ZTE Blade A3 Prime - Hands On & First Impressions! By Kevin Breeze

What's going on everyone, this is Kevin here coming at you with my hands on and first impressions, video of the ZTE blade, a three prime. So let's get started, so this is the ZTE Blade, a three prime one of the latest budget devices from ZTE now for full transparency just want to let you know that I did purchase this phone with my own money. However, I have collaborated with ZTE in the past. They did send me out to their headquarters in Dallas Texas in October 2019, and that was a pretty cool experience. I do have a vlog on the channel where I documented most of that. But since then my main contacts over at the company have moved on to other opportunities, so I don't currently have any connections with them, but I still wanted to check out one of their new devices.

Now this phone is being offered at both visible and Yahoo Mobile, which are essentially the same company, and there are two different ways that you can get this phone. You can either pay $99 for it or it is eligible for the swap program. Essentially, you swap in one of your older devices, and then you get this device for free. You do also have to swap in your phone number as well, so you have to port that in but go over to visible website to learn more about that. But the point is that this device is their affordable, regardless of which way you go.

So that's pretty awesome, but here's what the box looks like you can see: ZTE Blade a 3-prime branding right there in the front. Let's open this up, I did already open up the box and set up the phone for the sake of saving some time. But here is the phone itself. Now the device does come with a removable battery and the battery doesn't come pre-installed in the phone, so I did, of course, put the battery in the phone already, but we'll put the phone off to the side for a second here in the box we have a Quick Start Guide for the phone. We also have a USB cable for charging and data transfers.

So there you are, and we have a USB wall adapter and here is the actual phone itself. Now you probably already noticed that this phone doesn't feature any sort of groundbreaking design elements. We don't have a notch or a hole, punch the front-facing camera and also this is kind of a rare thing. Nowadays, the screen is a perfect rectangle. The corners are squared off, which I actually prefer so overall I do like the design in general, but we'll talk about that more in a little with the phone we're getting a five point.

Four five inch display the display itself is 720p we're getting a PPI of 295 and an 18 by 9 aspect ratio. So the display actually looks pretty decent here with the phone I do have the brightness turned up to 100%, but in general it does get decently bright and the screen does look decently, crisp and clear as well, especially considering that this is a very budget device. Now the front-facing camera is 5 megapixels. We actually get a notification light here on the phone as well, which is another thing. That's pretty rare now, internally, we're getting 32 gigabytes of storage and out of the box.

You get 20 of those 32 gigs available, so 12 of those gigs take up the OS and other pre-installed applications and the phone also features micro, SD card expansion. So you can put a micro SD card in the device up to 2 terabytes, so that is pretty awesome. Now, on the back side of the phone, we do have a fingerprint sensor. So it's nice and quick, which is great. This phone does feature face, authentication as a method to unlock the phone, which is pretty cool as well and then another unique feature is that with the phone we are getting an 8 megapixel rear camera, but we're also getting a dual flash I, can't think of any phones that I've seen this year that feature a dual flash on the back.

So that's pretty interesting and I'm. Definitely looking forward to using that when I take my test, photos and videos for the device to prepare for the full review, so good job ZTE, that's kind of a cool quark, and I'm glad that you included it now. Here's how things look through the camera app here on the phone. There is no portrait mode by the way, so I just want to let you know about that, and it's a pretty basic setup overall, but that is to be expected, especially again for a phone in this price range. Now, here's how things look through the front-facing camera, of course, for me to completely judge the quality of these cameras, I will have to go out and take a bunch of photos and videos to really analyze those to see what the final results look like, but so far it's the pretty decent.

So that's good now, internally, with this device, we're getting two gigabytes of RAM, and we're getting the MediaTek hello a 22 processor, so neither of those things are necessarily too powerful, but at the same time I don't feel like either. Those are too bad, considering that this is a very entry-level phone now, unfortunately, I did attempt to run an into to benchmark test here on the device, but the app simply would not work on the phone. After about several minutes, the app crashed, and I attempted it five different times, including rebooting the phone and try to get it to work. So it looks like we won't be getting any benchmark scores with this device. Unfortunately, but I'm definitely looking forward to you of course, testing it out with real-world usage to really see what I can do now.

I did install a variety of my own applications here on the phone as well, so that I can use those as I test out the phone and in general I'm. Definitely looking forward to it. Now, video recording with the device maxes out at 1080p we're getting a decently beefy 2660 million power removable battery. So that's pretty rare as well. You don't really see too many phones nowadays with removable batteries.

Now, typically, I would say that it's nice to have a removable battery, because you can purchase other batteries to swap out. You know you can even technically have multiple batteries and then, throughout the day the phone does run out of battery put the new battery in, but I, don't really know necessarily where you can buy replacement batteries so until I'm able to investigate that a little more and see. If there's even a place to buy additional batteries, then I don't really see having a removable battery as necessarily being a perk. On the other hand, I don't see it as being a bad thing either. Now the software on here is Android.10 optimization seems pretty good. Of course, I'm going to have to use the phone quite a bit more until I can give you my full thoughts about that.

So stay tuned for the review, but typically with ZTE devices, they do a good job at keeping bloatware at a minimum and also giving you a decent software experience. So it looks like we're getting an experience here, that's pretty close to stock Android, which I definitely like to see now. As far as the hardware itself goes already talked a bit about the front panel here, but you can see we are getting kind of thicker bezels on the bottom and top of the device, but on the other hand, I feel like it still is a pretty decent phone. I do appreciate again that we do have these squared off corners. It seems like nowadays, every single device that comes out has to have rounded corners I suppose they do that to make the phone look a bit more sleek, and they're trying to mimic the look of the iPhone 11, but I'm more of a practicality over form, type of person and I certainly do appreciate having devices with these squared off corners.

It's a little thing that does make a bit of a difference. Now on the left side of the phone, there's nothing on the right side of the phone with the power button and volume buttons. Then, on the top, we have the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, and we have the noise-cancelling microphone and then on the bottom. We have a little grab area to take the cover off the back of the phone with the microphone, and we have the USB-C port for charging and data transfer. That's another cool thing to see is that we are indeed getting USB-C with the device in this price range.

That is pretty rare, so in general, and a big fan of that and another nice thing to keep in mind is that I had a very easy time taking the back off the phone now, it is very securely on here, but with other devices that this competes against I haven't always had the best experience with removing the back cover. I'm, not sure why this is, but with many other phones with removable backs. You either have to like really dig your fingernails into it to try to pull it off or in some situations, I've even caused damage accidentally to the phone trying to remove the back cover, but thankfully, with the blade, a three-prime, that's simply not an issue, it's pretty easy to take his cover on and off, and that's certainly helpful because under the back, we of course have the removable battery, but also the SIM card slot and micro SD card slot. So in general I think you did a good job designing this phone. It looks nice I like the way it looks on the back as well.

We do have a speaker here in the backside, with the camera, module fingerprint sensor and ZTE logo. So in general you know nothing too special about this phone, but then again it is a $99 device, and it seems like they are giving us quite a few things here for the money. I would say that my favorite highlights so far about this phone include having 32 gigs of storage, getting USB, see on the bottom and that dual flash seems pretty interesting as well. But this is my hands on in first impressions, video about the de l'etc 3-prime. Definitely let me know what you think of the device in the comment section below, but my name is Kevin and I hope you have an excellent day.

Source : Kevin Breeze