ZTE Axon 30 Ultra 5G review: An affordable flagship phone By ZDNet

Hi everybody today we're talking smartphones and, at the end of this month the ZTE axon 30 ultra begins having pre-orders available. I'm Beth matter here with Matt miller, Matt I've kind of scrolled through I've kind of looked through this phone um, the cameras look impressive. It looks compact, it looks powerful, um you've had the device in hand for about a week now tell us your first impressions yeah. So it's its nice to see. You know, we've seen some ZTE phones in the past and people may have seen them at the carriers and things, but it's been a while, since we've seen one actually coming to the US and the last one I looked at added under display camera, which was a unique feature that one this one does not have that, but it's an extremely powerful smartphone right- and you mentioned the uh, the pre-orders and the orders coming soon 749 dollars or 8.49 for the one with more memory. But it's pretty stunning in the fact that it has the highest end, snapdragon 888 processors.

It has the fastest ram. The fastest internal storage has a 4 600 milliampere battery inside and then a big 6.77 inch AMOLED. Now that's all flagship type specifications at a price. That's a couple of hundred dollars less than some other flagships, and you mentioned the cameras before I get to that real quick. The screen right, it's a big screen, but it also has a 60 to 144 hertz, refresh rate adjustable.

So you can turn on auto mode, or you can go through a bunch of different settings. So for gaming you can have a super high refresh rate or for other activities. You can toggle that back and forth. So the cameras you mentioned- I don't know if you can see them on there, but there's a lot of cameras on the back. There's, there's four cameras on the rear and three of those are 64.

Megapixel cameras, there's one that is the main camera with optical image. Stabilization there's another one on there um that is, they say it's portrait, it doesn't mean portrait mode. It just means capturing a lot of data for people kind of scenes and things and then there's the ultra-wide, which almost everybody has nowadays with 120 degree fields of view and the last one is something that you see: it's a square camera now, we've seen this before on Samsung's and a couple other phones. That's this! That's the periscope camera where the camera is actually angled inside the camera then uses mirrors and comes out because they can achieve a high level of telephoto, and this is an eight megapixel camera with uh five by optical telephoto capability, and so that's the camera hardware and hardware. But the real power of this one is really in the camera software and there are all kinds of modes.

I mean I've spent a week with it, and I still I've only touched on some of these camera modes. There's a multi-camera mode that can use two or three cameras at the same time to capture different perspectives and help you be really creative and the fun mode that's on here is for vlogging and movies and there's a bunch of preset options. So I don't know if you're familiar with like the Hitchcock effect, where an image will stay still and then the rest of the scene around it kind of backs up, or you zoom, into a subject in the middle. So there's all these weird perspective and creative modes for video on here, which I think a lot of people have a lot of fun with and be pretty creative with. You know, there's also a moon mode, and we've seen this before on some Huawei and Samsung phones, where you flip it on moon mode, and it will do like a super zoom on it, and then it will kind of do some algorithms and things to try to help you capture the moon as well.

So it's got a lot of camera features in it and, like I said, I put up a first look review. It's going to take a while to dive through all the camera features to get a full review of yeah. It sounds impressive um as someone who doesn't probably use camera now on my phone to its full capability. Who is this phone? Who are these cameras? Kind of designed for like what's uh, maybe who's the best user for this kind of thing yeah. I think a phone like this is really for content creators.

You know we see a lot of content. Creators use gimbals and some gimbals will have different software and a lot of the software that's kind of covered in this phone. This is really for people who want to not necessarily dive into the manual mode that real serious photographers get into, but do some creation with some very simple modes, and like I mentioned those modes- are kind of templates in the movie mode. So you don't have to get crazy and learn all the movie features you can flip it into movie mode and the template in there will help you create this kind of different movies. So it's its for those who want to be creative, but maybe don't have all the camera skills of a manual mode, okay, um- and I think, a lot of our viewers and readers would be really interested um.

How does this stack up to the galaxy s21 yeah? The s21 is, is probably the main competitor to this phone, because the s21 is 799 dollars and this one's 749. So you got a 50 difference, so the difference is really. The key are Samsung. Has water resistance in their phones? This one does not have any water resistance. Uh.

The ZTE phone actually has higher resolution cameras and uh more optical zoom than the galaxy s21. The battery in this phone is 4 600, which is actually 600 more milliamperes than the Samsung one um, and then wireless charging is provided on Samsung, but not in the CTE phone and then there's a slight difference in the refresh rate. Samsung has 120 hertz. This one has 144 hertz, so you're still getting a high refresh rate on the Samsung, but this one's a bit better for the gaming um aspect and one other thing I'll mention to it. You know I don't know if you can see at the bottom.

This does have the 5g logo on there, and this is the know: axon 30, ultra 5g and those in the US, maybe Sam okay. So if I buy this gonna pop any sim and card and get 5g now, there are limits there um for the US uh. It will work on at t and T-Mobile. It's a GSM unlocked phone, but for 5g it only works on band n41, which is the mid-band spectrum that T-Mobile now has because they purchase sprint. So I did test it, and I was in an area where they had that mid-band 5g.

I was seeing about 100 megabits per second downloads, which is faster than the LTE, so just know that it's not going to be as broad and when you see like an apple with a 5g that covers all the bands you know low, mid and high. This one is just a mid-band supported, 5g foam, so make sure you include that yeah perfect point about the 5g. It can be a little deceiving if you see commercials or if you just read little tidbits about 5g in the U. S. , so good to keep in mind Matt any closing thoughts here about this device.

Yeah. This is a beautiful device. You can kind of see it. It has a matte finished glass on the back, which I love, because it prevents fingerprints and other weird things. It's also kind of scratch resistant, but it's a pretty thin phone too.

At eight millimeters, it's really a lovely piece of hardware, nice camera array. If you're a content creator, it's something you can consider for hundreds less than the flagships with all the power that you could expect absolutely perfect point um! It's that price point 749 is what it starts at: that's considerably less than those flagship phones, as you mentioned, um May 27th pre-order start for the ZTE axon 30 ultra Matt. Thank you so much for showing it to us. Um, like you, said, a beautiful piece of hardware um and those cameras that looks fascinating. That might be something that I try to get my hands on and see how everything works.

Um! Thank you so much for watching, as always be sure to like this video subscribe to our YouTube channel, and we've made it easy. We've got some pre-order links right below this video for you, if you're interested in checking the device out, as always for all things, smartphone and tech be sure to stick with CNET.

Source : ZDNet