ZTE Axon review: A killer flagship that won’t break the bank

When you think of an Android flagship, chances are ZTE isn’t at the top of your list. The company hasn’t exactly pioneered great smartphones, and if they have, its only been in Asia-Pacific, with other regions being dominated by bigger names like Samsung, LG, HTC, and even Apple. ZTE is looking to change that in its effort to become the world’s third largest smartphone vendor, and they might just be onto something with the ZTE Axon.

The Axon is ZTE’s best smartphone yet with its hefty and elegant design, audio experience, and beautiful 5.5-inch display. As far as specifications go, the Axon contends with much of what Samsung and LG put out this year, effectively adding to the already competitive smartphone market.

Does the Axon have what it takes to dethrone kings like the Galaxy S6, LG G4, and maybe even the beloved Nexus series?

Design

As far as design goes, ZTE may have something up its sleeve. While Samsung is busy creating beautiful smartphones with glass backs and chamfered edges, ZTE is taking the polished metallic look to a whole new level. Measurements comes in at 153.9 x 73.7 x 9.4mm and this handset weights a hefty 170 grams. And while that might be heavier than many flagships, it gives the smartphone a durable feel.

The all-around design screams premium. The body of the Axon is made out of smooth metal, and it feels great. It makes the phone feel slippery, but then again, what smartphone doesn’t these days? It has a tapered back and rounded edges, all normal things you would see on a smartphone. But what makes the Axon stand out is its unique grill pattern placed at varying locations on the phone — the rear camera, the earpiece, and the front-facing speaker. These aesthetically pleasing marks make the handset stand out from the crowd, having an authoritative feel to it, so to speak.

Some of those aesthetics do make the Axon a tad misleading. For instance, the unique grill pattern on the front of the phone gives the illusion that the handset features dual front-facing speakers, and unfortunately, that’s not the case. It only comes with one great sounding speaker hidden by the bottom grill. The top grill is solely for the earpiece and isn’t another speaker. It’s still a very nice and unique design, despite it being misleading.

As far as button placement goes, there’s a power button on the right side of the phone and a camera button below it for snapping photos without having to fiddle with the on-screen shutter. The physical camera button is truly just a shutter and doesn’t double as quick access to the camera application. On the left top side is a volume rocker with a SIM card tray placed above. The tray only holds only a SIM card. ZTE did not include an extra slot for a microSD card.

The Axon features a circular home button that doubles as a notification light, pulsing when you’ve received notifications or when your battery is low. It also has two dots on either side of it, acting as the Back button on the left side and the Recents button on the right.

ZTE has outdone itself with the Axon’s design.

Hardware

The Axon features a 5.5-inch Full HD (1920×1080) TFT LCD display, Snapdragon 800 quad-core 2GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, a dual 13MP and 2MP rear camera setup, an 8MP front camera, a 3000mAh battery (non-removable), WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, and Bluetooth 4.0.

Bands:

4G LTE (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17, 29, 30)
GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900)
HSDPA (850, 1700, AWS, 1900, 2100)

Performance

ZTE has implemented a great media package in the Axon. It features a 5.5-inch TFT LCD display with a resolution of 1920×1080. Having a 5.5-inch display does mean that you’re going to be making some major adjustments when using the phone one-handed, but that’s a small price to pay for carrying around such a beautiful screen.

Viewing angles on the device were about normal for a flagship, and brightness levels were great, making the Axon a good candidate for outdoor use. Overall, it’s a nifty display, and while it’s not one of Samsung’s signature AMOLED panels, the TFT LCD screen will go above and beyond at delivering content with accurate colors and a crispness seen on many flagships today.

The Axon also employs a Snapdragon 800 quad-core 2GHz processor, making it nearly as slick as the LG G4 and even the Galaxy Note 5. I did put the Axon through a couple of stress tests that a smartphone may not otherwise go through. Loading up some fairly intensive games like Need for Speed and Godus proved to be no issue for the Axon.

The only noticeable change in performance was that the smartphone would heat up when manipulating terrain in Godus, but there was still no actual drop in speed. Both games played very well and I experienced hardly any stutter or lag. The stutter that I did see I believe was due to frames dropping, which seems to be more of a software issue with Android than a problem with smartphone manufacturers.

As far as day-to-day performance goes, the Axon was able to handle anything I threw at it, whether that be answering regular emails, shooting messages through Hangouts, checking up on my social networks, and so on. It goes without saying, the Axon will be able to handle any and all of your tasks. There’s no worry about that here, especially when it comes to that Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor paired with 2GB of RAM. It’s a very nice package, and one that’s certainly hard to pass up.

Battery

The ZTE Axon isn’t the thinnest flagship you’ll ever see, but trading a little thinness for a bigger battery isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the Axon is a 3000mAh battery and lasts well through the work day with plenty left over for play and any other errands or activities you may need to do in the evening and night hours. ZTE’s battery optimization is spot on. Under moderate usage, the Axon unit I was sent lasted on 1% of juice left for a good hour. I was able to reproduce these results a couple of times.

I tested a high definition video on the Axon playing continuously with all other applications closed. The Axon lasted about six or seven hours doing this. That said, if you’re on a plane or traveling, you could easily get a movie or two off of a single charge. ZTE does include a battery saver, which reduces performance and background apps, and that helps at increasing your battery life exponentially if you’re a power user. It might helps users who use the smartphone lightly, but in testing, I didn’t notice much of a difference under moderate usage with and without the power saver.

Speaking of charging, the Axon sports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 technology, meaning this handset charges fast. It only takes a couple of minutes to the Axon back from dead to 20 or 30% life, giving you a good few hours of usage on the device.

Camera

One of the major aspects of the Axon is the dual-camera setup. You get a main 13-megapixel sensor with f/1.8 aperture and OIS with a 2-megapixel sensor directly below it for capturing depth information. ZTE also included a 8-megapixel front camera for taking great self portraits.

With the dual-camera setup, you’d think photos would be out of this world. Unfortunately, that isn’t entirely the case. You have to remember that the megapixel count doesn’t necessarily mean a device takes good photos. Much of the quality of photo depends heavily upon software processing. With that in mind, photos do look good on the Axon, but only when there’s plenty of light available.

I noticed that low light photos and even photos with adequate lighting appeared very grainy (I have included a gallery of photos as an example below). You’re just not going to get an iPhone 6S or Galaxy S6 level of photo quality out of this smartphone without plenty of lighting. It’s an overall good camera, but certainly nothing that all the hype led to believe.

As far as the Camera UI goes, it has all of your standard features you’d expect to see in any smartphone–panorama, sport, HDR, and Manual. However, there’s some unique to the Axon in that you can alter the f stop control. Well, sort of. The only thing I noticed in altering it was the change in depth of field. It’s most definitely not an actual aperture change as you might see on an actual DSLR camera.

Software

One of the highlights of the Axon phone is that it boasts of a very clean user interface compared to other skins, such as Samsung’s TouchWiz. The Axon is loaded with Android 5.1.1 straight out of the box, and as of the time of this writing, there hasn’t been any official statement whether the device would be receiving Marshmallow.

While Google’s Material Design elements have been left in the user interface, ZTE did add some of their own features, such as a theme engine. Unfortunately, there aren’t many themes to choose from, and it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the Galaxy S6’s theme engine.

As far as pre-installed apps go, ZTE did an excellent job including just a couple to help keep tabs on your health. One of them is Argus, a pedometer that keeps track of your steps. The other is RockMyRun, which is a music player that alters the tempo to match the pace of your run. Both are handy applications to have available, but better ones can be found in the Play Store.

ZTE added some minor changes to the Quick Settings, allowing users to swap around the order in which shortcuts are shown. There’s also a ton of other options available to add to your Quick Settings panel. Finally, there’s an oddly placed quick info panel that you can access by swiping from the bottom of the screen (similar to what you would do in iOS). It offers quick access to your media player, favorite contacts, a step counter, and Yahoo! Sports news. In my real world testing, I hardly used this panel at all, though it may be useful to some.

Overall, ZTE has provided a clean user interface in the Axon over something bogged down with software that you’ll never use. We hope ZTE continues to keep this slick and speedy interface in software updates going forward, as it truly makes or breaks a smartphone for many.

Closing

You can pick up the Axon in Phthalo Blue, Ion Gold, and Chromium Silver from outlets like Amazon, and Newegg for around $330. Considering that many other flagships of the same specifications will run you anywhere from $800 – $1000, the Axon is one of the cheapest flagships available unlocked today. ZTE has excelled with the Axon, and though many are still wary about off-contract devices, they would be mistaken to not try out the Axon.

It’s a superb smartphone, and like all handsets, it does have its caveats. The software wasn’t great, to say the least. The real thing that makes or breaks this device is the camera, which wasn’t superb. But the question is, are you looking at buying a smartphone for the camera or media experience? If it’s the latter, the Axon is the right choice. With great sounding speakers and a gorgeous display, the Axon offers an unmatched media package. And in my opinion, that’s not worth passing up.

[ZTE] [Amazon] [Newegg]

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