TikTok-owner ByteDance unveils its first smartphone Nut Pro 3

Smartisan Jianguo Pro 3 runs the Smartisan OS 7 and offers quick access to TikTok app from the lock screen.

Chinese smartphone maker Smartisan celebrated the Halloween season by releasing its new flagship device, the Smartisan Nut Pro 3, after being away from the smartphone scene for nearly a year. The new handset marks the first flagship released by Smartisan after some of the company’s tech-related patent rights were acquired by ByteDance for smartphone development earlier in July.

Smartisan Nut Pro 3

The Nut Pro 3 is positioned as a budget-friendly flagship device with a slew of unique features and software optimizations added to cater to a niche and enthusiastic crowd.

Design

Nut Pro 3 is rocking a retro and vintage smartphone design that’s reminiscent of Apple’s old iPhone 5s, while still maintaining the company’s own take on design aesthetics. Featured in white, black and green, the phone is encased in a solid glass cover with a rectangular camera module on the top left hand corner to house its quadruple camera lenses. Even with all the flagship specs crammed into the phone, Smartisan still managed to give the phone an impressively slim profile of just 7.8 millimeters.

Sitting at the bottom left corner is a red Smartisan logo which doubles as a breathing and notification light when new messages are received. ByteDance’s recent acquisition of the company hasn’t affected the designs or printed logo of the phone, seeing as Smartisan’s signature hammer logo remains unchanged compared to its previously released smartphone models.

On the front, the phone has a 6.39-inch AMOLED display with a U-shaped notch, similar to its previous models. Smartisan chose to stay away from using punch holes or a pop-up selfie cameras to house a larger and fuller display in order to maintain its preferred design philosophy.

Camera

On the back of the phone is a quadruple camera setup featuring Sony’s 48MP primary sensor, IMX586. The large sensor is paired with a 13MP ultra-wide angle camera with a 123° field of view, an 8MP telephoto camera and a 5MP 2cm macro lens.

Smartisan made countless system optimizations to include numerous photography enhancement features such as distortion correction when using the ultra-wide angle camera, TikTok effects support, beautifying effects and dual camera video recording, where users can shoot videos with the rear and selfie cameras simultaneously.

Performance

Living up to its flagship name, the Nut Pro 3 is housing some of the most high-end specs in the industry for premium handsets including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ mobile platform, up to 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 4,000 mAh battery and a quadruple camera setup.

Concurrently with the launch, Smartisan also rolled out its newest operating system, Smartisan OS 7.0, which comes with a host of revamped features such as its signature Big Bang, One Step, Idea Pills, Smartisan TNT and many more. Big Bang offers built-in OCR (optical character recognition) which converts images of typed or handwritten text into digital text, while One Step takes advantage of a brand new take on split-screen usage, giving users a more comprehensive interface to use and switch between apps.

Incorporating Human values

Aside from the conventional highlights often seen on regular smartphones, Smartisan showcased a brand new feature on the Nut Pro 3 making the phone more accessible to people with disabilities, especially ones suffering from hearing loss. In a moving video shown during the launch, the company showcased a user with a hearing impairment using the phone with ease during a phone call or video call.

According to Smartisan, by leveraging the phone’s ability to perform real-time text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversions, users can see subtitles of audio played from the phone and respond by typing, which gets converted to speech automatically. The feature is added to facilitate easier communication for those with auditory impairment which, according to Smartisan, accounts for 27.8 million in China.

By including unconventional features like this, Smartisan is attempting to redefine technological well-being by taking a humanist perspective and being more inclusive. This is an area that other giants in the industry, such as Apple and Samsung, have largely ignored.

Price

The Smartisan Nut Pro 3 is priced starting at ¥2699 (~$382) for the 8GB RAM + 128GB version. The 8GB RAM + 256GB version is ¥3199(~$412) while the 12GB RAM + 256GB version comes to ¥3399 (~$481).

If you’re interested, the handset is on sale in China at 2,899 yuan (about Rs. 29,000).