You can find AI in just about anything, from smaller pieces of tech like phones and wearables to bigger things like household appliances and cars.
But its functions have mainly been limited to menial jobs like answering questions, taking notes, doing translations, and so on. It hasn’t really gotten to the point where you have an AI assistant like J.A.R.V.I.S. in the palm of your hand.
Now, this is where the next evolution of AI comes into the picture. Agentic AI or AI agents are meant to do more than answer questions. Their purpose is rooted in completing tasks with little to no user input other than speaking. Instead of simply responding to prompts, these systems are designed to plan, make decisions, and carry out actions on a user’s behalf.
But I bet you’re asking, isn’t AI already smart enough to do those things? And the answer is yes, but making AI act rather than answer questions requires a lot more moving parts to work together. Parts that could fail at any time and, if they do, the whole system collapses.
Although it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying because you have companies like OpenAI making their own agentic AI called Operator. And as recently as last week, a new Chinese AI company called StepFun debuted what it calls the world’s first “AI Agentic Phone” called the StepX Neo.
nubia Joins the Agentic AI Race
Now nubia is throwing its hat into the proverbial ring with the NaviX Ultra, which it unveiled at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai. However, nubia didn’t give much information on the NaviX Ultra’s specs other than what could be seen at the event. The company instead focused on showcasing the phone’s AI first experience and its ability to perform tasks autonomously.
There are four colors to choose from: Blue, Dream, Obsidian Black, and Snowfield. It features a horizontal camera layout which, from the looks of it, consists of three camera lenses. Of course, seeing as this is an agentic AI phone, it makes perfect sense that there would be a dedicated AI button.
nubia says that all the AI processing is handled directly on the phone, which helps secure your precious data and reduces the need to send sensitive information to the cloud. As for the chipset and other pertinent information, it looks like we’ll just have to wait for nubia to reveal more details about the NaviX Ultra.
We’ll also have to wait for the demos and reviews of this thing, just to see if the agentic AI part really does work in practice. But until that happens, we’ll reserve our judgment on this phone and the other agentic AI phone.