Gadgetory

the best laid plans of mice and tech bloggers a little inside baseball while I was wrapping up our Sony Xperia coverage we sent this beauty over to hi Mei to tackle the full review of course he got the note 7 and seeing is how we can't pry that phone out of his hands this poor little bugger slipped through our review schedule let's fix that now cutting to the chase this phone rocks are you sad that HTC no longer sells the One m8 want a phone that resembles those sleek lines and features a killer set of front-facing speakers ZTE has a solution which might interest you graceful tapers familiar antenna bands high quality build materials a premium look and feel this phone punches well above its $400 price tag that style is also backed up by killer hardware on board this 5.5 inch pax a quad HD resolution besting the 1+3 and honor 8 for pixel density we're not lacking for horsepower with a welcome 820 and 4 gigabytes of RAM on tap this phone matches the 1 plus 3 for storage 64 gigabytes built in but media junkies can also add more via microSD there's an 8 megapixel selfie shooter above the screen joining a 20 megapixel rear shooter and the ZTE strayed from the mid-price pack with a 3,250 milliamp hour battery and quick charge 3.0 looking at this display it's a solid screen ready to handle current services and this generation of VR applications and it delivers great brightness outpacing the honor rate and just nipping at the heels of the galaxy s7 ultimately losing to the galaxy once we see that excellent high contrast mode but for those of you who read on your phones at night you'll be very happy with how dim the screen can get I'm also happy to see this placement for the rear mounted fingerprint sensor great location for my little Hobbit hands on a 5.5 inch screen size in operation however this is proven to be one of the finicky er sensors I've recently used after training the phone it's a little less forgiving of finger placement than say a Huawei might be and on an odd angle it regularly takes a second try to unlock the phone when you nail that placement though this is a lightning-fast there are precious few criticisms we can throw at this hardware but I do wish we had backlit navigation buttons the capacitive home back and multitasking keys are rather close together and it takes a while to muscle memorize where you need to press to land the commands you want thankfully these keys are swappable and folks who like a right-side back button will enjoy this option all of this Hardware powers a software skin I rather enjoyed my favored UI delivers a flat simple look to an Android layout we'd normally associate with an LG but with a more cohesive design the notification shade delivers five quick actions from a single swipe your home screens come native in a five by four grid giving you a bit more space to play with widgets and the app drawer shows off large bold icons for your installed programs lastly the settings menu is cleanly laid out with simple icons for each option we're always happy to report that there's little pre-installed bloat outside of a few ZTE provided services like this nifty toolkit app for your nifty geometry projects that skins are often derided in our comments but this one I kinda liked I didn't feel any urgent need to swap it out for Nova Launcher and performance is about what you would expect from this collection of specs the axon handles the daily driver stuff with style and grace no issues at all with messaging in social media with a Snapdragon 820 on tap we shouldn't be surprised that this thing can chew through games like implosion with a stable and fluid framerate it even managed to perform well in Marvel future fight there are still dips in the framerate but we don't see it slow to a slideshow like we witnessed on the galaxy s7 alongside the Moto Z newer phones with this chipset seem to slightly outperform the first devices launched with this Qualcomm hardware if there's a weak link it's in radio management our review unit performed rather poorly on AT&T LTE falling about 2 to 3 decimals behind the 1 + 3 + 5 - 7 decibels behind the honor eight when trying to stay on big blue's network these numbers were even worse on Wi-Fi where the glass backed honor absolutely trounced the axon when connected to my router this disparity was so wide we are asking ZTE it's on this and we'll follow up later on pocketnow.com if and when we receive word on this Wi-Fi deficit moving over to the camera we've already produced the most in-depth look at this camera which you can see in our full real camera review but it's a quick overview this is a solid performer which absolutely lives up to this price tag Photography is all about light so it's always silly to say you get good photos when you have good light though the axon delivers pleasant exposures with eye-pleasing saturation when shooting in daylight this camera does struggle a bit with low-light situations optical image stabilization helps but we did have issues delivering crisp shots here where other phones might have been more successful also this phone very much resembles the fringing and flaring we also see from current held genes moving to video we get an extremely ambitious option to deliver h.265 video compression and this does deliver a very high quality UHD video but we still had some issues with twitch East able ization while this camera might not quite reach the performance of the 1+3 or the consistency of the iPhone se we're still very happy with the bang for buck here this is very good to excellent camera performance for $400 and many of our gripes could be lessened with some software tweaks and future updates but when we talk about the axon audio is the name of the game everything about this sound setup is loud and aggressive these speakers are some of the punch ear ones we've tested recently though they can sometimes be a bit shrill especially when listening to jazz and classical music to my ears we lose a little in the mids and the high EQ becomes a bit brittle but this is a terrific setup for games and films it's moving over to headphone audio which totally messed us up this phone is loud stonking loud like off-the-charts freaking loud I recently replaced my audio interface used for testing headphone audio and was in the process of retesting all of the phones we've reviewed so we could have relative numbers between different devices the axon 7 blew past the threshold I was using and is forcing me to completely retest everything again for accurate comparisons this amp beats the v10 HTC 10 and iPhone 6s and below that tear it absolutely murders every other phone we've reviewed here's a playback comparison at max volume between the axon the v10 and the galaxy s7 Yonex and while loud it has a fantastically low noise floor which means this phone delivers the best signal-to-noise ratio we've ever tested you people will be able to tolerate audio at max volume from this device and we're pretty sure trying for any length of time will damage your hearing but turning the volume down means benefiting from almost zero discernible noise coming from this phone no hiss no wine no air no nada the only compromise here seems to be down sampled playback of high res audio files only outputting 16-bit audio and we also see a little funkiness with our dynamic range test numbers but it's difficult for us to be overly upset about that if you listen to high quality mp3 this phone will do an excellent job driving nice headphones lastly we have a battery with slightly more juice in the competition which results in very good runtime on our media test streaming 30 minutes of HD video over Wi-Fi at 190 Lux the axon drained 5% of its battery and those numbers match our daily usage it's really easy making it into the late evening with the little battery to spare ZTE claims the axon can recharge 80% in 30 minutes and we're not exactly sure how they arrived at that number to be sure this is a fast charger and we landed a 61% recharge over a half hour this is great performance for those times you need to top off during the day so let's wrap this up where does that leave us with the ZTE axon 7 I'm totally sounding like a broken record here but 2016 has been an amazing year for mid-range err phones ZTE has delivered something really special this phone is a monster with few faults to find the main concern and the only potential deal-breaker might be the radio performance which we can't positively conclude isn't an issue unique to our review unit and we will follow up on any responses we received from the manufacturer otherwise we're looking at a compelling option for folks shopping a $400 phone joining the ranks of Alcatel One Plus and honor these men factures are hungry for some competition and are rapidly eating away at the line which divides mid-priced phones from far more expensive flagship options what a time to be alive as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like these definitely check out our real camera reviews to see these smart phone cameras in action and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos bag now some gadget guy on twitter and instagram and i will catch you all on the next review you