- Can you even see it, Brandon?
On camera?
- [Brandon] Sort of?
Is is like a little square?
- I keep letting you say fingerprint sensor, but it's not,
It's a selfie camera, an under screen selfie camera.
This is the ZTE Axon 20 5G, and I don't know
what's craziest about this thing,
the fact that it has an under screen selfie camera.
So there's no pop-up, no notch, no hole punch, nothing.
An under screen, an in-display selfie camera,
or the fact that it's a mid-range priced phone
at 450 US Dollars, so let's wait for it to fire,
oh, that's interesting.
I can already totally see it.
Brandon, look at this.
There it is, right there.
It actually looks like a notch or a hole punch,
but they say the display goes over top of it.
What else is in this box?
Hey, my wish is granted.
Oh, look at that.
Thank you.
Credit to ZTE, at least they still include
a headphone adapter.
Nice.
Apple couldn't, it was too hard.
Got a Type-A to Type-C, and then probably a wall wart.
Yeah, that's really hard, Apple wasn't able
to do that either.
Not a North American one, but hey, good effort.
Is that sick or what?
- [Jono] Oh, the wave!
- [Linus] Yeah, that looks really good,
I've seen Honor do some really cool stuff like this,
but that looks, it doesn't look tacky.
- [Jono] Looks cool.
- [Linus] It does, it looks really cool.
- [Jono] I wonder if it's a little bit different
on each phone.
- You know what else is cool?
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There's like a shadow there.
It's a little square, and then there's almost
a dotted line square underneath it.
Can you even see it, Brandon?
On camera?
- [Brandon] Sort of?
Is is like a little square?
- [Linus] It's a tiny little square.
- [Brandon] Yeah, I can-
- [Linus] Can you make it out?
Okay.
- [Brandon] Oh yeah, there you go.
- [Linus] Got it?
- [Jono] Oh, yeah yeah yeah.
- Okay.
But wait, hold on.
So let's fire up some excellent high quality tech videos
on YouTube.
Mono speaker, I mean, those are the kinds
of compromises that you make when you're going
with a midrange device.
Yes.
Oh, okay, I see it.
Oh, interesting.
They did a ton of work on the materials of the display
in order to enable the selfie camera to work
with a display over top of it.
So they've got the cover glass, the polarizer,
packing glass, all that's pretty normal.
Then there's a transparent cathode,
special OLED material, a transparent matrix,
and then the baseboard glass underneath it.
So it's those three ones that are in between
what would already be clear that's designed
for additional transparency.
Now, if you guys saw our Linus Tech Tips video checking out
the transparent OLED TV from LG, you'll know
that transparent is more like translucent.
I think that transparent TV allows 30% of the light through.
Somewhere in the 30 to 40% range.
In order to build this, they had to work
on a special pixel matrix.
So I think what we're seeing right now
when we zoom this content.
You can see it, right, Brandon?
So it looks low res in that spot.
- [Brandon] It's like faded a little bit,
like it's got a gradient?
- Yeah.
When I get up close to it, it's very obvious.
Because it's just, the color's off
and there's the screen door effect,
I can see right through it.
But from this distance, if I'm actually looking
at the center of the screen, it's there, I can see it.
But boy, is that ever less noticeable than a notch
or something like that in the middle of my freaking content.
It's obvious why Apple hasn't shipped it yet.
It's not Apple good yet.
But it's usable.
This, one's got eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage,
it's got a 64 megapixel main shooter.
Actually, I don't know how many megapixels
the selfie cam is, but I doubt how many megapixels it is
is gonna be the main bottleneck there.
It's got a quadruple camera set up, which is pretty cool,
I guess, you've got that optical zoomability
and all that good stuff.
A USB Type-C.
I don't know if it's got dual SIM,
so we'll go ahead and pop this up and have a look.
Oh, microSD, nice.
You can go dual SIM or microSD plus a SIM.
Thank you very much, ZTE, for giving a crap
about people who like to expand the storage in their phones.
It's so funny how some of these features end up
becoming mid range features because, well,
rich people would just buy a phone
with more storage in it, wouldn't they?
Playing around with brightness,
the lower the brightness level, the less noticeable it is.
And interestingly, the screen doesn't get crazy bright,
which is something that I might expect
from a more value-oriented phone.
So it doesn't have wireless charging,
although it does support 30 watt fast charging.
And it's running a Snapdragon 765G chipset.
So that's one of the ways that they were able
to get 5G connectivity into this thing
at a reasonable price, because with the premium chipset
these days, at least until the 888 launches,
which I think is happening really soon,
it might even have happened by the time
this video goes live.
But for now, 765G is the way to go.
Of course, whether or not you can see content over top
of the camera is only half of the equation.
We've gotta fire up the camera and see
if the camera can see your face through the content.
This is it.
This is gonna be my first look at myself through a display.
It's awful.
It's like there's a big hazy smudgy film.
Wow.
That is...
Oh, man, that is something.
So you can see the display is completely powered down
in the area above the camera.
So that's going to help with light transmission.
But just like we learned when we looked
at LG's transparent OLED TV, there's still elements
of the display, even just the wiring that has to be done
to every pixel that you can't make clear
or not completely clear, at least not right now.
So lowering the pixel density helps.
That's why those OLEDS are 1080p right now at,
what are they, 55 inch, I think?
55 inch 1080p.
There is a hit to image quality.
There's more than just a camera built in here though.
So there's an ambient light sensor.
- [Brandon] There's like under display sound.
- Under display sound, I don't even know what that means.
I mean, it only had mono sound when I played
that something in YouTube anyway.
So if it does have a stereo effect, it's not very good.
- [Jono] Yeah, and under display fingerprint.
- And under display fingerprint,
well, that, okay, that we've seen before.
And those under display fingerprint sensors
were very obvious, like this at first,
you could really see them.
Now you can't see them at all.
And it's only been a couple short years.
If this is the beginning of where we're going
with this technology, I've got high hopes
that we could bid notches adieu sooner rather than later.
Play around with the rear camera a little bit, actually.
I miss that whole just putting a second OLED display
on the back and just using your main camera
for selfies concept.
If someone like Samsung had done that,
I think it would have been very interesting.
ZTE still has some work to do on their processing,
but this is not bad.
DTS:X Ultra 3D sound, apparently.
Now, hold on just a second here,
'cause I didn't even pick up stereo in the YouTube app.
For an absolute maximum speeds, yeah,
two sticks is what you want.
Okay, that's definitely a bottom-firing speaker.
We fired up the Chinese website,
and apparently it's the wide angle,
the 64 megapixel main shooter,
there's a two megapixel depth sensor, and then a macro lens.
So that's what the four different lenses are here.
- [Brandon] Does it have image stabilization on the cameras?
- Yes, pretty well specced for a $450 device.
Hey, it's the blurry selfinator.
Okay.
I mean, hey.
Some people go and apply a blurification beauty filter
to all their pictures anyway, Brandon.
- [Brandon] That's true.
- So am I not beautiful?
Do you not think I'm beautiful, Brandon?
With this blurred face?
Look at how all of my imperfections have been smoothed out.
Just like my imperfect end to this video,
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How about just ShortCircuit and TechLinked?
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- [Jono] And TechQuickie!