Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm kabhi HD here and while a lot of people may argue or like to say that smartphones have been getting a little more stagnant or a little boring lately I would argue that the rise of super inexpensive really good smartphones is a pretty exciting benefit to how good the tech has gotten recently in other words good smart phones have gotten really cheap and cheap smartphones have gotten really good and this out of nowhere is ZTE axon 7 is a really good example of that it's one of those smart phones where you've either heard about it a lot recently or never heard of it at all and that's fine either way consider it in the running for best budget smart phone right now it's going for 400 bucks off contract in the US so right alongside the oneplus 3 now if you're considering buying this one then you should consider my five pillars of a great smartphone which I judge all smartphones by whether they're 850 bucks or 350 bucks and that is great build quality great display great performance great battery life and great camera if you have all five of these things you're sitting pretty now you can have other little quirks and other little things missing and trust me axon 7 definitely does but as long as you have those five things you're pretty much set as a great smartphone and other little things probably aren't a deal-breaker now those core ones and your set so build quality axon 7 is built great it's got the Full Metal Jacket and pretty much no straight lines anywhere it's similar to an iPhone with the antenna lines at the top on the bottom and on the rounded metal at the top the bottom and the sides with the unibody design pretty much no straight edges it's kind of slippery since it's so rounded so you can always apply the clear plastic case that comes in the box if you want or not or you can pick up a matte skin or something like that a little more clean I'll link to this dbrand skin below that will help with the grip for sure but then there's also expandable storage with a micro SD card slot on the side which is awesome and it has a USB type-c port at the bottom with quick charge 3.0 and good well spaced clicky power button and volume rocker and then up front there's a pretty great display to bezel gyeo here since on the front you're getting a big old display but you also get stereo front-facing speakers flanking it and that's one of the phones biggest strengths and speaking of the front how is that display it's pretty great on paper for a budget smartphone it's a 5.5 inch quad HD AMOLED display and it looks pretty great nice and sharp gets pretty bright so it's decently viewable outdoors and actually ZTE does a good job with its built-in wallpaper collection to really show off that resolution so overall you can see the media experience here with this screen and these speakers is going to be great the audio sounds great up till about two notches from max volume and since it's front-facing obviously it's a lot louder and clearer than most other smartphone speakers so this is awesome for videos and games and pretty much any media up at the top the front-facing camera does interrupt the speaker grille for a little bit but that's not a big deal and then at the bottom you have your hardware nav buttons these buttons they work but they're not the best so there's no backlight first of all so they're not lit you literally can't see them at night and then the strip of bezel Iran is also super thin which looks really good but that also makes the target that you press a lot smaller so you can find yourself missing presses sometimes like I did it's kind of a quirk alright so what about performance well ZTE threw in the Snapdragon 820 with the Adreno 530 and 4 gigabytes of RAM so it should be right up there with other premium phones with the same chipset obviously and this software is et East Austin is overall pretty smooth I wouldn't say it's lightweight though it is packing a lot of extra features and it's called me favored UI and it's I guess somewhere in between the stock Ashraf's from oneplus and the fully custom UI from like Samsung it has a bit of a different look different icons different quick settings different aesthetics but overall it's pretty easy to find your way around and you still have a bunch of extra features like I mentioned stuff like voice unlock or customization of the navigation keys you can switch the back button to the left side or the right side however you want a bunch of custom gestures for things like taking screenshots or turning on a flashlight or scheduled power up and power down to start and end your day without having to use the hardware pretty neat there's power saving modes there's a battery saving mode when you're getting low it's pretty full-featured but it is definitely still packin some quirks to the software quirks can definitely be ironed out with updates but it's just odd to see certain stuff like on a lock screen for example every time you unlock your phone you have to hit the little bell to see your notifications like every time I don't why can't you turn that off it seems weird the only reason you unlock your phone half the time is just to check to see if you have notifications and nine times out of ten it's really annoying to have to press that bill I'm not sure what the thought was there anyway the fingerprint reader on the back also works pretty well but it's not the fastest especially after using phones like the one plus three and the iPhone 6s but it gets the job done and it's in roughly the same place on the back of the phone as the Nexus is so I got used to it pretty quick but yeah overall performance didn't really have any real major let downs so I guess how much you liked the software experience will just depend on how much you like the aesthetics the battery life category is a little bit more flexible for me because there's also other charging conveniences that can make up for not having the best battery life like a removable swappable battery or wireless charging or fast charging so the one plus three is an example it has decent battery life but it makes up for it by having the best fast charging in the game so it's totally fine that it doesn't have the best battery life in the world so ZTE did not skimp with this guy it's got the chipset so it does have Qualcomm quick charge 3.0 pretty fast charging but it also still has roughly four hours of screen on time and a pretty good battery life for a quad HD display that's constantly on max brightness for me so that's also pretty nice to see and it's a thicker phone and I'm glad they put the thicker battery in there but yeah quick charge helps a lot with this one now the fifth pillar is the camera and this is the area where you expect it to break down for pretty much every budget smartphone rocket on the back of the ZTE axon 7 you get a 20 megapixel sensor with F 1.8 aperture and optical image stabilization but as we know numbers don't mean everything those are great numbers but they don't mean everything so the pictures show pretty clearly a mid-range camera so it's pretty decent exposure which is good news and the auto HDR does a good job of leveling that out and bringing up shadows really well but it kind of struggles with color reproduction and I found it pretty consistent we had some sort of a warm to magenta cast in all of the photos so I guess the good news here is that it's consistently bad the same way every time but it's fixable with software so yeah you can see the color accuracy is just not the strength here despite being very good with detail and dynamic range with all those 20 megapixels and then of course it struggled hard and low light and the a megapixel front-facing camera has almost no dynamic range so overall mixed bag with that camera so in short exon 7 is one of the best phones you can get for the price especially if you're into audio again the front-facing speakers and internally it has a really high quality DAC high quality amp 32 bit high power output you're going to have better audio from the headphone jack with this phone than normal phones if you're into media and if you're into listening to a lot of music and watching a lot of videos this is one of the best budget smart phones you can get it definitely has its quirks with the software but at the end of the day it still has all the five core requirements to me to be a good smart phone it's got them pretty much locked down so I'd say if I'm going to make this my daily driver I'm gonna wait for software updates to lock up the quirky features but overall it's it's firmly right behind one plus three for me for best smartphone on a budget right now highly recommended and thanks to you guys for recommending that I check out this phone obviously you guys are blowing up Twitter over the last couple days for me to check this out so I'm glad I did I hope you enjoyed the video thank you for watching and feel free to leave comments of other things you want me to take a look at tech related smartphone or non smartphone in the comments section below again thanks for watching talked to you guys the next one base