ZTE's new Axon Phone is a radical swerve for the company.
Until now, the nation's fourth biggest smartphone maker (after Apple, Samsung, and LG) has focused on "affordable prepaid" phones sold through carriers. But the Axon Phone goes into the growing unlocked market against the likes of the Alcatel One Touch Idol 3 and Asus ZenFone 2.
It's also a swerve in design and attitude for ZTE. Most of the company's phones have been pretty bland-looking black boxes. The Axon has attitude. ZTE's marketing VP, Andrew Elliott, said that the triangle-studded "grille" around the phone is designed to highlight some of the phone's key features: camera and audio. It certainly gives the phone a unique flavor, and the shiny metal back—while far from unibody, with lots of seams—has a premium feel.
The Axon is a big phone, at 6.06 by 2.9 by 0.37 inches and 6.1 ounces. It feels a little more phone-like in the hand than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 or Asus ZenFone 2, which is mostly down to a slightly narrower width—it's 0.1 to 0.2 inches narrower than other big-name phablets. It's still a big piece of metal at 6.1 ounces, although you get a powerful 3000mAh battery for the weight.
The front is mostly a 5.5-inch, 2,560-by-1,440, 534 ppi screen protected by Gorilla Glass 3. I'll have to spend more time with the screen to get a good perspective, but it initially didn't seem as bright as the Galaxy Note 4's panel. It's nice to see this high resolution in an unlocked device, though, as most of the open-market phablets we've been seeing top out at 1080p.
The grilles on the top and bottom promise stereo sound, but alas, there's just one mono speaker at the bottom. The Axon Phone is optimized for headphone use, and it comes with a decent set of $40 JBL E13 earbuds. Listening to music versus the Samsung Galaxy S6, music on the Axon was louder in the headphones, with a richer mid-bass. Nice. The phone can play back high-res 32-bit, 192KHz audio files, and it's also designed to capture loud or distant audio clearly when taking videos, Elliott said.
Speaking of its camera modes, there's another little grille near the dual camera. Like on the HTC One M9, this is a dual-lens camera where the bottom lens is devoted to trickery. There's a main 13-megapixel camera, and then the sub-camera is used to speed up the autofocus or for depth-of-field effects. The camera app has an "F-stop" slider, which isn't about the actual aperture but about virtual depth of field; while the lens itself goes to a virtual f/1.8 in terms of brightness, you can do DOF tricks down to a virtual f/1.0. There's an 8-megapixel front-facing camera.
Processor and Android
Inside, the phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor running at 2GHz. I didn't get to benchmark it, and I'm skeptical of any benchmarks performed on Snapdragon 810s with non-final software. As we saw on the HTC M9, firmware makes a huge difference in 810 performance, both in terms of speed and heat. The Axon promises to be fast; we just don't want it to boil.The phone runs Android 5.1.1 with a relatively light skin. The skin looks heavier than it is because ZTE messed with all the icons, but it's skin-deep. The only major functional changes I found from stock Android were the new camera app and a quick-info panel you can get by swiping up from the bottom, with a music controller, step counter, four top contacts, and some Yahoo news.
There's no microSD card slot, and 24.35GB of the 32GB of built-in storage is available.
Band-wise, this thing is looking great for AT&T, T-Mobile, and foreign carriers. It has an awesome set of LTE bands: 2/3/4/5/7/12/13/17/29/30, along with HSPA+ and GSM. It has voice over LTE, although ZTE couldn't confirm Wi-Fi calling. It won't work on Verizon or Sprint.
The Axon Phone is big, elegant, and looks fun. Audio sounds great, and the metal case feels cool in the hand. The phone doesn't seem leaden like the ZenFone does, although it also doesn't have the sharp, premium edges (or the stylus!) of the Galaxy Note 4. While it's much heavier than the Alcatel Idol 3, it also has a much larger battery and a much, much faster processor.
ZTE hasn't confirmed the Axon Phone's price to me yet, which is odd, but I've heard (in part because of a contest that was running on the Axon Phone website) it will cost in the $400-$500 range. It will be available on July 27, and it will come with a 2-year warranty and 30-day return period.
The price range I've been hearing about is an unusual price point for unlocked devices in the U.S., as right now there's a big hole between the $299 Asus and Alcatel entrants, and $600-plus phones like Samsung's, Sony's, and Apple's flagships. You can find gray-market imported LG G4s for $499 on eBay, but those aren't being sold legitimately. It'll be interesting to see if ZTE can break through there.