Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by NCI XCOM great technology selection and service hello everyone I'm Dimitri with hurricane axe and can a $200 smartphone off-contract the actually any good in 2015 when we were first approached by ZTE to review this latest phone the grand x+ this is the first handset to be designed in Canada that's an important distinction we were honestly a little bit skeptical given the fairly scattered reputation that clouds ZTE smartphones so we questioned the supposedly added credibility of this design in Canada label to the actual quality of the smartphone based on their new research and development office in Ottawa but despite initial doubts with the Grand x+ I must admit that so far I've been fairly impressed with what this has to offer for the price especially since its carrier unlocked the display is 5 inches with 1280 by 720 p resolution nothing groundbreaking but it is an IPS panel with outstanding viewing angles there are no color shifting excellent brightness range and for the value smartphone we think that's possible under the hood we are running Snapdragon 400 quad-core chip at 1.2 gigahertz with adreno 305 GPU disappointing limiting 8 gigabytes of internal storage with 2 gigs of ram LTE support that's an awesome thing it's got a beefy 2300 million power battery and these specs are pretty much identical to the Moto G from Motorola the phone that was released at the end of 2013 so this is designed in Canada for Canadians a statement is a little bit washy because it's a spec loan from the Moto G and the design element I'm sorry to say but it looks like the Nexus S which is you know dates all the way back to 2010 now this is not to say that ZTE s Canadian branch is in the wrong track but the truth does serve as an incentive to be more innovative then back to the grand X bus the body is nothing special it's a little chunky individuals who want that five inch form factor would be happy this is definitely a phone for two-hand operation not sure how people would feel about capacitive buttons but that's there with really old-looking icons nicely done designers the power button is on the right with perfect reach for your thumb and individual volume up and down on the other side that offers outstanding clicky registration there's a microUSB at the bottom and headphone jack up above the rear shooter is 8 megapixels with a single tone flash and the 2 megapixel front-facing cameras are find for a $200 phone but you better shoot in HDR to preserve color and dynamic range but this would also test your patience as the low-end specs really reveal the aging processing of every single shot I love the small blinking LED in the top left corner to indicate unread activity with a green color and a dying battery with the red LED there's a tiny speaker the bottom that actually is very loud no missed calls on this one now the one thing that that truly dislike about this phone is the plastic back luckily it is removable to get you access to the 2300 milliamp hour battery there's your SIM card slot and the micro SD card slot for expandable storage so that's a huge bonus for media but the cover does not have any texture the reflective nature reveals all the handling marks and any physical wear but the main thing is how slippery the phone is I've dropped it a few times because of it you better put a case on it I'm happy to say this is running very close to stock Android with KitKat 4.4 point 4 I installed the Google launcher here and aside from the slow camera everything is very snappy and loads fast there's an occasional Google now hiccup but the experience is very close to my own Nexus 4 I was also very surprised to find no preloaded bloatware only their own camera app with the built-in time-lapse feature there is really cool plus 1080p video capture and what you see now is recorded with the grand X plus there's a built-in Power Save mode with the grand X plus and disables the data and Wi-Fi reduces brightness and all the other things that are running in the background and only powers on the essentials that would turn the last 10% of the battery into four plus hours of additional runtime standard battery life lasted me a good day and a half without needing to recharge throughout those times so that's very good to see but it is when we get down to the nitty gritty stuff all the compromises surface like the a gigabytes of internal storage capacity that only equates to 4.5 gigabytes of usable storage system updates must come through ZTE and who knows how frequent those are Wi-Fi range on the Grand X bus was very poor the poorest out of my entire phone collection in my bedroom about eight meters away it would not pick up any Wi-Fi signal whereas my Nexus 4 my BlackBerry z10 and my iPhone 5s had at least two bars and had no connection to Wi-Fi no problem call quality passable satisfactory I could hear the other person on the other line just fine actually reduce the volume a little bit there's a little too harsh they could hear me just fine through the microphone nothing to complain about plus a huge bonus built-in LTE and over all it is an attractive handset for $200 that plays all my games without hiccups the display does not suck and in fact it's one of the strongest elements of the granik's bus it is very close to stock Android but with support for Google launcher that shouldn't really matter for 2015 at this price there's still many Oh seriously moments like the extremely slippery back that isn't very good for handling and only eight gigabytes of capacity that translates to 4.5 gigabytes of usable storage that's pathetic might be a reason why the design and Canada label is almost invisible and so tiny and muted because there's clearly more work to do I'm not saying the Grand x+ is a bad smartphone it's not but it's not exciting either drop that price by 50 bucks and now we're talking you're golden and super competitive so guys let us know which phone you're rocking at the moment and if you are looking for budget options exploring your value phones does the Grand x+ excite you in any way and for us Canadians does this design in Canada label matter to you do you care that this was designed in Canada let us know in the comment below as always thank you so much for watching this review of the Grand x+ from ZTE don't forget to subscribe for more similar content give us a like if you found this review helpful and we'll see you in the next one