ZTE Axon 7 Features and Comparsions
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 the super inexpensive smartphone is really good. Smartphones is a pretty exciting benefit to how good the tech has gotten recently. In other words, good smartphones 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 smartphones 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 the best budget smartphone right now it’s gone for 400 bucks off contract in the U.S. So right alongside the one plus 3. Now if you considering buying this one. Then you consider my five pillars of a great smartphone which I judge all smartphones by whether they’re 850 bucks or 350 bucks. That is a great build quality, great display, great performance, great battery life and the great camera. If you have all five of these things you said pretty and 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.
Build Quality of Axon 7
Now those core ones and your set so build quality Axon 7 is 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 and the bottom. On the rounded metal at the top and the bottom and the sides with the unit by 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 mat skin or something like that a little more clean that will help with the grip for sure but then there’s also expandable store. It comes 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. Good well spaced cliquey power button and the volume rocker and then a front there’s a pretty great display to bezel ratio here since on the front you’re getting a big old display but you also get the stereo front facing speakers flanking and that’s one of the phone’s biggest strengths and speaking of the front.
Display Of Axon 7
How is that display? It’s pretty great on paper for a budget smartphone it’s a 5.5inch Quad AMOLED display and it looks pretty great nice. Sharp gets pretty bright so it’s decently viewable outdoors and actually, ZTE does a good job with his 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 to about two notches for 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. Grow for a little bit but that’s not a big deal and then at the bottom you have your hardware now have 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 Axon 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.
Performance of Axon 7
What about performance. What was ZTE through 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 easy to use tossed in is overall pretty smooth. I would say it’s lightweight though it is packing a lot of extra features and it’s called me favor UI and it’s I guess somewhere in between the stock issue roms from one plus and the fully custom UI from like Samsung. It has a bit of a different look differ. Icons different quick settings different aesthetics. But overall it’s pretty easy to find a 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 the 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. It’s pretty neat. There’re power saving modes. There’s a battery saving mode when you’re getting low. It’s pretty full featured but it is definitely still packing some quirks to the software quirks can definitely be ironed out with updates but 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 you turn that off. It seems weird the only reason you on locking 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 Bell I’m not sure what the thought was there any way 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 I got used to it. Pretty quick but overall performance didn’t really have any real major let downs.
Battery Life
So I guess how much you like 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 there are movable swappable battery or wireless charging or fast charging so the one plus 3 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 did not skimp with this guy it’s got the chipset so it does have Qualcomm squid charge 3.0 pretty fast charging but also still has a roughly four hours of screen on time. A pretty good battery life for a QHD display that. 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 the quick charge helps a lot with this one.
Camera Quality of Axon 7
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 rack on the back of the ZTE AXON 7 you get a 20-megapixel sensor with F. 1 aperture and image stabilization. But as we know numbers don’t mean everything. Those are great numbers but they don’t mean everything. So the pictures how 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 consistently 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 you can see the color accuracy is just not the strength here despite being very good with detail and dynamic range with all those 20megapixels and then, of course, it struggled hard in low light. A 8 mega pixel front facing camera has almost no dynamic range so overall mixed bag with that camera. So in short Axon 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 the 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 but it’s smartphones you can get it definitely has its quirks with the software but at the end of the day it still has all the five requirements to me to be good smartphones going pretty much locked downside safe I’m going to make this my daily driver. I’m going away for software updates to lock up the quirky features but overall it sits firmly right behind one plus 3 for me for best smartphone on a budget right now. How you recommended and I see you guys are recommending that I check out this phone. So I’m glad I did hope you enjoyed.
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