Nubia M2 Lite Review: Impressive Design and Built Quality

Nubia brings its new M series product M2 Lite smartphone in India. The Nubia Z11 Mini we reviewed last year had a best in class camera and now this time with Nubia M2 Lite the Nubia has focused on the selfie section. Yes, the Nubia M2 Lite has the 16MP front camera to provide high-resolution selfie images with inbuilt soft led flash. The M2 Lite will be available in India through an exclusive partnership with Amazon.

Premium and Aesthetic design

The gold rings and logo on the black color body gives a flashy premium look which is unique. The metallic gold color strip is running both sides around the phone. The candy bar design of the phone is eye-catching and feels premium. Its unibody metallic design feels better & more upmarket in the price category the phone falls. The 2.5D metallic frame and black antennas look awesome. The back of the phone has a matte finish but slippery & can drop accidentally if you have dry hands or while pulling it out from the pocket in hurry. Also if the scratches appear on the back side of the phone it removes the paints and the metallic surface will appear. Talking about the upper portion of the back at the left top side it comprises LED flash and camera encircled in a red color.

Coming to the front side which is a little bit different as compared to the 'N' series of the Nubia, it has capacitive touch home screen button which is not pressable and also works as a fingerprint scanner. In the center of the home button, it has nubia red color while at the left and right side of home button two dots will appear when you touch them, also act as recent and back buttons.

HD Display but impressive

The color produces on 5.5 inches TFT Display HD display of Nubia M2 Lite looks very natural and vibrant. Also, it has an inbuilt display color option that can customize the screen color. The viewing angles are wide but we noticed little bit color shift from minor angles and slight pink tint all over the display. The black levels and contrast of the display are tuned well. The front glass of the display is too much glossy and reflects under direct light.  Overall the display sharpness, legibility, and brightness all are good.

Nubia M2 Lite camera

It hosts a 16-megapixel camera at the front with f/2.0 and has an ISOCELL sensor along front flash that Nubia called a "soft light flash". The camera has no WoW factor but selfies captured are appeared more natural along vibrant color as compared to other smartphones coming in this price range. The outdoor selfie is good but indoor or normal light photos are too much grainy.

Coming to the rear camera which is 13MP / F2.2  with stacked CMOS and has 5-pieces Motor Drive Lens. We had review N series of Nubia and those have the best camera in their class but in Nubia M2 lite the page is not the same. The rear camera captured quite high noise levels and grainy images while shooting outdoor. In regular conditions and under light shots it produces low saturation images.  The camera UI offers you several functions including Time-lapse, Slow Motion, Camera family and more.  Overall,  both the cameras are average.

Images in Daylight and low light

D

Low Light Image

Highly Customized Nubia OS

Nubia M2 Lite running on UI Nubia UI 4.0 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Like other Nubia phones, it also enabled with Edge Gestures features enabling the user to switch between various apps.  Sliding the both edges up and sown simultaneously increase or decrease the display brightness.  Also, when you repeatedly slide on edges, it will clear all background apps. To give something different the Nubia has given some new features such as the Breath Light (red dot light at back and recent button) which glow softly while charging. Overall the UI of the phone is pretty much straight forward no app drawer and easy to use.

Average Performance

The Nubia M2 Lite runs on the MediaTek MT6750, an octa-core 1.5GHz +1.0GHz Cortex A53 processor.  For multiprocessing, it has 4GB RAM and Mali-T860 GPU clocked at 700 MHz. No doubt the phone is pretty much stylish but performance wise, we can't say it is quick and snappy in terms of using Apps. Apps take longer time than usual to load but didn't find any lag or glitches while playing heavy games.

Coming to the call quality, we didn’t find any call drop or network issue with this phone.  For listening to your favorite music, the comes with DTS feature to enhance the audio quality in headphones as well as in Loudspeaker. Overall the clarity of sound is good but the loudness is average. The fingerprint sensor works fine 8/10 times.

Battery

The Nubia M2 Lite in regular usage works almost about a day which is offered most of the smartphones.  The phone has 3000mAH which last for 9-10hour in our case under 50 minutes gaming, few rear camera shots, 10-12 calls, a lot of social media Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp at the auto brightness. In the video loop test at full brightness and volume, the phone gave us a 7 hours 2 minutes backup. Overall the phone has a good battery backup.