The AI Agent Phone Explained: From Origins to Now

Why it’s suddenly everywhere

1. 01

   Financial wire Cailian Press reported that reservations for the nubia NaviX Ultra passed 360,000 units by the morning of September 15 — one day before it went on sale.

2. 02

   Back in December 2025, TechNode documented the engineering prototype (nubia M153) selling out at CNY 3,499 almost immediately, with second-hand listings rising by at least $210 — early proof that demand was real, not synthetic.

3. 03

   Per PConline’s launch coverage, nubia arrived with more than hardware: a screen-operation protocol called SAEP, drafted with around 30 partner companies, to define what an AI agent may and may not do inside other people’s apps.

4. 04

   IT Home’s reporting pointed to a starting price around CNY 6,999 — roughly double the prototype — signaling that ByteDance and ZTE now treat the agent phone as a flagship category, not an experiment.

The timeline

1. 2023-11The standalone AI hardware wave

   Humane unveils the AI Pin, a screenless wearable meant to replace the phone; two months later the Rabbit R1 steals CES 2024 with the same promise in a $199 box.

2. 2025-02First wave collapses

   Humane shuts down and sells its assets to HP after brutal reviews and returns; the Rabbit R1 fades as its "large action model" turns out to be mostly scripted flows. The verdict: hardware that fights the phone loses to the phone.

3. 2025-12-01The prototype that sold out

   ZTE’s nubia brand ships the M153 engineering sample with ByteDance’s Doubao assistant wired into the system layer. Priced at CNY 3,499, it sells out at once; resale listings jump by $210 or more.

4. 2025-12-04The super-apps push back

   Users hit login errors and warnings in WeChat and several banking apps; Yicai and Cailian Press report the apps restricting the Doubao-powered device. ByteDance denies any hacking, saying the agent acts on user-granted system permissions.

5. 2025-12ByteDance retreats to advance

   ByteDance suspends the agent’s gaming, banking and payment operations, calling the step "necessary" to give the technology a more solid future — a tacit admission that capability had outrun consent.

6. 2026-03A paradigm claim at MWC

   At MWC Barcelona, nubia presents the M153 as an "autopilot" experience and declares the AI-native phone a new paradigm for human-device interaction.

7. 2026-07Consumer version surfaces at WAIC

   The successor, NaviX Ultra, appears at the World AI Conference in Shanghai with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a 7000 mAh-class battery and on-device model support.

8. 2026-09-16On sale, with a rulebook

   The NaviX Ultra goes on sale after 360,000+ reservations, alongside SAEP — a screen-operation protocol drafted with roughly 30 companies to negotiate the agent’s boundaries inside third-party apps.

The backstory

The graveyard this category climbed out of

To understand why a phone launch is trending, start with the two devices that died so it could exist. In late 2023 and early 2024, Humane’s AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 promised to free us from the smartphone by acting on our behalf — and both failed within a year. Their mistake, in retrospect, was architectural: they asked people to carry a second device while their AI still needed the apps, accounts and logins that lived on the first one. The lesson the industry absorbed was that the agent had to live where the apps already were. The phone wasn’t the obstacle to the agent era; it was the venue.

Chinese vendors spent 2024 and 2025 shipping “AI phones” that were, in nubia president Ni Fei’s later phrasing, hardware with AI features tacked on — summarizers, erasers, translators. Useful, but they answered questions rather than completing tasks. The jump from answering to doing required something riskier: an assistant with system-level reach, able to see the screen and tap through apps the way a person would. That is the bet ByteDance made when it paired its Doubao model with ZTE’s nubia hardware.

The December experiment

The first proof arrived as an engineering sample. On December 1, 2025, the nubia M153 — a CNY 3,499 prototype with Doubao embedded at the system layer — sold out almost immediately, and second-hand prices climbed by at least $210, per TechNode’s reporting. Buyers weren’t paying for the hardware; they were paying to watch a phone order its own ride-hailing car — an errand Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis were already completing without a driver on the streets of Wuhan.

The backlash took three days. On December 4, users found WeChat throwing login errors and banking apps displaying warnings on the device; Yicai Global reported that WeChat and several Chinese banking apps were restricting it. The technical trigger was precisely the phone’s selling point: an agent that reads the screen and injects taps looks, to another app’s security system, indistinguishable from malware or a cheating bot — the same trust problem autonomous AI cyber agents pose to every sandbox they touch. ByteDance denied any hacking, insisting the agent operated on permissions granted by the user — but within weeks it suspended the agent’s gaming, banking and payment capabilities, calling the retreat a necessary step for the technology’s long-term future. Industry watchers at 36Kr framed the episode as the opening skirmish in a fight over “system-level control”: whoever operates the screen sits between users and every app’s business model.

From being blocked to writing the rules

The nine months between that clash and today’s launch are where the category actually grew up. ByteDance narrowed the agent’s scope to stabilize it; nubia carried the “AI-native” message to MWC Barcelona in March and showed the consumer-ready NaviX Ultra at WAIC in July. Most tellingly, the launch arrived with SAEP — a screen-operation protocol drafted with around 30 companies, per PConline — an attempt to replace ad-hoc blocking with negotiated boundaries for what an agent may do inside someone else’s app. Analysts quoted by China Daily have called 2026 the first year of the agent smartphone.

Why now, after the AI Pin’s gravestone is barely a year old? Because the three things the first wave lacked are finally in place: models capable enough to plan multi-step tasks, flagship chips with the on-device muscle to run them, and — hardest of all — an industry starting to agree on the rules of engagement. Meanwhile the “second device” idea the Pin failed to kill off entirely is being retried from the other direction: Amazon’s Bee wearables don’t try to replace the phone, they just listen from your wrist or the phone’s back. The NaviX Ultra is less a new gadget than the first mass-produced test of whether those rules can hold.

Key facts

On sale

Sep 16, 2026

Reservations

360,000+

Reported base price

~CNY 6,999

Chip

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Battery

7000 mAh-class

Prototype (Dec 2025)

CNY 3,499, sold out

What people are saying

Common questions

How is an agent phone different from Siri or a normal AI phone?

Conventional assistants answer within their own app or a single partner integration. An agent phone embeds the model at the system layer: it reads whatever is on screen and chains taps across apps to finish a task — booking, comparing, filling forms — without each app building a plugin first. That reach is both the selling point and the source of the conflict with super-apps.

Does it work with WeChat and banking apps now?

It depends on the app. After the December 2025 blocking episode, ByteDance pulled the agent out of gaming, banking and payment scenarios, and the NaviX Ultra launches alongside SAEP, a protocol meant to define what agents may do in third-party apps. Expect some apps to keep restricting agent operations until they sign on.

What about privacy?

The open question of the category. An agent that sees your screen can, by design, see everything on it. ByteDance says the assistant follows a principle of collecting only what is reasonably necessary, and part of the pitch for on-device models is keeping that data local — but neither claim has yet been tested at mass-market scale.