Parris: Hi it's Parris from EpicReviewGuys and sadly my Nexus 5 phone, it's on life support,
it's having a number of issues. But at least it lasted a year and fell apart right when they're to
release the Nexus 6. Which I was looking forward to buying and decided I'd just keep this 1
alive until I could get a Nexus 6, and then I saw the price they were asking for it and then I
needed some life support. No way was I going to go back to spending that much money on a
phone. I got this for around three hundred, three hundred and fifty. Wasn't willing to spend
anymore than that. How am I going to get a decent phone for that price? Well, hours and hours
of research and the brand and model that kept coming up as a actually, probably a pretty good
option, really surprised me. It's the dark horse, it's the ZTE ZMax, but I think this may have just
saved me four hundred dollars.
Now if you're watching this in the US, you've probably never heard of this phone brand just as I
hadn't. But this is a direct from China phone, so you can sort of look at as it's made in the same
factories as the iPhone maybe, over there in China, but it doesn't have the fancy name and it
doesn't come in the fancy box. Now the features of this phablet, because it's big, are both
surprisingly good, for the price, but surprisingly so-so for a brand new phone.
My new ZTE ZMax from T-Mobile arrived just about half an hour ago. I had to get this ordered
because we'll be doing some traveling over the holidays and there's no way I'm going to take
around a phone that will die within an hour if you don't have it plugged in to an external battery.
Now I did a lot of research on this and I didn't know the brand, and was pretty suspicious of
something I hadn't heard of but I just kept reading good things about it. And apparently this
company would really like into the US market and so they're willing to not overprice their phone
in order to get these out into more people's hands. Sort of like Kia and Hyundai when they first
started selling in the US. You go for the budget models and you just try to get as many of them
out there on the road as possible, so people actually recognize the name, and after awhile people
so "Oh yeah, I know that name. That might not be too bad to buy."
So I'm taking a chance with a rather unknown here, but for two-hundred and fifty dollars, as
opposed to six-hundred and fifty dollars for a new Nexus 6, I think it's worth the risk. I haven't
opened the box yet. You're going to see it same time I do.
Big phone, square phone. I knew that though. I didn't want a phablet. I really wanted the Moto
G. Almost went that route, but that 4 and a half in screen for the LT model, I just say "Nope,
can't do that anymore." 5 inches the minimum, even that gets a little fuzzy at night so. 5.7 inch
screen and a big old phone. The other must for me was even if the phone's heavy, a big battery.
Something that's really going to last a whole day because I'm tired of these, well it lasts a whole
day for the first month that you have it but then once the battery gets a little worn down, you find
yourself having to charge it in the middle of the day.
Is it really that big? Well here's my Nexus 5. 5 inch screen. Was considered fairly large in its
day. A year ago. And here's the ZTE ZMax with the 5.7 inch screen. This 1 is oh so much
heavier. Also in the box, the charging adaptor, the cable, a little tool for popping out the tray to
put in the little SIM card, which they included also.
So the way they keep the price down on this, what could be arguably a contender to the latest
Galaxy Note, or the large new iPhone 6, is they don't use cutting edge hardware. It has a quad
core processor, but it only runs at 1.2 gigahertz instead of, I don't know what they're up to now,
2.7 or something on the flagship models from other companies. So you can get those old quad
core processors much cheaper apparently. Has somewhat less memory, has a 720 screen instead
of a 1080 or retina type display, but it's a big screen and that's what matters more to me.
So from what I've read, nothing about this is great, except I guess for the price, but everything
else about it is good. It has a camera that works pretty well, the screen is bright enough, it has
enough memory, a fast enough processor, unless you're doing some real intensive games or
something. And so that's really what I need in a phone, rather than the cutting edge phone if it
means I've got to pay that cutting edge price.
Where the micro-SIM card, pop that out using the tool. Underneath that is the power button.
Over on this side there's a microSDHC card, little tray, so you can add extra memory. I'm not
sure what the capacity is. Something like sixteen gigabytes though I think, so you can really add
a lot of memory to this if you want to. And then the volume rocker is underneath this. Now down
here at the bottom if you didn't notice this earlier, harkens back to 4, 5 years ago, like my
Nexus 1, that it has these buttons on the phone screen all the time rather than built into the
display portion of it. But it worked fine on my Nexus 1, again, this is the older hardware at the
lower price.
Over here you can see the camera and the flash. Okay, the ZTE ZMax took about an hour to
charge up from what I would guess is about half charged, which is usually how they send it. So
that's a good sign of it not taking too long to charge. Got my micro-SIM card out of my Nexus 5
and I've got the tray pulled out of the ZTE ZMax. Swap the card over. Okay. Got my Google
account setup on this.
Now the screen pretty quickly dims itself and then, there we go, and then sometimes it will, if
it's tipped towards the light it will brighten back. I don't like that so I think I'm going to turn off
the auto brightness.
Here's the app screen. Let's look at settings. I checked the settings and I am on Android version
4.4.2. I think I look a little washed out there but. This is the rear facing camera of the phone. This
is definitely not the standard, very basic Android camera app. I brought up mode and you have a
whole bunch of modes in case you don't think the camera can quite figure out the scenario
you're trying to take a picture in, you can set it right here. Taking a look at storage space. Again,
you can put a microSD card in this and add some storage. It comes with sixteen. It looks like
about 5 of that's being used by the operating system. I haven't downloaded any apps or anything
yet. Video is HD by default, 1920 by 1080. I'm downloading Hill Climb Racing. That's about
the most intensive game that I play so I want to see whether it can handle that game okay or not.
Seems somehow a little blocker than I'm used to seeing it, that on my phone. But the game
doesn't play choppily, it just, I don't know, I guess it's either the color or the resolution with it
being 720 instead of the 1080 that I'm used to.
Browser works fine, seem pretty quick. Of course, our website is pretty simple. And if you
zoom, and zoom, and zoom, I still don't see pixilation on the letters. They still seem pretty good
to me. Maximum volume, full screen. The ZMax is surprisingly nice for watching YouTube
videos. I assume Netflix will be the same. The big screen really is nice when you're watching
something.
About using it make calls, I'll show you a little video here when I was on a call earlier.
I see. Oh, oh yeah that's true. I have no trouble holding it with 1 hand, but I would have trouble
doing much in terms, other than hitting maybe a couple icons, it's hard for that.
Now they moved, I've heard they've been doing this on the phablets, they're moving the control
buttons down on the side, so it's a little easier with having them in the middle there. And when
you hold it up to your head, do I look really strange?
The sound was clear, talking to my wife. And she had no trouble understanding me, so it seems
to work fine, as a phone. It seems to work fine as a portable tablet. The screen size is very nice.
It's bright enough for me. I haven't noticed, this phone is technically, with the CPU that has
much faster than this phone, but just in doing the things I do on a regular daily basis I don't
notice any difference. Why do I got to pay so much more for that Nexus 6 so I can do thees same
things one one hundredth of a second faster?
It's heavier. I'll have to see how that goes. Walking around for ten, fifteen minutes on a call and
see if it gets to be so heavy. I believe it will fit in my pants pocket no problem. Yeah. I don't
think that will be an issue. Definitely I can feel that it's larger when I bring my leg up, because
the way the material tightens over it. But just holding it, I have to say is fairly comfortable. It's
rounded from the front of the phone, the glass back. It's rounded on both sides. Top and bottom
very slightly. But where you're going to be holding it most of the time, it's nice. The hand fits
right there. It's a plasticy backing.
So there's certainly tradeoffs for a two hundred and fifty dollar phone, but the experiment begins
today with the ZMax ZTE. I'll report back, let you know once I've had a week or 2 of using it if
it's still comfortable, if I have regrets, if I think it would be better to go ahead and spend the six
hundred and fifty dollars to get the latest Nexus 6, or the latest Samsung phone, or whether two
hundred and fifty dollars will buy you a phone that for most purposes, works just fine.
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