Gadgetory

ZTE is one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world it also happens to be based in China the company has an impressive range of products that suit almost every budget recently it announced a new top tier product called the ZTE star - Josh did a great hands-on video during Mobile World Congress and now our review unit has arrived priced at $399 without a contract it's more expensive than the ZTE Blade s6 however it brings more features to the table so let's take a look the ZTE star 2 is one of the sleek is 5-inch devices I have reviewed recently it's easy to hold and feels comfortable in the hand it certainly isn't bulk yet just 6.9 millimeters thick and carrying it around in my pocket was quite easy with no pocket drag whatsoever one of the first things you'll notice about the star 2 is that it has glass on the back thanks to the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 which is also used on the front the back of the device is smooth and sleek the chassis is plastic but feels pretty durable the top and bottom edges of the device curve around continuing the sleek feel in many ways it uses the same design language it's the ZTE Blade Vic 4G joining the glass on the back is the camera and the dual tone LED flash looking around the rest of the phone you'll find the IR blaster on the top edge while the microUSB port and the headphone jack are on the bottom all the controls are on the right first comes the volume rocker and below that the power button on the left hand side are two trays one for the Micro SIM card and one for the microSD card plus the speaker the position of the power button and the volume rocker means that if you hold the phone in your left hand it's very easy to reach the buttons with your fingers however the positions of the speaker means that the sound can be easily muffled by your palm since the phone includes some very clever voice activation software the ZTE star 2 has a multitude of microphones I've counted three separate holes two on the top and one on the bottom presumably they are for noise reduction and better audio pickup and they certainly seem to do their job well as the voice command are excellent but I'm jumping ahead of myself here the display on the star 2 is very good it has great viewing angles and a good level of brightness personally a 5-inch display is still the sweet spot for me and the ZT star 2 brings everything that I expected from a phone in this category the 5 inch LCD display has a resolution of 1920 by 1080 and a pixel density of 441 overall display provides a nice viewing experience with a good level of sharpness the colors are bold and the display gives a device a sense of vibrancy making it a pleasure to use the display is flanked by nicely sized bezels which my crude measurements show at just under 3 millimeters each above the displays a space for the earpiece front-facing camera and the sensors along with a multi card notification LED below the display are the three backlit capacitive keys the performers of the ZT star 2 is excellent it has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon processor as the Samsung Galaxy s5 the HTC One m8 and the oneplus one although the Snapdragon 801 is being superseded the processor has a proven performance track record and it will easily handle just by any tasks you can throw at it using the star 2 was a joy in terms of fluidity and responsiveness the extra features like the voice commands worked well and didn't seem too overly taks the processor at all as you'd expect the benchmark scores are good and on par with all of the 2014 flagship devices the antutu score was 39,000 503 while Epic Citadel the demo app for the Unreal Engine reported fifty nine point eight frames per second in the high performance mode the star 2 has a reasonably sized battery at 2,300 milliamp hours since we used to sing devices with 3000 milliamp hour trees I was a little skeptical about the battery performance however I was happily proved wrong during my time using this device as my daily driver I often saw 20 to 24 hours of off charger time with a screen on time of around 3 hours my experience is that the device will last a full working day without any problems the power manager settings also provides a couple of interesting power saving options the first is auto adjust CPU which allows the software to more aggressively control the CPU frequency with the auto adjust CPU enabled I estimate the overall system performance decreases by around 25% however such a drop in performance is hardly noticeable because the Snapdragon 801 is already such a high performer I ran some individual battery tests for example when running Epic Citadel in its guided tour mode the device will last for about three and a half hours before it runs out of battery Riptide 2 will last around four hours while Temple Run 2 will last for around five hours for youtube streaming over Wi-Fi the device can handle around 6 hours on a single charge the camera app on the ZTE star 2 is excellent as well as the normal point-and-shoot auto mode there are lots of other different modes including HDR panorama and front rear the front rear mode combines the image from the rear facing camera with a shot from the front-facing camera besides the auto mode there is a pro mode a manual mode that gives you full control over the various settings like ISO exposure and white balance however it also gives you control over the focus this means you can manually focus images and with a bit of care you can create nice pictures with a narrow depth of field other interesting settings in the camera are voice control and time-lapse the first allows you to activate the shutter by saying capture or cheese while the second one is use on the video camera to record only one frame per second and hence to create a time-lapse movie interestingly enough the camera can record not only at Full HD but also at Ultra HD ok here are some sample shots from the ZT star 2 if you want to see some more sample photos please check out the written review on the android authority website on the software side the star 2 uses Android 4.4 but it comes with a custom UI known as me favor UI overall me favor is colorful and light without being too overbearing one of the big differences in terms of the UI is a lack of an app drawer all installed apps appear on the home screen like on the iPhone / say I don't - I tend to keep the majority of my apps on the home screen anyway and with a clever use of folders you can keep the device easily organized the other thing that's quite different about the star 2 is its settings page it is completely different from other Android handsets however it's still easy to use inside the settings you'll find a plethora of new features that help set the star 2 apart from the rest of the field along with features like double tap to wake and settings for the display temperature there is also the always-on the voice recognition service called voice assistant even when the device is offline you can still access a number of different areas of the phone just by using your voice calling contacts controlling music and waking up the device are just a few of the things you can do using voice assistant ok phone open Twitter you can record special commands magic words which are associated with an action which will be performed when the phone hears that command possible actions include cornea contact or opening an app the difference between the magic words and the normal commands is that the magic words don't need to be prefixed with the phone's name quick camera another cool feature of emotions as well as motions like flip to mute there are lots of other motions available including auto answer pocket mode and change from speaker to earpiece during a call the first will automatically answer a call when you bring the phone up to your ear the second ensures that the phone rings with the maximum volume when it's in your pocket and the third will automatically switch from speaker to earpiece when you lift the phone up to your ear during a call the 16 gigabytes of internal storage might be a bit limiting for some people especially those who like to store a lot of media on their phones the 16 gigs divided up into a system area of 3.8 four gigs a user area of 3.9 3 gigs which is used to install your apps and a phone storage area of 8.2 three gigs which is used to store data and media if 3.93 gig seems a bit small as an area for storing your apps there is an option to move the apps from the user area to the phone storage the device also supports the use of microSD cards up to 32 gigabytes unfortunately there is no option to move apps from either the user storage or the phone storage to the external sd card you are however able to set the default right location to the external sd card but this seems to be a bit hit-and-miss in terms of which apps respect will understand this setting so there you have it there's a t-star to its recommended retail price is $399 so I've seen it online for as low as three hundred and fifty dollars I think it's a great price for a premium smartphone the processor is excellent and it's the same package that we saw in many of last year's flagship devices the design is great as is the display the software is advanced you're getting more than just stock Android line gave the ZTE Blade s6 a score of 8.5 mainly because it's competitive price its 64-bit processor and because it's running lollipop now I'm going to give the ZT star to a score of eight point eight I think it brings more feature to the table and even though it cost more money I think that extra money is worth it my name is Gary Sims Ranger Authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up also please use the comment below to tell me what you think about the ZTE star - also don't forget to subscribe to and royal thora t's youtube channel we will see videos by J's Jo Josh lon having the tech ninja action of course Taylor Martin and as for me I'll 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