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ZTE ZMax Hands On and First Impressions

2014-09-16
it's been a little while since I've seen zce much less held one in my hand which is why I was actually kind of excited when this particular film made it onto my doorstep hey it's Josh magar from Android Authority what's going on everybody and it's time to unbox and get my first impressions on the ZTE zmax for t-mobile alright here we are with the ZTE zmax now we have a pretty colorful box right here and as you're going to see right on the corner here it is made for t-mobile so I did have a t-mobile card SIM card available with this box and it was already perforated out so the SIM card should already be inside of this particular phone so we're just gonna go ahead and jump into the actual phone itself or the contents of a box rather so get the things out of the way and we have a nice big plastic bag right here with the 5.7 inch device right here and I'm gonna go ahead and take that out of the plastic in a little bit but let's see what else we get inside of the box CTE bringing you closer as it says right there and we're gonna go and get that middle part out of the way and we have some pretty big pieces of plastic here even some bubble wrap right there which is kind of interesting but as far as the other peripherals go what we're going to have inside this box is a micro USB charging cable if I'm not mistaken along with the plug adapter there you go the plug adaptor for us plugs and of course the charging cable we also get a tool for removing the SIM card or the SIM tray rather and another card with the t-mobile SIM in it so I'm gonna double check if the t-mobile SIM is already inside of the phone but it looks like we have an extra one here if I so choose to use it a couple of manuals right here especially for t-mobile documentation which will just leave over on the side and here we are the 5.7 inch ZTE zmax well we do have a rounded feel on the back but I'll go ahead and remove first thing I noticed and I'll go ahead and remove the plastic here and then we'll get go ahead and get into the initial thoughts alright here's the actual device itself like I said already there's a bit of a curve over on the sides that kind of move into the backing and it does allow it to sit pretty nicely in the hand right here the gripping on the sides is not quite as ideal because they're not flat obviously so you're going to have a little bit of a curve downward on your thumb and fingers over on the other side but that's just the initial thought when it comes to the field we'll go ahead and just remove the plastic right here there you go it's a really simplistic backing really it has just a ZTE logo right there with the camera optics up top and then a slit on the bottom for the actual speakers if you look over on the sides we have the power button over here on the right side along with the SIM tray and if we move over to the other side we have the volume rocker with the micro SD card slot alright here we are we didn't exactly have a setup that we had to do we'll just go ahead and jump right in you can long press the screen to unlock so it's not a swipe we don't really have a swipe here but you have to just sort of hold it there I'll show you that one more time it's a bit of a different lock screen that we have here just hold and there you go so what we have here is Android 4.4 our at least as it says in the box we're going to take a look at that in a bit that icon on the top right right there that says 4G LTE is all the confirmation I need to say that there's already a t-mobile SIM in here so we're gonna go ahead and get started pretty quickly we already have some t-mobile messages right here so we are good to go in that regard head back so we have capacitive keys here on the bottom and that includes a menu button right here well go ahead and jump into the system settings and just take a look a little bit at the software version so it looks like it's 4.4.2 so it is KitKat it is a somewhat older version of KitKat but that's alright 4.4.2 and it looks like it keeps a pretty stock looking Android right here as you te doesn't really seem like they're really changing the formula too much social if we look over here we have the notification drop-down with the quick settings right here that includes some added buttons right here that aren't necessarily found in the real stock Android if you're looking for a good mid range entry or just something that really kind of works gives you the bare essentials at the very least when it comes to your Android device does eet EEZ mix might it so we're going to take even further looks at this phone before we get into our full review as far as the look and feel of this device I do think that it's a pretty nice looking device but you can already see it in my hand it's kind of large and it does come with a 5.7 inch display but as I turn on the screen right here you're going to see that there's actually quite a bit of bezel around that display that otherwise actually looks quite nice but the problem is when you already have 5.7 inches in the screen and you add a lot of girth on the top and bottom and then if you look in the sides here you have a pretty good bezel right there actually makes this phone a little bit unwieldy and with that curve on the sides that leads to the back this one's a little bit unwieldy I have to admit it's not the worst looking device it actually looks pretty nice like I said already but being able to just get around with one hand it's definitely not something you're gonna be able to do easily with the zmax you will be using this with two hands probably in landscape more often than not but otherwise it's a nice black slate design and I do it to give it some credit for actually looking pretty attractive to further the fact that this is a mid-range offering we do have an 8 megapixel camera on the back with 1.6 megapixels in the front facing camera now I did take a look at the interface a little bit one of the few places so far that I've seen that has changed that ZTE has changed from the original stock like a feel of Android and it does provide you quite a few different modes including a manual mode that did provide quite a few options in order for you to change the shot to what you needed to be as far as camera quality goes we're obviously going to be waiting for our full review to show you that but that is just a quick look at the ZTE zmax in my case for t-mobile and I'm pretty excited to take a look at this because ZTE is a phone company that I haven't really really played with their phones in a little while and with this one coming on my doorstep I just knew I had to give my first impressions on it and show them to you so keep it tuned to Android or Atia for these zmax full review as it's going to be coming soon and for all of our other coverage you can see a couple videos over on the side and make sure that you drop us some legs on our videos subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and once you're done with all of that watch 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