ZTE’s latest phone ships with a digital camera crown, and I love every bit of it

Like many other consumer electronics makers, ZTE is showing off its latest and greatest product offerings at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show. While the company has a fleet of products on display, one of its smartphones piques my interest above all the rest: it’s called the Nubia Focus 2 Ultra.

As its name suggests, the ZTE Nubia Focus 2 Ultra is a high-end flagship phone with both a premium build and several top-of-the-line internal components. In terms of specifications, the phone ships with a 6.8-inch 120Hz AMOLED display capable of 2800 nits of peak brightness, a large 5,000mAh battery, and a Unisoc T760 octa-core chipset.

Externally, the phone doesn’t immediately stand out much from its contemporaries. At first blush on the show floor stage, I found the device to look and feel in line with other modern large-screened Android handsets. I did come away impressed with its eye-catching forest green and sunrise white colorways, which gleam in the light.

However, the Nubia Focus 2 Ultra has a trick up its sleeve, and a clever one at that. Its rear camera protrusion, which features a triple array of camera sensors, is stealthily lined with a digital crown. The ring around the bump can be twisted and rotated, which in turn adjusts the zoom and aperture size of your camera viewfinder in real time. This Rotatable Lens Ring, as ZTE calls it, is complimented by a dedicated Capture Button for quick access to the viewfinder.

ZTE Nubia Focus 2 Ultra

The Numbia Focus 2 Ultra is a premium  Android smartphone from ZTE, that comes with a unique rotatable lens ring and a dedicated Capture Button.

What’s old is new again

ZTE draws inspiration from the professional camera world

If you’ve ever used a traditional DSLR or a dedicated mirrorless camera with modular camera lenses, then the idea of twisting your camera hardware to adjust and tweak settings is nothing new.

Rotatable crowns started disappearing in most compact cameras, in favor of a simpler point-and-shoot design with retractable sensor hardware. Naturally, smartphones adopted this simpler interaction model as camera phones grew in popularity, switching out a zoom lever for touch-screen controls and pinch-to-zoom capabilities in the process.

Now, however, innovation in the smartphone space has plateaued, and it’s become clear that handset makers are using ever-more-powerful camera systems and features to drive upgrades and to justify high price tags on flagship models.

Apple’s Camera Control interface launched last fall on the iPhone 16 series, which provides a dedicated button for taking photos, locking in focus, zooming, and more. More recently, Xiaomi’s 15 Ultra has seen notable coverage due to its point-and-shoot camera design undertones.

At MWC, the latter company even showcased an experimental product called the Xiaomi Modular Optical System, which brings modular (and twistable) camera sensors to a smartphone via a magnetic MagSafe-like attachment system.

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What’s less clear is whether the broader smartphone consumer base will find this added camera phone complexity to be a positive or a negative development. Smartphone photography replaced dedicated compact cameras out of convenience and comfort, and the return of unwieldy sensors and more complex interaction models is a gamble that may or may not pay off.

With the Nubia Focus 2 Ultra, I reckon that ZTE has struck a balance that’s both reasonable and practical. In my brief time demoing the phone at MWC, I found the ability to zoom and adjust the aperture size to be a tactile and kinetic experience.

The digital crown might evoke more expensive camera equipment, but crucially, it doesn’t get in the way or introduce compromise. The phone’s camera hump isn’t any bigger than the ones found on competing flagships, and you aren’t forced to interact with the crown if you don’t want to. For what it is, I very much appreciate ZTE’s blending of new and old technologies.

Exact release date and availability details haven’t been specified by ZTE yet, but the Nubia Focus 2 Ultra is expected to launch sometime in the second half of the 2025 calendar year.

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