I’m not a gambler, but if you had asked me to predict what we’d see at MWC 2024, my top picks would be the (oddly enough Eve from Wall-E esque) Nothing Phone 2a, a bendable concept phone that you can wear as a wrist cuff and transparent laptop screens – Samsung’s first ever transparent micro-LED display was unveiled early this year.
What I didn’t bet on was ZTE releasing a colorful vinyl-style smartphone with not one but two analog 3.5mm headphone jacks and a huge DTS:X-certified speaker on the rear panel, making it a solid competitor to my current pick for the best phone for sound, the Sony Xperia 1 V.
But here we are. ZTE says that thanks to its rear-mounted vinyl-style speaker (which isn’t all that different from the speaker on the Nokia 130, one of two ‘dumb’ Nokia phones launched last year, albeit a more powerful proposition), the Nubia Music smartphone promises 600% higher volume than your average smartphone. If that’s true, carrying one of the best Bluetooth speakers to add music to your next barbecue, beach, or camping trip may soon become completely unnecessary.
And let’s talk about those two 3.5mm headphone jacks! While Sony’s aforementioned Xperia series is one of the last handsets to continue supporting the simple headphone jack, I haven’t seen it two of it on a portable audio kit since the Sony Walkman of my childhood. Even FiiO’s new CP13 cassette player doesn’t have two connections, and that’s a real Walkman wannabe…
3.5mm jacks and Ambilight? This is the retro phone of my dreams
Nubia also includes a dedicated music app that lets you control the special RGB strip on the edge of the screen to match the music – yes, ZTE thinks Ambilight is the future and I’m for it, despite Philips having a major Ambilight feature I enjoyed last year even when Panasonic added integrated LED lighting to its in-flight entertainment system.
As reported by NotebookCheck, the Nubia Music phone features “a powerful amplifier and an AI algorithm” to achieve much higher volume than conventional phones. Elsewhere, it is said to have a 90Hz HD display, a 50-megapixel dual camera, a 5,000mAh battery and up to 8GB of RAM.
Solid details are otherwise sparse (the phone has an unspecified Unisoc processor, the DAC chip is unknown, and price and availability haven’t been made official by ZTE yet), but based on those specs it’ll likely arrive as a middle class offering. And I will be ready.