Gadgetory

hey what's up guys these two said so today we're gonna do a review of a piece of wood and my terrible tan lines from cycling today we're gonna do something I have only done a couple of times on this channel we are gonna take a look at a smartphone device and it's not an Apple device so that'll be fun and the talking hands thing well if you've never seen my channel before you've never seen my face trust me I am doing you a favor but today we're gonna take a look at ZTE s new axon Android smartphone they're gonna be making a big push here in the US so today we're gonna be talking about this phone and why this might actually be one of my favorite Android devices that I had personally ever touched and trust me that's saying a lot if you ask me this looks an awful lot like Apple now we'll go ahead and open up the package here and you'll see what I mean when you open it up you are greeted with the device now the axon comes in three different colors you've got this black with kind of a gold trim which is what I've got you've got silver which is basically just like a bare aluminum anodized and then you have got a kind of a goldish color so again kind of taking cues from Apple on that one I think but once you take it out here I'm just kind of set that aside you remove this tray you are met with a little fold out thing here that's got you know Quick Start Guide it's not easy to get this out and then you've got inside charger cable charger and earbuds or earphones so this is why I say this is awfully a lot like Apple I think their presentation at least my first impressions of opening up the package here this is this is way too Apple I I would like to have seen something a little bit more unique because this let's face it the reason why I'm doing this review is axon brings something kind of unique and and different that's not your mainstream brand which is why I'm excited about this product but anyway the headphones they are JBL so these are going to be a nice high quality earbud I don't want evil come your but that's an Apple thing earphone in ear earphone that's gonna meet the sound quality that a lot of the customers you know desired I also would have liked to have seen a black charging cable and a black brick with black headphones because that's more Android to me I don't I know I've said there's like 15 times already but my first impressions when I open this package up and started messing with it was it's an Apple product or what let's go and run through the specs real quick of the physical aspects of the phone it is a 5.5 inch screen compared to the iPhone 6 you can see it does look pretty big but the display is not actually edge to edge which is going to be good so if you are gonna be putting case on this thing it's not going to be covered up at all by any of the case it does weigh 6.10 ounces or six point ten ounces or 175 grams so it's not the lightest phone there's ever been but because of the all-metal construction I do think that that's aníbal weights in fact it's kind of weighty which is in my opinion I'd like to have a phone that's got a little bit of weight to it does measure nine point three millimeters thick so it is thicker than say an iPhone 6 or some of the other Android devices but that's because it's got this sort of a curve to it and because it's got a curve it's got a thicker point in the middle so that 9.3 millimeters is measured right here in the center or the highest point of the phone but other than that it is a really solid feeling phone because it's curved though it does feel a little bit slippery in my opinion because there's no edge really on the back to kind of put your hand against so you do want to be careful if you're not running with a case that you don't drop this thing it is very slick because of the aluminum case but other than that it is not user serviceable you cannot pop this back cover off you cannot replace the battery you cannot replace the storage so that's something to keep in mind now one thing I think is really really nice about this device and I've always complained about this especially with Apple is putting the speaker on the bottom of the device never made sense because when you're holding it let's say like this you're gonna block it with your hands or it's just the sound is going away from you you want the sound coming towards you so ZTE has put the actual speakers right here inside this really attractive looking mesh grille and then on the top here you have a matching mesh grille but the speakers are down here as well as the microphone pickup so it's facing you imagine that sound that faces you guy who would have thought moving on to the front of the device you've got a really beautiful TFT display as I mentioned 534 pixels per inch it's very very sharp it's very smooth and it is not an edge to edge screen which is nice because when you put a case on this thing you're not gonna have it wrapping over the screen at all making some of the edges harder to touch you do have a front facing camera on here which we'll talk about a little bit later in this video and then you do have a dedicated home button flanking the home button on either side you've got two little dots the left dot is a back button so let's say you're you know in something whatever you hit that dot you're gonna go back to the previous screen and then on the right it brings up a programmable key but it's also brings up task manager which you can clear all right from there so it's nice and quick to actually enable those functions now scrolling on this is very very quick and snappy and that's because in terms of hardware specs on this it's almost a little bit ridiculous this is using a Snapdragon 810 which is an 8 core 2,000 megahertz processor that's probably faster than some people's desktops and on top of that it's got 4 gigabytes of RAM this thing is an absolute monster in terms of just responsiveness now keeping this thing alive is a three thousand milliamp battery which is advertising 12 hours of talktime and ten days or 240 hours of standby time and it is not user replaceable I just want to point out this back panel does not come off this is one of those Android devices here that's not serviceable you can't get inside you can't expand the memory you cannot do anything to the device it's almost lockdown hardware wise kind of like an iPhone where you cannot expand the memory so that's kind of a downside number one Android always being used or friendly in terms of adding more memory and such you can't or storage you can't do that in this case but this one does come with 32 gigabytes of built-in storage so that should be more than enough for most people you're just not gonna be able to put a ton of movies and stuff on here you can put tons of pictures tons of applications and tons of music but I wouldn't go putting a ton of movies on here because 32 gigs will fill up fast it would be nice to see a 64 gig or maybe even a 128 gig variant but anyway that's what's available on this model right here now ZTE is claiming that this is the first true HiFi sound device in the US it's got two dedicated audio chipsets in there it's got an analog to digital converter or an ADC for improved recording and digital to analog converter for better playback so this thing does have a built in sound recorder that you could hook up a high quality microphone to this or use the built-in microphone which is going to sound decent as well and it's got a DAC built into this to give you superior playback especially when you use high fidelity headphones kind of like the JBL's that were actually included with this but it's going to sound fantastic but the built-in speakers on this thing are also probably amongst the best I've ever heard now because they do have all of this space right here to put a nice massive well I guess massive compared to the device - LED speaker in here the playback on this thing is actually very very good now I'm gonna play a little bit right here a little bit of this music you're not going to be able to hear how good it sounds trust me I just want to play this back so you guys can at least hear the volume level of this thing is actually pretty impressive so the sound quality of the speaker's is fantastic and as I mentioned when you're holding it guess what they face you or a height now we're not going to talk a whole lot about the operating system on this you can look up pretty much any android 5.1 you know review and you'll get a really good idea of how this works but it's very lightweight they're not sticking a bunch of crap on here that you don't care about and that you don't want but they do offer you a couple of extra launchers on here as well if you want to do that you can scroll up and you can see you know things that are going on for the day etc consider I'm still kind of sucky and Android you can see I have done 10 steps today obviously have not been carrying this phone around very often notice all right I haven't left my chair don't judge me now one of the other phones out there that's really kind of made a splash in the Android community with it not being a mainstream like flagship device from Samsung or motor Rolla you know HTC was the 1+1 but most people had nothing but terrible things to say about the camera well the camera and this guy here is a 13 megapixel camera in fact it's even got 4k recording capability at 30fps built-in but it's got a ton of different modes now we're going to flip this around now you guys can see me you feel pretty I am do you see my pretty face so the front-facing camera on here has got face rate facial recognition it's also not the sharpest camera in the world for front-facing but I think it gets the job done now when you flip it around you've got 13 megapixels to play with on the dual camera setup and both of these cameras here are actually they're not the same you've got two different apertures also happening between both of these camera cameras which are going to give you some very near DSLR type of performance now I'm not gonna call it DSLR performance a lot of people are quick to say that you're never going to get DSLR performance out of something like this size so I'm just gonna go ahead and say that now but they do give you all of these different modes here you've got full manual mode multi exposure mode where you can take two pictures and kind of overlay them on top of each other panorama sport which is a very fast shutter speed with a very fast focus slow motion and interval intervals kind of neat it's kind of like a time-lapse you can play around that a little bit we've got auto mode and you've also got a bokken mode now bokeh is a bokeh however you want to say it it's basically like depth of field it is where you can make things that are farther away blurrier because you can play with the f-stop on this particular camera now anything below f 2.0 is going to be nothing but a software manipulation of the photo it's not a true f 1.0 in this trust me but you can play around with this where you can take a photo here and touch what you want to focus on it'll beep at you when it gets the focus take the photo and then it actually adds more bokeh post-production which as you can see right there the axon is in perfect focus but then everything else is super blurry now it wasn't actually that when it took the photo but it did a process of post-processing to it which added a little bit to it so it's not a true you know depth of field or f-stop that you're playing around with anything below 2.0 anyways but and I just bumped the shutter button but anyway it does give you a little bit of creativity to play around with now as I mentioned earlier the camera does do 4k recording at 30fps we'll put up a couple of samples of that probably somewhere around now but I will say the camera on this thing is pretty damn good you can see the detail on the flower is super sharp it really likes to do macro photography in fact this camera is fantastic at doing macro stuff I even pointed it directly at the Sun just to see how the sensor could handle that it did a fantastic job of giving me almost like a dual exposure where even though it was pointed directly at the Sun you could still see the palm tree it's not in super detail it's quite a bit shadowed but you got an image that gave you something than just a big Sun flare in the middle of the screen okay so the last thing I want to do with this is I want to do a little bit of a gaming demo on this that eight-course Snapdragon processor is when this is this might as well just be like a PSP or a full-on gaming device because that processor and that four gigs of ram is just absolutely overkill for a device like this so I just thought I'd do a couple seconds here of Angry Birds - in fact it's so loud I got to turn it down man told you those speakers are loud but we'll just do a few seconds of this Angry Birds isn't exactly a very demanding game oh yeah and as you can see there's no stutters or anything it's very very smooth a graphics processor on this is really good dad turn down farther this speakers are so loud get back here and oh fail alright wow that's a nail that alright I totally meant to do that alright but as you can see it the gameplay on this is super smooth although the driver really sucks that's for sure and we're going to purr fast and I finished first oh yeah all right well gaming on this thing as you can see is pretty amazing I'm happy with it so here in the US right now it currently works on AT&T t-mobile NPCs cricket Rogers Bell Tell entellus if you happen to be in Europe or Asia it's gonna work on most Europe Asia Oceania Latin America country areas where GSM + WCDMA Network roaming is actually working so I can't use this on Verizon unfortunately that's kind of a downside but it is unlocked and you do buy it carrier free you buy directly from ZTE so you're not gonna have to deal with contracts or any of that stuff and then a price of 450 dollars the features that you get for 450 bucks I think it's great because you start dealing with phones like Samsung and iPhone and all of that to buy them carrier or contract free they can be like 700 bucks or something stupid so there you go guys the axon from ZTE I think this is a super super sharp device I really like the way that it looks I like the way that it performs I don't like the way it doesn't work on Verizon all right so what device you guys using sound off down in the comments or hit me up on Twitter and let me know it's always guys thanks for watching maybe we'll do more of these mobile content type videos this was kind of fun no but out of my element but I I do carry a smartphone so I do feel like I've got some opinion on the matter all right guys time to get out of here and we'll see you where are you were you at there you are we'll see you in the next one