It’s a flagship with Ultra in the name… and it’s not a Samsung. This is the new ZTE Axon 40 Ultra,
and its claim to fame is that its selfie cam hides under the display, and is practically invisible.
The phone also comes at a significantly lower price
than other top flagships- so is this as great a deal as it seems?
I’m Will for GSMArena, and let’s find out in our ZTE Axon 40 Ultra review.
The ZTE Axon 40 Ultra is a 2022 flagship, and that means you should expect the best
specs and cutting edge tech. And that’s more or less true, especially for the latter part.
The phone is large, with a squared off, minimalistic design.
The curved matte back is made of glass, and it has a soft, almost fuzzy texture. You also
get a solid aluminum frame, and the Axon 40 Ultra feels a bit on the heftier side.
Unfortunately even though this is a flagship, there’s no official IP rating here.
On the front of the phone is a 6.8 inch AMOLED with a 1116x2480 resolution, that’s 400ppi,
and a fast 120HZ refresh rate.
Like last year’s model, this display is curved at the edges. It’s a neat, but polarizing feature.
But one thing pretty much everyone agrees on is that notches and cutouts in the screen
aren’t ideal. That’s what makes the Axon 40 Ultra’s hidden selfie cam such a standout feature.
This is the 3rd generation of this tech, and it has improved enough for ZTE to include it on its
top flagship. Now there’s a new, more seamless sub-pixel arrangement of the camera sensor,
as well as a higher pixel density of the screen above it.
The selfie cam is pretty hard to spot while you’re enjoying your media,
and enables a more immersive experience. Since it’s an AMOLED, blacks are quite deep here,
and you also get support for 10 bit color and HDR10- but not HDR10 plus.
The color accuracy here is unimpressive, too- generally trailing the competition.
When it comes to brightness, we were able to measure 540 nits maximum with the manual slider,
and that boosts up to 680 nits in auto mode, in bright sun.
Most other flagships can do better, but it’s still quite usable outdoors.
We are happy with the 120Hz refresh rate in that it smoothes out our swiping and
scrolling on screen. Last year’s refresh rate was higher though, and while it does dial down here
when idling , to save power, it won’t go lower than 60Hz.
There’s also no support for high framerate gaming here either.
For audio, the Axon 40 Ultra has a stereo setup, with the second speaker
both acting as the earpiece, and having a grille on the top.
The speaker earned a score of VERY GOOD in our loudness test, but there isn’t much for low end here.
The Axon 40 Ultra doesn’t support expandable storage, but there are
plenty of storage options to choose from, from 128 GB up to a whole terabyte!
You can wake up and unlock the phone with an optical under
display fingerprint reader. It’s quite responsive.
You can also hold down on the fingerprint reader,
to open a set of shortcuts as soon as you hit the home screen.
The interface itself is ZTE’s MYOS 12, on top of Android 12.
In many ways it’s very similar to stock android.
You get the Google feed on the homescreen,
and most of the phone’s functions are provided by Google’s apps as well.
There’s also the privacy dashboard, which is a standard Android 12 feature
that organizes your privacy and permissions options into one convenient spot.
You will notice some cosmetic changes in comparison to stock Android,
such as the icons in the setting menu. There are also a bunch of
personalization options you can use to customize the looks of the UI.
And there are a few ZTE-only features, like special shortcuts and gestures,
which you can find in the Features menu.
Powering all of these features is this year’s high end Android chipset- the Snapdragon 8
Gen 1. Performance is of course very good. But for some reason, compared to other flagships
running on the same hardware, the Axon 40 Ultra falls behind in the benchmark scores.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is notorious for running hot, but here, there’s an advanced passive
cooling system. Sustained performance was pretty stable in our stress test,
better than many of the other flagships.
This means the hardware is staying cool,
but on the outside of the phone, the heat became unbearable during these tests!
Thankfully during a normal gaming session, the effects were not so extreme.
The Axon 40 Ultra is powered by a 5000 mAh battery,
which is a larger capacity than what we saw on last year’s model.
Battery life has improved too, and it’s decent for a flagship. The phone
was able to score an endurance rating of 104 hours in our proprietary tests.
There’s 65 watt fast charging, too, and with that bundled adapter,
we were able to charge from 0 to 80% in half an hour!
There’s no support for wireless charging here though.
Moving on to the cameras, and let’s start off with the selfie quality,
since that’s one of the big questions about this phone.
Because the 16MP camera sits under the display, there’s gonna be distortion,
and the phone needs to use AI to compensate for that.
Honestly, the results aren’t great. The photos are soft and hazy, with inconsistent colors,
and limited dynamic range. This solution isn’t for selfie enthusiasts,
but it’s okay if you just need it for something practical like a video call.
On the back, the Axon 40 Ultra brings a triple camera setup,
all with a 64MP resolution. There’s a main cam with OIS, a 5.7x periscope telephoto cam with OIS,
and an ultrawide cam with autofocus that can take macro shots.
The main cam is special in that it has a 35mm equivalent focal length-
that’s pretty rare in the smartphone world.
ZTE even has a special name for it: the Humanity camera.
It’s a bit strange because the camera’s not only for photographing people.
Another quirk of this setup is that the 5.7 times telephoto zoom
is actually compared to the ULTRA WIDE cam! Compared to a regular 26mm main cam
you’d see on most camera phones, it’s more like a 3.5 times zoom.
There are plenty of camera modes and features,
including one which lets you shoot with all 3 cameras at the same time, with a single click.
16MP photos from the Humanity camera are for the most part excellent. There’s a lot of detail
and it's rendered naturally, without excess sharpening. Noise is low, and colors look true to life-
though some people might prefer a more vibrant look. The dynamic range is good here, too.
The longer focal length feels good, and it allows
you to get a natural bokeh effect behind a close subject, which looks really nice.
It works great on human subjects too, for a natural looking portrait.
If you want an even stronger effect, you can turn on the portrait mode, which adds some
extra blur to the background. It works well- the subject separation is pretty accurate.
The telephoto cam lives up to the high standards, producing nicely detailed,
sharp and noise-free photos. The colors and dynamic range are good, too.
The ultrawide camera captures equally great photos - it's among the best ultrawides we've
seen for daylight shooting. It has the same sensor as the main cam, so it’s a perfect match
in color reproduction. The detail is excellent and there's no drop in sharpness towards the corners.
The ultrawide has autofocus, and it’s the camera the Axon 40 Ultra uses in its Macro mode. There
is some upscaling involved here, which causes some loss in detail, but the tight framing looks good.
In the dark, the main cam applies some night mode processing automatically.
Colors look great, and highlights are preserved,
but the photos are generally darker than we’d like- especially in contrasty scenes.
In some cases the noise reduction and sharpening result in an overprocessed look.
The dedicated Night mode provides a much nicer looking exposure, with lifted shadows
and midtones. The effect is pretty good, but some scenes, like the lit grass, seem overdone.
The telephoto does a decent job- it captures plenty of detail
and manages to preserve the highlights.
Night mode lifts up the shadows noticeably and attempts to bring down highlights further.
The ultrawide does an admirable job in low light, for this sort of camera. Shadows can
come out less than ideal, but if the lighting is enough, the shots have good sharpness and detail.
The effect of Night mode isn’t that dramatic on the ultrawide,
but there’s better development in the tonal extremes, and that’s good.
When it comes to video recording on the Axon 40 ultra, what we have going on here,
at the time of the review, is what you’d call a work in progress.
ZTE has promoted the neat feature that all 3 cameras can record in 8K resolution!
But when we first got the phone, that wasn’t the case, and the framerates were off.
Now, several software updates later, the framerates are fixed,
but you can’t record in 8K at all. ZTE will hopefully sort everything out soon.
We’ll show you what we managed to record in 4K. Footage from the main cam is pretty nice,
with good looking colors, plenty of detail, and wide dynamic range. Our biggest concern
is a wobble that persists on a tripod even with electronic stabilization off.
4K footage from the telephoto is also shaky, but to a lesser extent. The quality is great,
with similar colors and dynamic range, and excellent detail.
4K video from the ultrawide is quite steady and again the quality is superb.
So there you have it guys- the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra. It provides that unbroken front screen,
decent battery life and fast charging, and a pretty unique camera setup on the back.
It does fall behind other high end phones when it comes to
things like the adaptive refresh rate and brightness of the screen.
You don’t get waterproofing. And of course there’s the selfie quality.
But overall it is pretty reasonably priced for a flagship, and if you want to wow your friends
with this cutting edge, under display technology, the Axon 40 ultra could be worth looking into.
Thanks for watching and see you on the next one.