TL;DR
ZTE showed the NaviX Ultra at WAIC, calling it the first agentic AI smartphone. It runs ByteDance’s Doubao agent. StepFun and Honor showed similar devices.
ZTE, StepFun, and Honor all showed AI-native phones at WAIC this week. IDC expects AI smartphones to account for over half of China's market in 2026.
ZTE showed the NaviX Ultra at WAIC, calling it the first agentic AI smartphone. It runs ByteDance’s Doubao agent. StepFun and Honor showed similar devices.
ZTE showcased the NaviX Ultra at the World AI Conference in Shanghai this week, calling it the world’s first agentic AI smartphone. The device, built under ZTE’s Nubia brand, runs ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent and can be activated by voice or a dedicated button. It comes in four colours and was prototyped in December at 3,499 yuan ($516). The initial 30,000 units sold out quickly and doubled in price on the used market.
ZTE was not alone. StepFun unveiled a device running a proprietary operating system with a built-in agent called Amoo. Honor, the smartphone maker spun off from Huawei, is showcasing an AI agent co-developed with Alibaba that will ship on new devices later this year. The idea is the same across all three: build an agentic layer into the operating system that lets AI execute tasks autonomously across apps, rather than bolting isolated AI features onto an existing interface. “Many so-called AI phones on the market simply stack AI functions on top of an existing system,” said Nubia chief Ni Fei. “That actually makes it more cumbersome for users.”
The timing is not coincidental. China’s smartphone shipments have fallen for five consecutive quarters as the memory crisis pushed component costs up and consumer demand down. IDC expects the global smartphone market to post its steepest annual decline on record in 2026. Chinese manufacturers, many of which sell budget devices with thin margins, are being squeezed hardest. AI phones are their escape route. IDC’s Arthur Guo said more than half of China’s smartphone market could be dominated by AI devices this year.
The launches also deepen the competition with Apple, which just received Beijing’s approval to roll out Apple Intelligence in China through partnerships with Alibaba and Baidu. “In terms of AI smart devices, we are ahead of Apple,” Ni said on Weibo in June. The AI boom that is killing the cheap smartphone is simultaneously creating the argument for a new kind of phone. Whether an agent that books flights and edits photos is enough to make people replace a device they already own is the question the market will answer by the end of the year.
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