Nubia NaviX Ultra: the world's first AI agent phone — with some big caveats
Nubia has officially announced the NaviX Ultra at WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, calling it the world's first smartphone with an AI agent integrated at the operating system level. The phone runs ByteDance's Doubao assistant — the same company behind TikTok — which can autonomously handle multi-step tasks like comparing prices, placing orders, and planning trips across different apps. No price or release date has been announced yet.
The phone
The NaviX Ultra follows a prototype called the M153, which sold out its entire first batch of 30,000 units on launch day in December 2025 at 3,499 yuan (roughly $516). Resale prices on the secondhand market quickly doubled. Nubia describes the NaviX Ultra as the production-ready successor, refined through that earlier testing cycle.
Design-wise, the phone uses a horizontal camera bar across the back — similar to Google's Pixel lineup — housing a triple-camera system that includes a periscope telephoto lens. The front has a flat display with a centered punch-hole camera and even bezels on all four sides. A dedicated orange button on the side launches the Doubao assistant instantly. It comes in four colors: Blue Horizon, Obsidian Black, Snowfield White, and Dream Pink.
The NaviX Ultra's horizontal camera bar and flat-screen design.
Nubia says all key AI processing happens on-device rather than in the cloud, which it frames as a privacy and reliability advantage. In practice, that claim is partial: Doubao's interface navigation runs locally, but its core semantic reasoning still relies on cloud servers.
The orange side button gives instant access to the Doubao AI assistant.
The catch
The "world's first" label is already under pressure. StepFun and Honor both showed competing AI agent phones at the same WAIC event this week, and Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi are all pursuing similar OS-level AI features. ByteDance's title is fragile at best.
There's also a proven ecosystem problem. On the M153, major Chinese apps including WeChat and Meituan blocked Doubao's cross-app automation over data control concerns, per China Daily. ByteDance acknowledged it needed to "adjust" its AI capabilities as a result. Nubia has made no statement on whether NaviX Ultra resolves that conflict.
For US and UK buyers, availability is the more immediate issue. The M153 was sold exclusively in China, and The Next Web notes that no global rollout has been confirmed for the NaviX Ultra either. Hardware specs — including what processor it uses — have also not been officially disclosed. Details are expected "in the coming days," but nothing has been published yet.
