ZTE Axon 20 5G unboxing and first impressions By Neowin

Hi everyone- this is Ravi Edwin, and today I have here the ZTE xm25g. This phone is pretty exciting to me for one very particular reason which is the display. So this is the world's first phone or the first one you can buy with a camera under the display, and I think that's really, really cool, so we're going to go and try and get right into that, but well in a bit uh. Let's just look at what's inside here. This thing comes with an actually pretty cool protective case. I like how it looks, though, I'm not sure if that's supposed to look like that.

It's that some problem with the finish there but whatever- and here we have the uh USB type- a to type c for charging- and here only wrong dongle, because no it does not have a headphone jack. I think I don't think it does otherwise why the ROG will be there, and this is the 30 watt power brake. So the phone does support quick charge for four plus and this charges at 30 watts, which is pretty good. I'm I mean we've seen faster, but 30 watts is still pretty nice, so we set that aside, and we take the phone out of the wrapping here and there it is so right away. You can see something different about it, because there is no speaker here.

There is nothing really that you can see on the top on the top bezel here. It's all just a very uniform working design all around so the display, the speaker, the camera and the ambient light sensor are all behind the display here and if you look closely, you can kind of see the camera hiding in there. At least I can. I don't know if it's very visible in the recording here, but if you look closely, you can kind of see it, but it's its barely noticeable, and we'll turn the phone on right away actually and just take a look at that. So one thing that needs to be mentioned here is that the vibration engine is not great.

It feels kind of weird um. It's its soft, I guess in a way it doesn't feel very, very good. Furthermore, it reminds me a bit also of the Nubia phones and the red magic phones that I've reviewed a few in the past. So here we see a completely white screen. You get to see the size of the bezels, which isn't very big.

The biggest one is probably here at the bottom, which is a pretty common thing to see, and it looks really nice. I actually really like that that very clean look. There is no notch, and you can, if you're looking specifically at it. So the camera is right there right, and I can see it right now. I don't think it's visible on camera in the recording.

But if you look closely enough, you can see the see right there, so it becomes very visible when you get up close like that, but in normal usage this is way less noticeable than a notch or a punch, hole or anything like that. I can see it if I focus on it, there's definitely some sort of fuzziness up there, even though that's a flat color, you can see it almost like. You can see the soft pixels in a way. It's kind of weird, but you kind of have to look closely and this being a flat camera. You know actually makes it worse because if you have more cameras going on, it's probably going to be less noticeable, so I'm going to set up the phone, and we'll come back once I have done that all right.

So now we've finished setting up the phone uh very quickly. We have the home screen here. I am ready to change the wall paper because by the phone, the wallpaper darkens a bit up there, and it seemed kind of looks like an attempt at disguising the camera, but even here just looking at it like this, I can't tell there's anything behind the display there, and it just looks really cool because there's nothing else like there's nothing up there. There's no speaker, there's nothing! You can tell. I think that looks spotless and really sleek and that's pretty cool.

But if you do, if you look more closely and if you tilt it sideways like that, you can definitely tell that something's going on in that little area, but it's barely noticeable and, of course the big question with this technology is: how does the camera do when you have this display in front of it? So if you open the camera app here, and you can look at the camera now, and it looks on right- it's not terrible, I think, but you can definitely see that the light is very blown out up there, and it's not amazing, but obviously I need to take pictures with it and see what it's like if you've seen other reviews. You'll know that it's actually not that great. It's very soft everything's, very soft. So I need to actually test it to see how good it is or if it's even usable, I'm not very picky with selfie cameras, because I rarely take selfies, but I'll definitely be trying that out because that's a big part of what this phone promises. But you know, aside from that, obviously the speaker and to emit light sensor, also behind the display, there's also an in-display fingerprint reader down there, which that's not as new, but that's something that ZTE mentions.

I thought is that everything is behind the display, basically, which is interesting to think about, and the screen itself looks pretty nice. I, like the colors here, like I said I can barely tell there's anything different uh up there, so it doesn't look worse, uh at least right off the bat, maybe over longer periods of usage, I'll notice it, and it isn't 90 hertz display it's by 1080 resolution perfectly fine for my tastes. Furthermore, I know people like quad HD, but also remember that this is about 450 or so it's not that expensive. It's this very clearly a mid-range phone with mid-range specs. So that's completely fine in my opinion and then going around the phone, there's nothing visible on the right side here, uh.

One thing that's worth mentioning for some reason is that there's 5g antennas all over this one like all around its something that CTE also mentions. There's 5g antennas here on the bottom on the top. On the other side, some of those antennas also work with 2g, 3g and 4g. On this side, it's only 5g. If the diagram that I have in my reviewers guide is to be believed, so lots of 5g antennas, so you should be able to get coverage more easily.

Not in Portugal, though, because 5g doesn't exist here. So I can't really test that part still has Wi-Fi. Of course, NFC is here as well. So that you are not missing out on like the basics. It did.

It nails the basics for sure, uh yeah. Of course, the USB type-c port on the bottom for charging 30 watts a sim card slot, a bottom finding speaker, which I believe is used in tandem with the speaker. That's behind the display for stereo sound. I think it does have DTS x ultrasound certification. We have another microphone up there, the power button and volume rocker, which is two separate buttons, I'm fine with that.

I usually prefer having the power button on one side and the volume rocker on the other or if they're on the same side then make the volume rocker one button that, like don't uh, because I think I feel like this- makes it a bit more confusing when it's just three buttons, but whatever on the back. Aside from the fact that it's very fingerprint um likes to come like fingerprints, it's got this fascinating finish. Its blank is obviously the most boring camera for a phone in my opinion, but it's got this really cool pattern going on that shines in all different kinds of ways with the light. So I do like that and of course we have the camera bump here with a 64 megapixel primary camera uh, which is fine, we'll have to see how it actually does. It has an eight megapixel ultra-wide and it, and then it has two more cameras that are basically here.

Just so ct can say that it's a quad camera phone, it's a two megapixel macro camera and two megapixel depth sensor. I've said this many times these cameras are pretty much useless. Not really. I mean I haven't tested these specifically, but typically, when you have these two megapixel sensors, they are just for depth or just for macro shots they're only here, so companies can advertise a certain number of cameras, because that's all the rage these days, so there's nothing special about that. Maybe the 64 megapixel camera is good.

We'll have to see about that, but uh that won't be for the phone review. The battery is a 42 420 William hour battery, like I said it, charges at 30 watts, so it should charge pretty quickly, and it has a snapdragon 765 g processor. So that's why you have 5g support, and it's a pretty solid processor. You know you see way. Phones are much more expensive with that processor, so that's pretty good for those 450-ish dollars, you're getting specs that are on par with what you'd expect at that price, and you still got that really cool innovation with the front-facing camera being under the display, I think that's kind of impressive.

I would have expected this sort of concept to charge a ridiculous price just for the heck of it, but it seems pretty reasonable in that sense, uh. So, aside from the hardware working at ZTE skin here they counted the favor UI uh version 10.5. I believe it's running on top of android 10, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, so no android 11 yet- and I don't know if it's coming soon or not- it's clearly a fairly custom UI that I'm usually not a huge fan of, but that's whatever you see that the drop down the shade looks like that. It's fine I've got nothing against custom skins, necessarily I'm my biggest worries that it delays software updates because they have to customize it every time, and they don't always add to android. If, if you're, not adding anything of value, I don't think you should be doing that kind of work.

And thankfully there are some things here that I'm noticing is that at least the phone and messages apps seem to be the Google ones, which is great it's what I'm used to using messages I can use with messages on the web. It's much easier to just get into the swing of things right away, even though there's a couple custom apps there, but it's actually not much. I see a browser here, uh best weather, never heard of that one before and just a phone switcher and private space voice recorder, just basically just some small stuff. It's actually not that bad. I I I was afraid to be worse, so um yeah, it looks fine.

I like the display. Furthermore, I can. Furthermore, I don't know if it's running at 90 hertz. Furthermore, I know it supports it, but it doesn't feel that smooth so, oh yeah, it is set to 60. So that's much better! Okay! I I thought I couldn't tell the difference, but there we go um and now that feels way better, so yeah, 90, hertz, full HD, very, really cool camera back there behind the display, I'm very interested to see how it does that's going to be it for this video, and I'll see you guys in the next one.

Source : Neowin