Nubia Unveils NaviX Ultra, a Smartphone Run Entirely by an AI Agent

Chinese brand nubia, owned by ZTE, unveiled the NaviX Ultra smartphone on July 19, 2026 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. The device has no classic home screen or app store in the traditional sense - instead, the user communicates with a single AI agent that carries out multi-step tasks in the background on its own.

Nubia describes the NaviX Ultra as the world's first agentic smartphone. Instead of switching between apps, the user issues a voice or text command, and Doubao independently compares prices, places orders, or plans trips, moving between services the way a person would if operating the phone by hand.

A Phone Without Apps

Structurally, the NaviX Ultra looks like a typical flagship: a flat frame, narrow display bezels, a centered selfie camera, and a horizontal triple-camera island that includes a periscope lens. The difference lies in how it's operated, the AI agent is meant to replace manual navigation of the interface, which nubia presents as a new paradigm for using a smartphone rather than another voice-assistant overlay.

ZTE senior vice president and nubia president Ni Fei commented on the partnership with Doubao's creator in an official statement accompanying the launch.

Doubao brings strong large language model and intelligent agent capabilities, while nubia brings deep experience in hardware, software, and product engineering - Ni Fei, ZTE senior vice president and nubia president

Local Processing, Not Quite

The company emphasizes that the most important AI operations take place locally on the phone, which is meant to reduce the risk of user data leaks compared to cloud processing. Nubia also states that the device is registered in accordance with Chinese regulations on generative artificial intelligence. However, the claim of fully local processing raises doubts among tech commentators - the Doubao interface itself does indeed run on the device, but its semantic reasoning layer still relies on cloud servers, so the phone loses most of its agentic capabilities without an internet connection.

Not the First Agentic Phone

The claim of being the world's first agentic phone is already being challenged. At the same WAIC 2026, Chinese companies StepFun and Honor showed their own versions of AI-agent-controlled phones, while Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi are developing similar features at the operating system level, without requiring users to replace the entire device. Nubia is also not a newcomer to this category - the brand's previous model, designated M153, ran into resistance from major Chinese apps, including WeChat and Meituan, which blocked automation of the Doubao assistant's actions between apps out of concern over losing control of user data. The company has not confirmed whether the NaviX Ultra resolves the same conflict.

What Comes Next

Nubia has not disclosed a price, sales timeline, or detailed specifications, including the processor or amount of memory. There is also no confirmation of global availability - the brand's previous agentic model was sold exclusively in China. The manufacturer said full technical details would be released in the coming days following the presentation.

For the Polish market, the launch is for now mainly a signal. It shows that Chinese manufacturers treat agentic phone control as another front in hardware competition, alongside cameras and processor performance, rather than just a feature added to existing models. If the device reaches markets outside China, it will be the first sign of whether the country's tech giants want to compete with Apple and Samsung in this specific category in European markets as well.

The very concept of a phone without classic apps also raises questions about the ecosystem - mobile app developers would need to adapt their services to be handled by an agent instead of a direct user interface, and disputes over data access between the phone maker, the AI model developer, and app owners, already visible with nubia's previous model, could recur on a larger scale.