ZTE Axon 20 5G Review World's First Under Display Selfie Camera! By TechTablets

So, I have a phone here, that's a little different from the rest of the phones that I've reviewed up until now, so they either have a notch or they have a cutout on the screen and some of them I've reviewed in the channel will have pop-up cameras, but this here from ZTE, the axon 20, is the world's first commercially available under the screen camera that has a setup that is a bit different because the pixels will cover over that camera. It's not quite as dense the screen there in that region as the rest of the screen, this OLED, which is 90 hertz. This is quite clever the tech behind this. It is innovation, the next step, and we're probably going to see a lot more of this. But will it affect the camera performance? Will it degrade the image quality of our selfies? That's what I'm here to find out in this in-depth review. So this model, if you're unaware it is a mid-range phone, it is powered by a mid-range chipset, which is the Qualcomm snapdragon 765 g.

My model here that was sent out to me has eight gigabytes of ram 128 gigabytes of UFS storage inside the box. We have a sim tray tool right there, and we've got a little of paperwork, so a warranty card, and we also do have this case, which is matching the color of the phone. So this one here is like a leather finish to it. Well, it's fake leather, with the axon branding there on the back of it our charger. This one is rated to 30 watts, and it will take about an hour and 20 minutes to fully charge the axon 20.

We have a type c cable to type a, and then they do include this. A lot of brands do not include an adapter 3.5 to type c. So, of course, it does not have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack in hand. The axon 20 feels quite nice. We have at the bottom here a little of a chin.

Now this screen is 90 hertz, but more on that later on, it's a full HD plus screen, and it does have a size of 6.9 inches in hand. This phone weight wise, not bad, it's just under 200 grams at 196. The thickness is also quite good about eight millimeters or so that I'm measuring just slightly over, and if you include the camera, which does stick out a bit as you can just see there, then that brings it up to about 10 millimeters, rounded edges all around it. So it's comfortable in hand, and it does have this middle frame. It goes around the outside without any antenna lines at all.

So there you can see on the right. We have our power button volume up and down. There is this eco leather. They call it on the back with the axon branding. ZTE logo is right there.

This has a texture to it and in hand feels very, very nice. It's a quality finish, there's no sharp edges or anything like that. Looking at our cameras here so 64 megapixels is the main camera. We have an 8, megapixel, ultrawide, f, 2.2 and then two 2 megapixel cameras which have an aperture of f 2.4. I really wish they did not bother with these two megapixel cameras.

I've said this with other brands and just give us a better ultra-wide camera say: 13 megapixels include the autofocus function with that, and then we've got a macro camera instead of the 2 megapixel macro and 2 megapixel depth. So there is an in-screen fingerprint reader with this one. If you tap about here, it will come on first, and you see, unlocking time is about if you time that from when I first touch it to then unlocking one and a half seconds or so most of the time. It is very, very accurate, and I don't normally have to repeat so. That is good.

The fingerprint reader, I think, is great face, unlocking as well. It does work with this verify your face. I can't right see me right now and of course, you can see here the hidden under screen camera. This is the star of the show really with this particular model. It's the first commercial unit, of course, to have this behind the screen, camera and right here you can barely see it most of the time, it's quite a hidden.

If you look very closely depending on the background, you may just see it. So if I bring up something like settings, for example, you may see just a little crisscross pattern like a checkerboard when looking at it very closely, but it is hard to make this out most of the time it's hidden. So if you're not into the notches or the cutouts, then this is a phone for you without having a pop-up camera having it behind the screen and the sim tray on this one will take two NATO sims or just a single NATO sim and a micro SD card. I've tested out my 128 gigabyte card and no problems with it down the bottom. There is a type c port that does support video out, which is great, so it's USB 3.1. All it does is just clone the display.

There's a microphone and a single downwards firing loudspeaker. There is no secondary loudspeaker with the axon 20. And then, lastly, up the top, we do have a secondary microphone. This is for noise cancellation with calls and also used in video. Now ZTE has selected quite a good panel for this mid-range phone, 90 hertz, full HD plus resolution.

We get all your typical options in here, so dark mode display optimization is just a feature they have to boost and the colors and contrast and things like that too scaling is there and the refresh rate, so it can be set to 60, hertz and 90 is our maximum here. So not the 120 we're seeing on most 2021 phones. Newer phones are all getting this a double refresh rate, but even so at the 90 hertz it does look quite a bit more fluid than the standard 60 refresh rate, so with the brightness. It can go all the way up. There's an automatic brightness, of course too, with this with the ambient light sensor right up here to a very bright 780 plus nits, which is good AMOLED display it does fare quite a bit better in sunlight than say an IPS even with a similar brightness, and I do like the touch sensitivity on this particular screen.

So one thing to point out, though, however, at lower brightness levels, this is on camera. You can see this flickering some people very sensitive to this, with especially OLED screens that this one has. You may notice that flickering at lower brightness, because it does not have any DC dimming. That's the one thing, that's missing. A lot of manufacturers do miss that, and even flagship phones will not have the DC dimming.

So touch response is good from this. I've had no issues, and I do have the full screen gestures enabled at the moment now the ROM performance I have noticed to be very good. I've had no noticeable lag or issues, multitasking is also great, and the task manager does not seem to be too aggressive, although if you do keep something in the background, that is definitely a third-party app, not a system, one like an tutu, it will reload. That is standard. This is a battery saving feature that most brands will set a time limit to how long those apps can be there before closing them down so touch responses mentioned is working good.

The fluidity of the ROM is excellent and overall, I think they have done a good job with the optimization of this particular ROM. So this ROM has plenty of features that are built into it. A lot of them are standard things that you would already know about. So I'm not going to go in depth into that or cover that. But I wanted to point out a couple of things that I do like.

I do like that there is a 5g toggle. Now I have 5g here I can get under the 5g networks, but here in Spain, in my area, 5g is actually well it's useless, and I probably wouldn't use it because it's exact same speed as 4g. Here, it's like a fake 5g they're using the same frequency, the same band, but the network has well the infrastructure from 4g, so it's pointless and that can save us a little of battery life, not using the 5g. There. You've got all the typical options here: screen recording mode as well.

NFC is on board with this, and it does support Google Pay. Now what about the bloat, where we get when you first power on this phone? There are a few apps that are pre-installed that maybe you don't want now. Some of these are built-in ones for support. Like ZTE care, you have a few extra google apps on there, but you can remove some things the WP office, so miner bloatware on here it's not as bad as some manufacturers. I have seen that will literally clam cram on to a phone about two gigabytes of crap that we don't want, and you have to uninstall that, but not with ZTE not too bad there now free available space.

You will get around about 109 gigabytes uh, with the 128 gigabyte version that I do have here straight out of the box and of course, we've got the micro SD card support, yay. That is good, but sadly no 3.5, millimeter headphone jack. So here is our battery life screen calibrated to 200 nits of brightness. It will run here with my fixed looping test that goes from 100 battery right down to 20, and it stops to give me this result. So 10 hours and 13 minutes is a good score.490 hertz, that's not bad at all! Now, if you use 60 hertz, you will gain a few additional hours of on-screen time now. Real-Life use out of this real world use.

You can expect around about seven to eight hours of on-screen time, depending on your brightness, your network signal strength and, if you're playing games, then you can half that time quite easily and, as mentioned before charge time is about an hour and 20 minutes or so to fully charge. This one here is our an tutu score, so 330 000 for that snapdragon 765 g with the 5g support, is not bad. That is a mid-range score here, so its nice snapdragons, triple-a, of course, which will be around 6 000 points, but still decent performance, and you'll see later on that you can play even demanding games, but you do need to turn down some of those real high settings so with our UFS storage with this one that we are getting decent good speeds here, random reads and writes are good, sequential reads, very, very good there and the rights as well. So definitely no holdups or bottlenecks will be there with the storage wired vine level, one cert, so Amazon, prime video Netflix, Disney, plus all in full HD maximum. There we're not stuck in standard definition.

That's another positive and just like this here, too camera to API support. So if you wanted a different kind of photo, you weren't happy with the stock camera app. Then you can find and use a Guam port for this particular model. So it's great to see a lot of manufacturers. Most of them do nowadays, anyway, support the hardware level three right at the maximum GPS.

This is Qualcomm's limitation, so accuracy will not be any better than three meters. It does see a lot of satellites locks onto them. Just fine and first lock only took a matter of seconds, so the expected performance out of GPS now, the maximum wireless speed you can achieve will be close to 400 megabits per second, of course, connected up to wireless ac, and at my point where I test, I got over 100 megabits per second, so I'm happy with that 133 3 average. There is good, and our safety net status is of course passed. We do have Google pay support and the NFC on board with this onto the audio quality.

Now so it does have Bluetooth, 5 support, and I have been listening to a few tunes and songs and things with my Bluetooth, five noise, cancelling earbuds, and it sounds fine, it's good! It's what you'd expect. Okay call quality as well is good, no problems there, and you can use the 3.5 to type c adapter, which also sounds very clean. The maximum volume could be a little louder. Just like the loudspeaker on this, so only a single loudspeaker here, I really would have preferred to have also seen the secondary one at the top. Hopefully they can add that in the next model, so here is a sample of it at maximum volume, which it could actually be a little louder.

The gaming performance, as expected for the snapdragon 765 g, isn't bad at all. So this game here this title, gen chain impact, is very demanding set to 60 frames per second with a medium resolution. Perfectly playable, other demanding titles like say, Call of Duty pub g, just lower the settings down to keep the frame rate up now. I have noticed here that we've got some odd borders with this particular game, see there's a border at the top there's also border at the bottom, which does look a little ugly and detracts a little just from how nice this game could look because of those borders there now thermals, very, very good. You can game for an hour or so, and it just gets a little warm on the back near the cameras, but nothing that hot, and it doesn't seem to throttle not enough for me to break out my thermal imaging camera, because really it's only about 40 degrees Celsius in my ambient 25 degrees.

Here that is on to our cameras. Now with the axon 20, we've got the 32 megapixel front, facing camera f, 2.0, and it is behind the screen. Don't get me wrong. This is amazing tech to have, and it's a step forward with innovation with phones. However, it's the weakness of this front-facing camera as it is looking behind and has to look around those pixels and to me, it often most of the time, looks a little fuzzy a little washed out as a result of this.

Now the front-facing vlog video quality right now is 1080p maximum there's no electronic image stabilization. Let's take a look now at the other cameras, as well as some photo samples, 4k 30 frames per second video quality here. So we've got electronic image stabilization. That does a reasonably good job. Now we cannot shoot any video, unfortunately, with the ultra-wide camera, it just seems to be the main camera only as I pan around.

There is a bit of chatter that I have seen coming through with the 4k video, and I'm going to run up these stairs while a light jog to show you that electronic image stabilization performance. So this new screen tick the fact that they can have a camera below it and hide it and camouflage it. So well is brilliant, and this, of course, is just the first generation, so they will only just be improving on this. Of course, and maybe they'll get to the point where they can set a focal distance where the camera looking through and around basically looking through those pixels, there won't affect the image quality, because at this point, at this stage, as I show, I've shown you with those samples from the front facing camera that it is not going to be as good as a standard camera with the glass over the front of it. So the selfie images a little at times having just some weird kind of effect coming through, especially in low light.

Video quality is not quite as good. I really wish that they'd added optical sorry, electronic image stabilization to that front-facing camera 1080p maximum with it, which is kind of to be expected for a mid-range phone. So the cameras, the cameras on this phone definitely for me, are the weak area. The screen is nice, 90 hertz, it's super smooth. The optimization of the ROM is also very good.

It's fast, it's fluid gaming performance decent for the chipset. If you don't expect to be running games like gen shin impact on the absolute maximum settings and have super fluid frame rates uh, then you can get away with this, of course, allowing the settings down a little for those really demanding games like Call of Duty pub g and all that playable super playable on the spec of phone, just don't run the max settings. That's all there. Battery life is good charge. Time is good, fingerprint unlocking is also good as well.

It's just really the cameras for me. So if you're really focused on especially the selfie camera, you take a lot of selfies all the time. I would probably want to skip this particular phone, but for everything else. It is a solid good offering from ZTE here, and thank you so much for watching this review. I do hope to catch you back with more up-and-coming videos bye for now.

Source : TechTablets