Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “ZTE Axon 7: Top Budget Smartphone?”.
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 gon na 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 .