Chinese phone maker Nubia debuted the latest addition to its M series in India, with the company officially launching the M2 Play in the South Asian country earlier this week. The Indian unveiling of the M2 Play comes ten weeks after the handset was initially introduced by the manufacturer and this particular model seems virtually identical to the previously revealed one. The company is aiming its new offering at the entry-level market segment, as evidenced by its price tag which amounts to Rs. 8,999, or approximately $140. Consumers in the country will be able to purchase the black variant of the M2 Play exclusively from Amazon India which will soon start retailing the device, though no firm release date has yet been given by either the e-commerce giant or Nubia itself.
The smartphone manufacturer equipped its new product with a 5.5-inch LCD panel with an HD resolution of 1,280 by 720 pixels which amounts to a conventional 16:9 aspect ratio, with the screen itself being protected by 2.5D glass. The handset ships with the Snapdragon 435 system-on-chip (SoC), a Qualcomm-made silicon which was already commercialized in dozens of various Android smartphones like the LG Q6, ZTE Blade A6, and the Huawei Enjoy 6s. The chipset comes with the Adreno 505 GPU and features eight 64-bit Cortex A53 cores, with four of them making a high-performance 1.4GHz cluster, and the rest of them being part of an energy-efficient configuration with a maximum operating frequency of 1.1GHz.
The Nubia M2 Play also offers 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal flash memory expandable via a microSD card by up to 128GB, with the Chinese OEM opting for a Hybrid Dual SIM setup which allows one of the device’s Nano SIM trays to double as a microSD card slot. Nubia’s new offering also boasts a 13-megapixel primary camera with an aperture of f/2.2 accompanied by a regular LED flash and boasting Hybrid Focus support, as well as a 5-megapixel secondary imaging sensor with an f/2.4 aperture. The handset runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box enhanced with the Nubia UI 5.0 and isn’t likely to be updated to Android 8.0 Oreo. All of that hardware is powered by a 3,000mAh battery, with the device also having a fingerprint sensor and featuring Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, Glonass, and 4G LTE support.
