Chris here with the ZTE AXON 30. now this model here has a second generation under display camera
and they're getting even better now at hiding it so we don't have any ugly notches it's a full
screen experience with this 6.92 inches it's a very large screen on the axon 30 here it's
almost 7 inches so with this particular model here it is powered by this snapdragon 870
my review unit here that they sent out to me has 8 gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of ufs 3.1
storage the main camera on the rear this one is 64 megapixels and i'll be taking an in-depth detailed
look at this new model here from zte this is what you'll find inside the box so a type c to type c
cable 65 watt charger it does take 42 minutes to fully charge this phone some headphones a type c
to 3.5 millimeter adapter so yes it does not have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on this we get a
hard clear case and there is a warranty card and also a sim tray tool which is not showing
so this phone is 189 grams so weight wise not too bad it's evenly distributed
we have a plastic frame around the outside we do have glass on the back of this one
and here before cameras we've got a main 64 megapixel sensor we have an ultra wide which is
eight megapixels five megapixel macro 2 megapixel for depth and an led flash right here too now i
like the design of this in hand it does feel really good i can get access to that power
button and yes it is a large phone you do know that almost being 7 inches the screen at 6.92
so there is a fingerprint scanner here which is an in-screen one and you see it unlocks in about
a second it's accurate it's fast it's quick i do really like it now when you take a look at that
under display camera you really cannot see it so they've improved the tech here with this one we've
now got a pixel density in that area where the camera is below it of 400 ppi instead of 200 ppi
16 megapixel camera now with four in one pixel binning and they've tweaked the ai on this one
so the ai camera will try and improve it to get sharper shots there with less grain less of the
blur that we sometimes see and i can tell you now that it is a step up over the axon 20 but still
not quite as good as a normal say cut out notch front facing camera there'll be samples and i'll
go over this later on in this in-depth review so the screen here full hd plus resolution 120 hertz
360 megahertz touch sampling rate it is very very smooth and really quite quick so there's
nothing here on the left and we've got volume up and down buttons right here power button
and 7.8 millimeters of thickness now where the camera is that then brings it up an additional
three millimeters you can see it sticks out a little bit right down the bottom here we've got
our type-c port microphone single loudspeaker so there's no dual loudspeakers with this one
our sim tray here will take two nano sims or you can give up on one of those nano sims
and use a micro sd card unfortunately at the top here no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack just
a secondary microphone for noise cancellation in calls and for video no ir transmitter so i do like
the build of it even though this yes is a plastic frame rounds around the outside it feels solid
and it overall is a good phone here in terms of build quality it is right up there excellent
so for me the true star of this phone isn't actually the hidden away under screen camera at
the front that you can barely make out there but it's this display so large very good really good
brightness so it tops out at just over 800 nets i'm measuring 812 nits and it can be made out in
direct sunlight really not too much of an issue it does not come with a pre-applied screen protector
but i don't think that's going to be too much of a problem there it does have scratch resistant
glass there so let's take a look here i just wanted to show you some solid colors to see
if we can make out again the under display camera there that it's so hard to see it i
mean i can barely even see it only at certain angles so looking at it straight down right now
it's pretty much impossible at this distance so a normal viewing distance you really do not see it
at all and this is the future it really is and they're going to improve on the camera quality
below to later on i mean it's getting better it's better now as you'll see later on compared to the
axon 20. so very very good display here the touch response rate is excellent because it's 360 hertz
and i don't really have any problems with gestures gestures there triggering it getting it to work
and that's just the screen rotating around there so jump into settings here just to quickly show
you uh what options we get with this display so there's a lot there so you've got typical dark
mode refresh rate i've forced it to 120 hertz the ui runs at 120 frames per second and everything
i'm not seeing any lag any stutters or anything like that coming through you can adjust the color
temperatures which is great so we've got a full range of options right there the white balance
can be tweaked as well too so i just keep that on standard while i have at least this time the only
thing i've done is just forced it to 120 hertz just to make sure it's continuously smooth and
fast now i'm not seeing any pulse width modulation flicker either with this display it is really nice
very immersive screen so a chip that's in this is the snapdragon 870 now i've got 128 gigabytes of
ufs 3.1 storage it has 8 gigabytes of ram and the snapdragon 870 is just as good to my eyes
that is and to me as the snapdragon triple eight which is their latest i think the snapdragon 870
in a way is sometimes a better chip because it doesn't run quite as hot performance is excellent
really good and this of course is running their own my ui of sorry it's called my os 11 and it's
based on android 11 with this and performance has been good it has been bug free for me and
overall i really do like how it does perform just everything fast smooth really good load times
good animation speeds no noticeable stutters lags any issues like that you've got your typical
toggles down here notifications all coming through it has nfc built into it and we also do have for
example google pay support you can use that with this so rom performance is great now when you take
it out of the box and first power it on you're looking at approximately 113 gigabytes of free
space with this particular phone expandable you can install a micro sd card and that will work
then you can use that as storage too for your applications if you're running a little bit low
so i am on the latest firmware update here at the time of this video of course and here bloatware is
there a bit of bloatware on this well not really it's actually pretty good now i've already started
to install here my own applications but i would call this phone one of the better ones definitely
that i'm seeing there's so many manufacturers that just put so much bloat on their roms and
exxon with this one here the xn30 zte they're not doing it and that is really good to see so this is
the 3dmark wildlife score which is an excellent score here it's a demanding benchmark and it's
able to achieve here 25 frames per second that's great performance there from the gpu and the
internal storage so ufs 3.1 spec as i mentioned before and we're looking at excellent random reads
and right sequential read speed there is very very high there and then 748 writes no slouch
at all this is a very quick phone as you can see with the antutu score here so able to achieve
over 700 000 points they're really good and a potent gpu in this as you'll see later on when
i get on to the gaming performance of this one so we have a wide vine level one cert which is great
however here when you try to run something like amazon prime video it doesn't actually run in
hd it's stuck in standard definition down here it should say hd later full hd which it does
with other phones so netflix works okay netflix disney plus in full hd it's just amazon prime
video have not white listed this device yet and i hope that will happen in the future it's
actually up to amazon to do that to talk to zte so wireless speeds really good gigabit speeds if
you connect up to wi-fi six so of course it does support wi-fi six the snapdragon 870 and i'm able
to get very very good speeds down at the point downstairs where i test away from my router with
lower signal strength but still able to get 400 megabits per second transfers that's phenomenal
that has to be now the fastest i have tested most phones but other flagships will be around 250 300
but 400 over 400 there is an excellent score when it comes to the wireless speeds there so we do
have dual frequency gps as i test it out here with uh you can see level five and level one in there
that means dual carrier frequency dual frequency sorry with the gps and you get a lock of around
three to four meters of accuracy so it just actually changed from three to four right here
and very good average signal strength and this is typical qualcomm that you won't get an accuracy of
one meter which you can with the mediatek chipsets they have a limitation of just maxing out at three
meters with them unfortunately camera two api support the maximum level we want so level three
this is good so yes you can find uh gcam ports and they will work on the axon 30. now we did the
stress test here for wildlife this is 3d marks benchmark it runs for 25 minutes uh 20 minutes
i think it is sorry 20 loops at least and it only throttled a tiny little bit the lowest score here
dropping down barely nothing and that is really good to see after 20 minutes of this demanding
test and there's the same thing again sorry and battery life okay it didn't actually count it
here but i can tell you it's 42 minutes to charge the battery and then battery life what i'm seeing
so far is around six to five hours on screen time that's at 120 hertz which is not amazing
on to audio so i'm a little disappointed it's just got the single downwards firing speaker
here i think a large immersive screened phone like this one especially with the under display camera
really should have a secondary loudspeaker at the top but i guess but maybe that camera tech they
just didn't have room for it somehow now the 3.5 to type c i've been testing that out quality is
fine i i wouldn't say it's the absolute best i've heard but i've got really no complaints
from it it's loud it's clear it's good okay it's good but that loudspeaker sample i'll give you
a sample of it now for a single loudspeaker it really doesn't sound bad but again i just miss
really having a secondary speaker at the top but here's that sample now at 100 volume
our gaming performance excellent with this and i've just got someone shooting at me
very very good it's very immersive with this large screen as you imagine and the snapdragon 870 can
handle this game this is pump g on the extreme frame rate with absolute ease you can see looking
down the scope here there's no lag at all so the extreme frame rate options available to us and
unfortunately we cannot go over that so we can't get any faster we can't take advantage of the 120
hertz at least not with this total here but other titles you can but still very quick so all those
demanding games on the store google play store you'll be able to play them with this now how warm
does this phone get so we've got a vapor chamber in it i've noticed that on the back here that it
does get a little bit warm and on the screen just in this area now i did check it out it gets up to
48 degrees which some of you may think is quite high but i've actually seen the snapdragon triple
eight phones get up to 51 52 degrees celsius my ambient temperatures here are 25 degrees c
so yes it's a warm phone it's a warm chipset but not as bad as the snapdragon triple eight
and here is our front-facing video with the camera so the under-display camera here we
still get soft video footage here unfortunately so just like the axon 20 very very similar here
1080p maximum and you can see it doesn't have any electronic image stabilization and it also has a
low bit rate which is 96 kilobits per second so the camera has to look through and around those
pixels really so that's why it looks like i've got a fingerprint smudge over the camera lens right
on the front of the screen but sadly that is not the case i have cleaned it with a
microfiber cloth it's 100 clean so this is what video is going to look like if you're going to
shoot vlog quality or you wanted to shoot vlogs with this then well you're going to have to deal
with this kind of quality so i'll swipe over now to the rear cameras and we'll take a look at what
we can expect here out of the axon 30. so with the main camera we have 4k 60 4k 30 frames per second
which i'm currently shooting in and it does have electronic image stabilization you can clearly
see that as i walk along it's quite smooth the footage right here and overall not bad quality
now i do the find that the focus works excellent i've had no problems with it getting a lock and
it doesn't pulse in and out or anything like that let's move over now to the ultra wide camera and
with the ultra wide camera it's only 1080p maximum with this one so it does not look as detailed
with that eight megapixel sensor but at least we do have the option to do this we get electronic
image stabilization again and throughout all of the video unfortunately with zte it's always the
same the 96 kilobits per second audio bitrate the quality they really do need to improve upon this
so
okay let's talk a little bit about the under display camera there so the axon 20 selfie
quality portrait photos were a lot worse than what we are seeing out of the x130 so yes they have
really improved the quality now the quality is still behind that of other phones that don't have
the pixels in front of them they don't have the pixel arrangement pen tile in front of it there
they don't have of course this tech will not be as clear with this okay phone here and especially
when it comes to video quality so vloggers out there this really is not the phone for
that as you saw it looks so smudgy it looks like i just put a big fingerprint over the top of the
lens there the glass and i just did not clean it but i can tell you that as i said in the
video that i cleaned it and that's just the way it comes out so audio bit rate 96 kilobits per second
it's a little bit low it really should be a lot higher i'd like to see 256 or 320 like a lot of
other manufacturers are using to improve on the audio quality there too now the rear video the
4k stabilization is good detail is not the best i've seen the sharpness especially when it comes
to the ultra wide video and the ultrawide camera as well it is only an 8 megapixel one so i would
have liked to have seen 13 or 16 megapixels two would have helped a bit with the quality
battery life on this it has a very large really nice screen and 120 hertz when you run that
it's quite demanding on that battery okay so even though the battery charge is really quick
it's about 41 42 minutes or so at 65 watts at the 120 hertz you're only looking about five hours to
six hours of on-screen time depending what you're doing there of course too it's going to vary a bit
so not amazing battery performance because of the larger screen and it's a very bright screen too
now if you drop down that refresh rate to 60 hertz we have that option of course from zte they allow
us to do that like all manufacturers you can then get up to around seven hours of on-screen
time bringing it up to a more standard kind of time that you want so if you're a very demanding
user that you're watching and using the screen a lot then yeah expect the battery life to be
well you might have to do a bit of management there with it to make sure you're going to make
it through a full heavy day of use that is now the screen by far is the best thing about this
particular mobile it's a very very nice large panel so 6.92 inches so close to
seven inches this is why the seven inch tablets disappeared they were replaced with well large
phones phablets even though i hate that term that's what a lot of people do call them
really good so it's very bright 812 nits that i've measured you can see it in direct sunlight it's
super immersive and the blacks look great on it because it is an amoled screen here with this one
now we do have the wide vine level one support so netflix and full hd on this there's an e
plus in full hd however amazon prime video if you use that a lot which i do personally
it's in standard definition with this one because amazon has yet to white list
this device so hopefully that will be happening later on in the future so we can then see the full
hd with this particular model here build quality is good fingerprint reader is fast face unlocking
is fast as well and fingerprint reader there just demonstrate quickly uh that it is fast and
accurate i didn't press it first time very good there but it's very very quick well it's about a
second it's not actually the fastest i've seen but it's still accurate it's good so all up i think
it's a good phone for those that want a immersive great looking large screen and you don't take a
lot of selfies and you especially don't take any vlog footage you're not one of those people out
there shooting video of yourself vlogging all the time because you're going to be disappointed with
that quality as i showed you from my example so do hope to see you in my next up-and-coming
mobile phone reviews please do subscribe for more and i'll see you in the next one