ZTE is the name behind many own-brand smartphones -- remember the Orange San Francisco, T-Mobile Affinity and the Vodafone 351? That was them. But the Chinese firm (the letters stand for Zhong Xing Telecommunication Equipment) is also making some advances under its own name, with mixed success so far. The ZTE blade III is on sale now for around INR 7,995.09 (£79.).
6/10
WIRED RATING
WIRED
TIRE
The Blade III isnt at the top of ZTEs smartphone range. For that youll need to look to the dual-core Grand X, or the quad-core Grand Era, though that has yet to make it to these shores. Its not designed to be bigger, faster or better than the others, but it is meant to offer value for money, and at around INR 7,995.09 (£79) SIM-free, thats debateable.
Build-wise it manages to look reasonably classy, with its silvery metallic strip sandwiched between glossy black plastic on the front and matte, rubberised black plastic on the back. The smooth sides are broken only by a slimline volume rocker, with a 3.5mm headphone jack and power/sleep button on top and a microUSB port underneath. Beneath the slim but solid-feeling rear casing, SIM and microSD memory cards (up to 32GB) sit beneath the battery -- so theres no hot-swapping available.
Theres an old-school frisson with the touch-sensitive Androidbuttons beneath the screen. Theres four of them -- menu, home, back and search - which used to be commonplace on Androids of yore, but has long since been superseded by the three-button approach. The more modern approach ditches the search button in favour of an onscreen widget and replaces the menu with an overview of active apps, which is arguably more useful - its not clear why ZTE has chosen this approach.
The 4in touch screen offers a resolution of 800x400 pixels, which boils down to 233ppi. Hardly the highest of def, with the likes of the iPhone 5 offering 326ppi and the HTC One steaming ahead with 468ppi on a 4.7in screen. Still, its bright, and displays reasonably well in sunlight with good viewing angles, so its doing pretty well for the price.
The single-core 1GHz processor is backed by 512GB RAM and that means problems for any capable smartphone. Its disappointingly laggy when navigating the menus and opening applications, even when you havent got a lot of stuff running at once. Opening up Facebook took a few seconds and even once connected there were lags which slowed things down to a depressing degree. Our AnTuTu benchmark test delivered a score of 3590, which puts it on a par with last years Acer Liquid Glow but well behind many other single-core Androids including the Orange San Diego (not made by ZTE).
It has a standard 3G connection, which is fine for checking emails but often struggles with more complex, pic-heavy web pages and YouTube can be something of a trial unless you have the patience of a saint. The Wi-Fi aerial showed a disappointingly narrow range too, failing to pick up the signal from our router at a distance where most phones have no difficulty. Bluetooth is on board but its old-school version 2.1, way behind the 4.0 incarnation that youre likely to find on higher end phones these days.
The operating system is Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, so a couple of notches down from the latest 4.2 Jelly Bean. Its a perfectly good OS, but with version 4.3 just around the corner, its starting to look a little tired. ZTE has done its own skim of the interface with some icon variations and a lock screen that requires a long press rather than the usual flick. Theres no particular advantage to this as far as we could see aside from doing things a little differently. Pinch the lock outwards with thumb forefinger however and you get a choice of six shortcuts which you can change using the Mi-EasyAccess app, which is handy.
The 5 megapixel camera is devoid of flash or indeed much in the way of processing frills. It has autofocus, and a 4x digital zoom, but there are only a few scene and exposure settings to choose from, so youre pretty much stuck with point and shoot. Theres no face or smile detection, not even a timer, but despite the lack of any fun gimmicks, picture quality isnt at all bad, with a level of detail we werent expecting at this price point. Colours look realistic, though they can appear a little washed out in less than perfect light conditions.
It can only record video up to VGA resolution (640x480 pixels) which looks jerky and wont blow up to a larger screen very well. With only 4GB memory on board, the small file sizes should let you have plenty of video time but with other 5 megapixel cameras routinely recording 720p HD these days, this one feels rather lacking. Theres no front-facing camera for video calls or self-portraits, which cuts down on the social capabilities of the phone -- surely Skyping, Facebooking teens are a key demographic for a budget smartphone like this?
The X-Office document viewer is on board, allowing you to view Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, but it wont allow you to create them. Evernotes here though, allowing you to create and share your notes and work via the cloud.
The saving grace of many a budget phone is the battery. With less work to do, they can often keep jogging for considerably longer than their go-faster-stripes high-end colleagues. Sadly, thats not the case here, and the Blade III gave us a good day of solid use, but no more.
Conclusion
ZTE is trying to make a name for itself at the budget end of the smartphone market but on this evidence it will have to do better. Its nice to have full smartphone capabilities for under a ton, but the processors poor performance is likely to leave you wishing youd stumped up a bit more. Lower end models from HTC andSamsung deliver better for not much more and fellow Chinese rival Huawei has demonstrated superior performance for the same sort of price.
- Software
- Google Android 4.0 Ice CreamSandwich
- Processor
- Single core 1GHz MSM 7227A
- Memory slot
- Yes
- Display
- 4in touchscreen, 65,000 colours, 800x400pixels
- Connectivity
- Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1
- Ports
- microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack
- Camera
- 5 megapixel camera with auto focus, 16xdigital zoom, pulsed LED flash
- Video playback
- MP4, H.264,H.263
- Audio playback
- MP3, WAV,eAAC+
- Radio
- Yes
- Battery
- 1,650mAh
- Size
- 123x64x10mm
- Weight
- 130g
Friday, March 27, 2015
0 comments:
Post a Comment