ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT: review of an affordable gaming smartphone

The Chinese company ZTE has several sub-brands of smartphones. In particular, Redmagic and nubia. And if everything is clear with the first one: these are gaming smartphones with powerful hardware. Then with nubia everything is more complicated. The line includes both budget models and top camera phones, as well as affordable "gaming" models like the ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT smartphone, which came to the editorial office of Mezha. Today we will figure out what you can expect from an affordable smartphone that is positioned as "gaming".

The editorial team would like to thank the Allo company for kindly providing us with the ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT smartphone for review.

Specifications of ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT

Package contents

The ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT comes in a fairly large box by modern standards with a lot of bright graphics, both on the box itself and on the soft cardboard cover. The company decided to focus as much attention as possible on the gaming positioning and partnership with the game Free Fire.

Unlike more popular manufacturers, ZTE is in no hurry to remove everything from the kit. Instead, the kit includes the smartphone itself, an 80W power adapter, a red Type-C cable, a protective bumper, a protective film (on the screen), a tray eject tool, and documentation.

The protective bumper is quite simple: made of transparent matte plastic. But it's better than nothing.

Design and ergonomics

It seems that ZTE understands the main audience of mobile games: it is mainly school age, maybe a little older. Adults do not play on smartphones too often. Accordingly, the company makes the design of its gaming smartphones with this in mind: bright and aggressive. The editorial office received a ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT in bright yellow, which evokes associations with Bumblebee from the Transformers universe.

The entire back cover is covered with a pattern of geometric shapes, decorative diagonal stripes, various inscriptions and aggressive design elements. Near the rear camera there is an LED backlight in the form of a strip and a cut-off part of a circle, resembling a robot's eye. The backlight is customizable and can work during games, notifications and charging.

The rear camera unit is made in the form of three vertical octagons: two cameras and an LED flash. The cameras practically do not protrude above the surface of the back cover. This is pleasant, although not surprising, given the very basic set of modules.

From the front, the ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT looks quite standard, it's extremely difficult to come up with something original in a modern smartphone. The frames are not record-breakingly thin, but quite acceptable. The front camera is in a round hole, above it is a speaker, which is also used for stereo sound.

The frame is made of matte gray plastic with a pleasant texture and a bit like metal. It is flat with beveled edges. On the right side there are volume and power buttons. The latter is red with diagonal serifs.

Closer to the edges of the right side of the ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT are the touch triggers that can be used in games. They are slightly recessed, making them easy to find with your fingers without looking.

There is an additional microphone on the top edge. At the bottom there is a microphone, the main speaker and a tray. It can accommodate 2 SIM cards, eSIM is not supported. There is no place for MicroSD.

ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT turned out to be quite large thanks to the 6.8-inch screen and not the thinnest frames. But not very heavy, because the body is made entirely of plastic. The manufacturer does not indicate the exact dimensions and weight. There is no IP68 protection, although there are a lot of competitors with a similar price that have protection.

Display

The ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT has a flat AMOLED screen with a diagonal of 6.8 inches and a resolution of 2392×1080. The pixel density is 386 ppi, the maximum refresh rate is 120 Hz. The manufacturer claims that the color depth of the display is 10 bits, the color coverage is 100% of the DCI-P3 space, and the peak brightness is 1300 cd/m², which is quite modest by modern standards. Although it is worth remembering that the peak brightness is generally more of a marketing indicator.

In the settings, you can choose between a dark and light interface theme, reading mode, night mode, select the refresh rate (there is also an adaptive mode), font size and type, and adjust the color temperature.

The screen is of good quality: the colors are saturated and the viewing angles are maximum. But I would like the brightness level to be a little higher: it becomes a bit difficult in bright sunlight.

Security

There are two standard ways to unlock your smartphone. The more secure one is the optical fingerprint scanner in the screen. It works quite accurately, there were practically no errors during use. But it cannot be called fast, even in this price category most smartphones have faster scanners.

Facial recognition works quite standardly. It recognizes quickly in good lighting. At night it is problematic, sometimes it cannot identify the owner at all.

Productivity and software

ZTE often uses budget Unisoc processors in its affordable smartphones. ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT was no exception, it received the Unisoc T9100. This is now the company's flagship processor, although it is difficult to call it so when comparing it with processors from other manufacturers. It is manufactured using a 6-nm process, contains 1 ARM Cortex-A78 core with a frequency of up to 2.7 GHz, 3 more Cortex-A76 cores at 2.3 GHz and 4 Cortex-A55 cores at 2.1 GHz, as well as a graphics accelerator - Mali-G57. 12 GB of RAM with the ability to expand by another 12 GB and 256 GB of permanent memory.

The ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT demonstrates quite good performance for its class of smartphones. In AnTuTu, it even surpassed the slightly over-popular Mediatek Dimensity 7300. But it lost to it in GeekBench and 3DMark.

The smartphone has its own gaming application "Game Space". It has many additional functions, including performance modes, system load monitoring, FPS counter, disabling notifications, creating screenshots and videos, etc. In the same application, you can configure touch triggers. You can assign certain actions in different games to them. For example, a shot in shooters to the right trigger, like gamepads. Popular games on the smartphone work really well. Call of Duty Mobile on medium settings - 40 FPS. Free Fire on maximum - stable 60 FPS. Diablo Immortal does not allow you to increase the frame rate or graphics settings. But 30 FPS is stable. Genshin Impact on medium settings - 40-55 FPS.

For cooling, the smartphone has an evaporation chamber with a total area of 4083 mm². The smartphone really works stably and practically does not overheat. In the CPU Throttling Test, under prolonged maximum load, the performance drops to about 93%, the case becomes barely warm.

The set of wireless interfaces of the ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT is not the most modern: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, somewhat outdated Bluetooth 5.0, as well as NFC. Global positioning systems GPS, Glonass, GALILEO, Beidou are supported. The smartphone supports 5G, although for us it is not yet very relevant. It is difficult to say anything about the quality of communication: recently, in general, any smartphone has had problems in some places (at least, not far from the center of Kyiv). But about Wi-Fi, it is worth saying that it works quite slowly.

ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT runs on Android 15 with the MyOS 15 shell. It is quite convenient to use and has a familiar logic. There are display options with or without a separate application menu and two curtain options. There are a bunch of appearance settings, its own AI translator AI Translate and the so-called Living Island, which resembles Dynamic Island in the iPhone. The area near the front camera where notifications are displayed.

Sound and vibration feedback

ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT is able to reproduce stereo sound using a standard hybrid scheme: main and conversational speakers. The sound is quite loud, but low frequencies are practically absent. The channel balance is good, the difference is minimal. There is support for DTS:X Ultra virtual surround sound.

The smartphone uses a linear vibration motor to improve tactile feedback. It is really noticeably more pleasant than standard ones. It can be used in games.

Cameras

The ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT has a very basic set of cameras. In fact, only the main one with a resolution of 50 megapixels is useful, the maximum video resolution is 4K 30 FPS. The company does not provide details about the optics or the sensor itself. It is complemented by a 2 MP depth sensor. The front camera is 16 megapixels.

The camera app interface is quite standard: a carousel of modes, all basic settings on the viewfinder screen, additional ones in a drop-down menu. Traditionally for Chinese brands that are not the most popular outside their homeland, there are some difficulties with localization. For example, "level" was somehow translated as "gradient":

During the day, the photos are of quite acceptable quality, with good detail and relatively natural colors. In night mode, everything is generally not bad either (for an affordable model), but digital noise and blurring are already noticeable:

Zooming in using the main camera's crop doesn't work very well: even during the day, it doesn't always produce clear photos. At night, the situation gets even worse:

Video recording is not the strongest point of the available models, especially gaming ones. The smartphone shoots 4K 30 FPS video, but the detail leaves much to be desired, the picture is very jerky:

Battery life

The ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT has a 6000 mAh battery. Quite a good figure, especially considering the gaming positioning. If you really play games a lot (an hour of play costs about 13% of the battery), then the smartphone will last until late evening. With everyday use without games, you can easily reach 1.5 days.

The smartphone supports 80W fast charging. It charges to 50% in 30 minutes, and takes 1 hour and 15 minutes to fully charge. There is support for pass-through charging: the smartphone is powered directly from the charger without charging the battery. Theoretically, this should reduce the temperature and slightly extend the life of the battery.

The editorial team would like to thank the Allo company for kindly providing the ZTE nubia Neo 3 GT smartphone for review.