ZTE USA announced on Wednesday that the Nubia 5S Mini LTE phone will be offered unlocked beginning August 27. However, customers can pre-purchase the phone now from Amazon for $279.99. The company seems to be placing all bets on the phone’s two cameras to attract customers -- a 13MP camera on the back and a 5MP camera on the front.
The phone has a 4.7-inch screen with a 1280 x 720 resolution. Under the hood, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core SoC, 16 GB of internal storage, a microSD card for 32 GB of extra storage, and a 2000 mAh battery. Android 4.3 “Jellybean” is the OS of choice.
As for the cameras, the company boasts that this is the first “widely-available” phone with this kind of camera hardware. The 13MP camera on the back has a BSI sensor and LED flash, and the 5MP camera on the front is capable of shooting HD video at 30 frames per second. Additional camera features include a F2.2 aperture, a 5-piece precision optical lens, a blue glass composite IR filter, and a sapphire lens.
“The Nubia 5S Mini LTE smartphone camera software has distinctive independent control of focus, light metering and white balance functionality,” the press release said. “The advanced combination of hardware and software capture images that are truer to color as the eye sees and produce excellent dark field, macro and color reproduction.”
ZTE USA announced that this phone has three camera modes -- Pro, Fun and Auto – that address all photographers, whether they’re professional or just starting out. The phone has DSLR-like controls, providing editing tools and effects that normally don’t ship on a smartphone unless a third-party app is installed.
The Nubia 5S Mini LTE phone follows the Nubia 5, which was released back in October 2013. The Nubia 5 also packs a 13MP camera on the back with a Konica-Minolta lens and intelligent stabilization, as well as a 2MP camera on the front, and it also has a 5-inch Full HD screen. It runs the Snapdragon S4 Pro (APQ8064) and has 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. This phone is also unlocked, but costs a pretty penny more at $599.
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