ZTE Axon 30 5G Unboxing, Camera Test & Review I got this box in the mail a few days back
and inside was the all-new ZTE Axon 30 5G.
Let’s see what this phone brings in the box.
Right here is the phone’s RAM of 8 gigabytes and storage of 128 gigabytes.
ZTE has a lot of first up its sleeves, I’ll give you a brief idea in a bit, let’s see
the box contents first.
Right here on the top, we get the phone, I’ll turn the phone up and put it on aside.
Underneath we have this sleeve with a sim eject pin, paperwork, and a plastic case.
There are two more boxes inside, here we have this one with the headphone, a headphone jack
to usb c converter, and a 65W charging brick.
In this one we have a USB C cable, now this was quite an unboxing experience, I’ve been
missing this since the day manufacturers started removing accessories from the box.
Let’s get into the phone now.
Okay at this point, I’ve used this phone for several days and I think I’m in a good
state to give you my final opinion on this phone starting off with its design and build.
Right out of the box, this phone makes an impression.
Its slim, sleek, lightweight, and beautiful, ZTE has used a futuristic design approach,
especially with the camera module, the two circular camera modules at the back accommodate
this phone’s quad-camera system.
ZTE And Axon branding at the back is prominent.
The curvy back makes the phone’s grip easy.
At the bottom along with the USB c port and speaker grill, you can find the sim card tray,
it’s a hybrid slot and you can add a sim card along with a 2nd sim or microSD card.
The phone’s top accommodates 2ndry mic, the right side has the volume and power keys,
left is clean.
The IP rating is not specified so I think this phone is not water or dust resistant.
This now leads us to the display.
A flat, beautiful whopping 6.92-inches screen rocks the front.
You might be wondering how come this display is so flawless and what’s missing here.
Well, the front camera is hidden, ZTE has deployed the world’s 2nd gen under-display
camera on this phone beautifying the whole front.
As I mentioned, ZTE leads the industry when it comes to innovation.
Back in the day, we saw ZTE coming up with 1 - True View display
World's first dual-camera in 2015 The first dual speaker in 2016
World's first foldable phone in 2017 World's first commercial 5G phone in 2019
World's first UDC in 2020 and now this 2nd gen UDC.
Getting back to the display, it also embeds an under-display fingerprint scanner, which
to my surprise is too fast and brings beautiful animations.
It’s a 120 Hertz panel, animations are too fast, touch sampling rate goes up to 360 hertz.
The colors are quite accurate, it has a PPI of 400.
There are no viewing angle issues as this is a super bright display.
Because of the under-display camera, the media consumption on the ZTE Axon 30 is a whole
lot of fun.
Overall, it’s a sharp, vibrant, and very good-looking display providing a flagship
experience.
I wish ZTE could trim down those bezels a bit more, the bezels despite a UDC are quite
notable, but still good nonetheless.
I’d like to talk about the software now.
ZTE Axon 30 brings the MyOS running on the top of Android 11.
I used the MyOS for the very first time, although it’s a bit away from my taste of clean and
simple UI, I still liked it enough to plan a dedicated video on the MYOS in the coming
few days, I’ll tell you what made me like this OS.
First of all, the animations on the MyOS are quite fast, the control center looks quite
good with straight-to-the-point quick toggles.
The home and app screens are fully customizable.
And yea, it has the always-on display, that is too loaded with a handful of AOD themes.
You can choose to use navigation gestures or buttons and these two are also fully customizable.
A screen recorder, screenshot options are also there.
Features like double-tap to wake, raise to wake, auto-answer, shake to turn on the flashlight
make this phone fun.
Google assistant is also fully implemented in the MyOS if you use that.
You have various animations for the fingerprint unlock.
The software did not bring notable bloatware, there were merely 2 additional applications
when I turned this phone up for the first time…
MyOS definitely has the potential to bring a notable Android UI.
I’ll talk about the Camera UI in a while once I take you through the photos.
And by the way, if you’re liking this review so far, a subscription would be delightful.
ZTE has equipped this handset with Snapdragon 870 5G chip, I’\m sure most of you know
that Snapdragon 870 is an upscaled version of Snapdragon 865+, you can expect top-notch
performance from this one.
First of all, its Antutu Score is impressive.
The geekbench score is also on your screen.
I played PUBG Mobile, all graphic options are unlocked and you can game up to 60FPS.
The triple vapor chamber cooling system keeps the temperature in control.
Because the display being so flawless, the gaming experience is the best one.
I did turn on my FPS meter while playing games and you can see that most games run at 60FPS
easily.
The PUBG Mobile 90FPS mode is not available yet, but I do hope it will make it to this
phone someday.
It won’t be wrong to say that the ZTE Axon 30 can be used as a gaming device.
Its 4200 mAh battery because of its software optimization helps it last longer while you
play games or consume media.
The 65W charger will take under an hour to fully charge the battery of this handset.
I’ve been using this phone for 3 days and in 3 days, I did gaming on and off, used the
camera as well, ran some benchmark tests, and the battery dropped only 29%.
The battery doesn’t drop in idle mode.
I was amazed by the battery optimization on this phone.
I think with resource-intensive tasks, its battery will easily last for 1 whole day.
And before I forget, I’d like to tell you about the speaker too, the single bottom-firing
speaker is not super loud, it's an average speaker.
Camera UI for me especially was a bit odd, probably because I’ve never used a ZTE device
before.
Swiping through the camera tray options doesn’t always work, but tapping does.
This phone can record videos up to 4K 60FPS from the rear and 1080P 30FPS from the front,
multi-camera mode allows using front and rear cameras at the same time.
More options include the options appearing on your screen.
I’ll show you the camera samples as well in a bit, let me tell you about the camera
hardware before that.
The main camera at the back is the Sony IMX682 64 Megapixels sensor, the rest of the details
are on your screen.
A front camera, hidden under the display, is 16 megapixels OmniVision sensor.
And with this I’ll show you some camera samples, starting off with the front camera
of course.
The front camera in the normal mode takes really good selfies, really good for the under-display
camera.
We have seen some other under-display cameras, but their front result is not on par, on the
contrary, the ZTE Axon 30 ups the udc game, its portrait mode is not very impressive,
it blows off some edges, so I suggest taking your selfies in the normal mode, the selfie
color tone is good, saturation is balanced, images are not super sharp, but this amount
of sharpness looks appropriate.
The fact that the under-display cameras have come this far should be appreciated alone
and this will definitely pave a better way for upcoming udcs.
Let’s move on to the rear camera images.
The ultrawide camera at the back takes a bit dull image, so you have to be under super
bright sunlight or just live with this kind of photo.
The main 64MP camera takes very impressively, vibrant images, the images lack details in
the normal mode but the moment you switch to the 64MP mode, details come alive all of
a sudden and you do compromise on the highlights here, highlights are blown off in the background.
The rear camera portrait mode adds a very strong depth effect blurring the background.
All these images side by side, the normal mode produces the best colors, 64 mode produces
the best details, portrait mode has an impressive look and ultrawide mode is good to capture
a lot of scenes inside one image.
I’ll show you some more high-res vs low-res and ultra-wide images now, the details of
images will be mentioned underneath, make sure to drop your own analysis about all these
images down in the comment section.
Here are a few macros camera samples for all of you.
Night mode works just as any other night mode does, it's acceptable, not extraordinary.
The rear camera can record 4K 60FPS video, it’s an optical stabilized camera, videos
are not shaky as you can see and details are rich.
I have captured videos in all available resolutions, watch these videos, and drop your own thoughts
in the comments below.
Hit the like button and subscribe if you haven’t yet, with that being said, I will sign off
and see you all in the next one.