ZTE's nubia brand put the NaviX Ultra on sale across China on September 16, calling it the first AI-agent phone to reach mass production rather than stay an engineering prototype.
The phone runs the consumer version of Doubao, the AI assistant ByteDance licenses out rather than something nubia built itself, and wakes it through a dedicated fingerprint AI button that doubles as a one-press launcher. nubia says the assistant uses a full-duplex voice model, so users can interrupt and keep talking instead of working through the stop-and-start rhythm of older voice assistants, with recognition tuned for Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka and Minnan alongside Mandarin and English. A multimodal layer also lets the phone answer questions about whatever is on screen and read live visual context during a video call.
Where nubia is leaning hardest is task execution: a single spoken instruction can send a Lark (Feishu) message, book a meeting, summarize a group chat or forward a document, with a new instruction insertable mid-task or a task left running after the screen locks. A separate work mode turns a sentence into code, a document, a spreadsheet or a slide deck. The company also claims the assistant can plan and carry out chains running to hundreds of steps over tens of minutes unsupervised, and that it already reaches into ride-hailing, music and mapping apps. Those are nubia's own figures, not independently verified ones.
With permission, the phone also keeps a running memory of preferences a user chooses to share, triggered by saying "remember this" or swiping up with three fingers, and it can search a user's own stored files by request. nubia frames the fingerprint button's authentication step as the device's core safeguard, with every agent action confined to what the owner has explicitly authorized.
Ni Fei, president of ZTE's terminal business division and of nubia, tied the launch to the brand's earlier AI-branded phones, tracing a line from an early AI-capable model in 2017 through a later AI-native release to the NaviX Ultra's arrival in mass production. He said user and market response so far has validated the agent-phone approach and that nubia intends to keep opening the platform to outside developers.
Underneath the software, ZTE built the NaviX Ultra around Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite platform, paired with LPDDR5X memory from ChangXin and Samsung. The 6.78-inch BOE display carries bezels as thin as 1.09mm and scales its refresh rate up to 144Hz, and a 7,100mAh battery supports 90W wired and 50W wireless charging. The rear camera array pairs a 200-megapixel main sensor with a 50-megapixel ultrawide and a 64-megapixel periscope telephoto lens.
The NaviX Ultra is a China-only release for now, sold through ZTE's own mall alongside JD.com, Tmall, Douyin and Pinduoduo, with no international availability announced. The 12GB/512GB configuration starts at 5,999 yuan (about $894), or 5,499 yuan (about $819) after a national subsidy; 16GB/512GB runs 6,499 yuan (about $968) and 16GB/1TB runs 7,499 yuan (about $1,117), converted at the September 17, 2026 CNY/USD rate. Buyers who order and pay in full within the first week of sale qualify for up to 24 months of interest-free installments.
