Hands-on experience with the second-generation "Doubao Phone": Douyin in the left hand and Luckin Coffee in the right, making apps start to work in line

Reported by Zhidx on July 18, during the 2026 WAIC, Zhidx got hands-on experience with the second-generation "Doubao Phone" — the Nubia NaviX Ultra, jointly developed by Nubia and ByteDance Doubao, which made its debut for the first time. 

Ni Fei, President of ZTE Corporation Terminal Business Division and President of Nubia, said that unlike traditional smartphones, agent smartphones are designed to shift from users operating the phone to the phone handling tasks for users, making life easier and more convenient for users. 

Starting with our actual hands-on experience, compared with the first-generation "Doubao Phone" Nubia M153 released at the end of last year, the NaviX Ultra has significant changes in appearance design. The back of the device is equipped with a large horizontally arranged camera module, and the flash component is independently placed below this module. 

▲ Close-up of the NaviX Ultra camera module

In terms of color schemes, the Nubia NaviX Ultra offers Blue Horizon, Dreamy, Black, White four color options. The frame of the device has smooth rounded lines, and judging from its texture and craftsmanship, it is made of metal material. 

 ▲ NaviX Ultra comes with four color options 

The NaviX Ultra features a "glass-like UI" that can interoperate with other apps on the phone based on Doubao. For example, when Zhidx told Doubao "Find me two cat videos on Douyin", the phone automatically ran the program, and after about half a minute, I clicked the task verification guide button on the screen to get the desired videos. 

While the AI is operating the phone, it will display the current execution steps, thinking process, and task progress in real time, paired with visual animation feedback, allowing users to keep track of the task status at any time. 

Since this phone has not been officially released yet, the interactive pages are not publicly accessible. You can refer to the updated interactive pages of the Nubia M153, which are actually quite similar in form to the NaviX Ultra's interactive pages. 

▲ The upgraded interactive page of the Nubia M153

Previously on July 16, according to the Doubao Phone Assistant Exchange Group, the Doubao Phone Assistant Intent Model 2.0 has been fully upgraded, with improved intent recognition accuracy, clearer boundaries for the "phone operation" intent, and the "phone operation" and assistant tools are not supported in Expert Mode and Work Task Mode; it also adds new features such as invoking the recorder via commands, invoking multiple tools in a single round of conversation, and issuing commands combined with current on-screen content. 

▲ The full upgrade notification for Doubao Phone Assistant Intent Model 2.0

In terms of the agent's task execution capabilities, the NaviX Ultra supports submitting multiple tasks at the same time. For example, when I asked Doubao to open Douyin to find videos, I also asked it to search for flight tickets on Qunar and order an iced Americano on the Luckin app, and unprocessed tasks will automatically enter a queuing state. 

On-site staff told Zhidx that a major feature of the NaviX Ultra is its active memory capability. Most of the content users bookmark in various apps and their operation habits will be included in the phone's memory system. As a result, users will feel that the phone becomes smoother and smarter the more they use it. 

After the launch of the Nubia M153, what upgrade points did the team focus on while refining the NaviX Ultra? 

It is reported that the refinement of the NaviX Ultra covers multiple aspects including interactive experience, intelligent architecture, and hardware engineering. For example, the new model has significantly enhanced speech recognition rate in high-noise environments and complex semantic understanding capabilities to make interactions more natural and smooth; at the same time, it integrates the latest industry agent architecture (such as Manas) and deeply collaborates with the device side to solve the experience shortcomings of earlier versions; in addition, based on user feedback, the NaviX Ultra has also targeted optimized hardware engineering details such as heat dissipation and appearance design to improve the commercial maturity of the product. 

During the conference, relevant executives including Ni Fei accepted interviews from media outlets such as Zhidx. 

When talking about the increasingly fierce competition in the current agent smartphone market, Ni Fei said that it is a good thing to have peers follow up, which shows that the entire industry has reached a consensus on the direction of agent smartphones. At the same time, he believes that the agent smartphone is not a demo track, and there are many engineering problems that need to be solved. 

During the more than 8 months of collaborative development with the ByteDance team, the team has gone through at least four key stages: The first stage: transforming user pain points into user experience; The second stage: turning agent capabilities into native phone capabilities; The third stage: converting single successful operations into stable, reliable experiences; The fourth and most important stage: security and privacy protection. 

Ni Fei said that Nubia started technical verification with the M153 last year, passed the cybersecurity filing, and now officially announced mass production. The team has successfully completed every step from technical verification, product iteration to meeting mass production requirements. They are very confident in this product that is about to be delivered to users. No amount of marketing talk can prove the product quality — it only counts when consumers actually use it and find it easy to use. 

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Zhidx" (ID: zhidxcom), written by Li Shuiqing, published by 36Kr with authorization.