuration, 16GB and 512GB, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite and a 6.78-inch LTPO screen. It sold out.
Then the apps pushed back. Within days, M153 owners found WeChat logging them out with the message “there is an abnormality in the login environment”, while the Agricultural Bank of China and China Construction Bank apps showed pop-ups telling users to turn the assistant off. WeChat said it had not taken any deliberate action against the Doubao Phone Assistant and that its automated security controls had fired on their own. The Doubao team said on Weibo that no malicious hacking was involved, that the assistant acts with the user’s consent, and that it will not carry out payments or identity authentication.
The argument is about a system-level permission, INJECT_EVENTS, which lets the assistant read the screen and simulate taps. Phone makers normally keep that permission for their own system components. ByteDance has since opened permissions with Alibaba’s platforms in some situations.
Three companies, one claim
- ZTE showed the NaviX Ultra at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July and called it the world’s first agentic AI smartphone.
- StepFun showed the StepX Neo at the same event, running its own Android-compatible Step AOS with an agent called Amoo, and made the same claim.
- Honor showed the RobotPhone, with an agent co-developed with Alibaba, and we covered its gimbal camera in August.
Ni Fei, president of Nubia and senior vice president at ZTE, told the conference: “Many so-called AI phones on the market simply stack AI functions on top of an existing system. That actually makes it more cumbersome for users.” Honor chief AI scientist Huang Fei described the same target: “The essence of an agentic OS isn’t adding an AI assistant to an operating system. It’s rebuilding the operating system around users’ intentions and tasks.”
Confirmed hardware, and the rest
Nubia has confirmed four colours and the orange button. It has also confirmed ChangXin Memory Technologies LPDDR5X memory running at 10,667Mbps, the first Chinese-made LPDDR5X to reach mass production at that speed. We wrote about CXMT last week when it beat Samsung and SK Hynix to LPDDR6.
The specifications everyone is quoting are a leak:
- a 6.78-inch 1.5K screen at 144Hz,
- a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5,
- three 50-megapixel rear cameras,
- a 50-megapixel front camera,
- a 7,100mAh battery and
- 80W charging.
Nubia has not given a price yet. The pre-order offers include up to 24 months interest free and a trade-in subsidy of up to CNY 1,500, about KES 29,000.
Whether any of this reaches Kenya
This is a China launch. Nubia has said nothing about selling the NaviX Ultra anywhere else, and the M153 never left China. What Nubia does sell here comes through importers and it is the gaming line: Avechi lists the RedMagic 10s Pro at KES 115,999 and the RedMagic 11 Air at KES 86,999. Doubao is a mainland China service, and the assistant is built to drive Chinese apps like WeChat, Meituan and Taobao. An imported unit wouldn’t make sense here.
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