Finding a genuinely compelling smartphone under Rs 20,000 has started to feel like a relic of the past. For a long time, the budget market has felt stagnant, forcing buyers to compromise heavily on performance, design, or battery life. Many of us in tech media had almost stopped recommending devices in this category altogether because the trade-offs were simply too severe. Add to that the current phenomenon of rising component costs, and it seems that the budget smartphone category will soon be a thing we read in history books.
Enter, the AI+ Nova 2 Ultra smartphone. A new phone that arrives with a feature sheet that aims to create an impact on the segment, if not disrupt it entirely. This budget device tries to bring back a wave of nostalgia for the days when entry-level pricing did not mean an entry-level experience. How does it perform, though? Let's find out.
Design And Build Quality
When you first unbox the AI+ Nova 2 Ultra 5G, the initial impression is one of solid, reliable construction. The build quality is decent and robust, utilising a structural design that feels firm in the hand. While it opts for materials that keep costs down, the engineering team has done an excellent job ensuring there are no cheap creaks or hollow areas when pressure is applied.
The aesthetic design, however, is where the brand makes a bold statement. Turning the phone over reveals an integrated RGB lighting system. Rather than being a purely cosmetic addition, this customisable lighting acts as a fun novelty that firmly pushes the phone towards the mobile gaming crowd. It gives the device a distinct, youthful flair that stands out in a sea of otherwise monotonous matte plastic slabs. Whether you want it to flash during intense gaming sessions or pulse rhythmically when a notification arrives, the RGB elements give this phone a personality that is rarely seen at this price point.
There is something else too, i.e., its customisable back-panel lighting. AI+ claims it can respond to calls, messages, music, and notifications, “turning everyday interactions into something visual, personal, and immersive”. Well, we put it to the test. At the end of the day, it is a novelty that will eventually fade away from your mind space. When you use a phone, you use it for its utility, and not its gimmicks. Although RGB is fun at first, it eventually comes to an end when you start using the phone seriously.
A bird's eye view of the design specs:
- Plastic body
- RGB lights at the back (I mistook them for magnets at first)
- Stereo speakers at the top and bottom
- Volume keys and power button on the right-hand side
- Gaming triggers on the right-hand side
- Dual SIM + MicroSD card slot at the bottom
- 50MP + 8MP dual camera set up at the back
- 13MP camera at the front
Display: You Will Not See This Coming
If the build quality is decent, the display is a few notches higher. Simply put, for the price, the display quality will blow you away. It is, hands down, a highlight of the entire device.
During our extensive review period, we conducted an informal social experiment. I showed the phone to multiple people, from casual tech users to smartphone enthusiasts, asking them to guess the price of the handset based entirely on the screen. Not a single person was able to guess the true price. The consensus pinned it as a much more expensive premium device.
The 6.7-inch AMOLED panel is exceptionally sharp, bright, and vibrant, presenting a visual output that feels completely alien to the sub-Rs 20,000 market. Text rendering is incredibly crisp, colours pop with excellent saturation, and the deep contrast levels make reading or viewing content joyful. There are no distracting elements, no washed-out viewing angles, and no massive chins at the bottom to break your immersion. AI+ has prioritised the screen here, and it pays off massively. Additionally, there is support for 4K 60FPS HRD content on YouTube. This is further complemented by the 800 nits of typical and 2500 nits of peak brightness. It is not the best in the segment from any angle. It does work in bright daylight, though.
Camera Performance: A Complicated, Dual-Lens Reality
The camera department is where the AI+ Nova 2 Ultra 5G exhibits some classic budget compromises, presenting a mixed bag of results that requires a bit of nuance to unpack. PS - you will not love the transition between the ultrawide and primary lenses.
The Main Camera and Low-light Struggles
The rear camera array looks impressive on paper, but real-world testing tells a slightly different story. When shooting with the main camera, we noticed that images typically do not have a lot of detail at a foundational hardware level. To compensate for this lack of raw resolving power, the processing software aggressively over-sharpenes images.
This digital over-sharpening is particularly noticeable when you look at fine textures, such as the fur in a shot of a dog, where individual strands look artificially harsh and blocky rather than soft and natural.
Furthermore, the main sensor seems to have trouble handling contrast and shadows from time to time, resulting in images that can look flat or improperly balanced when dealing with harsh lighting transitions.
When the sun goes down, these issues become more pronounced. Nighttime photos turn out looking very soft, as the noise-reduction algorithms try to clean up the frame at the expense of clarity. The phone also struggles with highlights in the dark, frequently blowing out the exposure of street lights and creating glowing halos instead of contained, well-exposed light sources. That said, this was expected going into the camera test.
The Ultrawide Camera: A Surprising Twist
Somehow, the 8 MP ultrawide camera is able to handle the shadows and dynamic range better than the primary main camera. This is different from what we see in the smartphone world, where ultrawide lenses are almost always inferior to the main sensor.
In my testing, the ultrawide lens performed well. Actually, much better than I had expected. It even got a “not bad” facial reaction from me while I was taking pictures on the streets. Simultaneously, it perfectly preserved the dark shadows on the signage hidden under a bridge, showing an impressive balance across the entire frame.
We also quite liked its colour science. The colours are slightly saturated over the main lens, giving landscapes and architectural shots a punchy, appealing look that instantly makes photos look ready for social media. We strongly wish AI+ could improve the primary sensor through software to bring some parity between the two cameras, because right now, the ultrawide is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for creative photography.
A 13MP Front Camera
Moving to the front, the 13 MP selfie camera is a basic performer that will satisfy most users. It clicks clean, well-exposed images with close-to-accurate skin tones. Refreshingly, the software did not over-soften faces with aggressive, plastic-looking beauty filters by default. Portrait images from the front camera also came out looking pretty clean for the most part, showing reliable background separation around hair and ears.
Performance: Is The Dimensity 7400 Up To The Task?
With the MediaTek Dimensity 7400 SoC (TSMC 4nm node), one of the most popular chips among budget and mid-range devices, 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB UFS 2.2 of storage, the Nova 2 Ultra sustains its performance when it comes to tackling daily tasks and getting through the workday. Gaming, however, is a different story.
Chipset
The MediaTek Dimensity 7400 is a popular chipset, and its performance in budget phones is known. We have the Motorola Moto G86 Power, the vivo T5x, and even the Nord CE 6 Lite with some variation or another of the D7400 chip. Let's take a closer look at how the chip performs inside the Nova 2 Ultra.
- Geekbench Single-core score: 1063
- Geekbench Multi-core score: 3012
- Geekbench GPU score:
- 3D Mark WildLife score: 3,612; 21.5 FPS
Audio
A gorgeous screen requires great audio to back it up, and thankfully, the AI+ Nova 2 Ultra 5G does not disappoint. The dual stereo speakers are significantly better than expected, delivering a surprisingly loud and full-bodied soundstage.
Budget phones are notorious for tinny, piercing audio that distorts the moment you push the volume past 70 per cent. The Nova 2 Ultra avoids this trap completely. It maintains remarkable clarity even at maximum volume, offering a balanced sound output that makes watching movies, streaming TV shows, or doom-scrolling through social media highly immersive. It provides enough depth and spatial separation that you will rarely find yourself scrambling to plug in headphones just to understand dialogue.
Battery Performance
The battery performance is another area where the AI+ Nova 2 Ultra 5G performed impressively, turning the device into a marathon runner.
The phone packs a massive 6,000mAh battery capacity. While it might not completely dethrone dedicated battery behemoths like the Realme P4 Power in pure efficiency, it delivered stellar real-world endurance. On average, the 6,000mAh capacity comfortably delivered almost 9 hours of screen-on-time.
Even with this heavy workload, the battery life is ample and more than sufficient to last a full day on a single charge. During our entire review period, we never found the need to plug the phone into a wall charger until the very end of the day, when heading to bed. For casual users, this translates into an almost two-day battery smartphone.
However, having such a massive fuel tank means it takes some time to fill up. The phone is technically capable of charging at a swifter 33W velocity. Unfortunately, AI+ has chosen to bundle a slower 18W charger in the box.
Because you are forced to use an 18W adapter out of the box to fill a massive 6,000 mAh cell, charging takes a while. The phone needs over 2 hours (about 180 minutes) to charge all the way from 0 to 100 per cent. It is a slow process, meaning you will want to charge this device overnight rather than relying on a quick fifteen-minute top-up before leaving the house.
The OS: nxtQ
The phone operates on the nxtQ OS, AI+'s skin for the Android 16 operating system. The UI is not bad. That said, there is a lot to improve. The most striking feature in this OS is limited bloatware. The number of pre-installed apps is limited to a few games, an FM radio app, and a couple of phone cloning and managing apps. The animations can be better as well. Launch animation for apps is fine and a bit on the smoother side. The app closing animation, however, is often rough and bordering on ‘gittery’.
Speaking of gittery, the camera UI needs to improve as well. The transition between lens switches is jarring and unwanted.
The most prominent software issue with this phone, however, is the 1-year OS update that comes with it.
What Stood Out:
- The AMOLED display
- HDR support
- Split view support
- The primary camera takes good clicks in the right conditions; EIS is mildly helpful
- 4K 30FPS video shooting
- Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 support
- 12 5G bands support, VoNR and VoWIFI support
- IP68-rated protection
- Battery life
- No issues of overheating
What Could Be Better?
- UI - App animations, responsiveness, jittery overall experience
- Cameras - Low light output, transition between lenses, no auto focus, only EIS
- Speakers
- Charging speed
- Only 1 year of OS update
- Overall build quality
- RGB is mostly gimmicky
Verdict: Should You Buy The AI+ Nova 2 Ultra Smartphone?
The AI+ Nova 2 Ultra 5G actually made us nostalgic for a time when you could find genuinely great, feature-packed phones under Rs 20,000. It breaks the recent cycle of boring, compromised budget devices by offering a jaw-dropping display, surprisingly robust stereo speakers, and a massive 6,000 mAh battery that completely eliminates range anxiety. My only concern is that they might follow the same trend of inconsistency and non-continuity when it comes to phones in this price bracket. Realme is a good example of this.
It is certainly not a perfect smartphone. The main camera needs immediate optimisation to fix the occasional over-sharpening and low-light exposure. There is a lack of difference in details between the 50MP mode and the 12MP mode, and the transition when you switch between lenses is just weird (what even is that?). Additionally, the software tuning could be tightened up to match the high-end hardware. If the company manages to improve its software, camera performance/processing, and overall user experience with future over-the-air (OTA) updates, it might become a worthy contender in this price segment.
That said, even in its current state, with its minor flaws accounted for, it is a decent device in the sub-Rs 20,000 price bracket. If you are shopping on a tight budget, want a phone that feels expensive every time you look at the screen, need dedicated gaming triggers, and a suite of features that covers most aspects of smartphone usage, the AI+ Nova 2 Ultra can be recommended. That said, the market for the sub-Rs 20,000 is stacked with players such as CMF/Nothing, Realme and Motorola who offer more than a year of updates and have much better UI, making the competition cutthroat.
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