today we're taking a look at the zte axon 30 a new phone with a very special feature
so today we're going to be doing a full review of the new zte axon 30 with the next gen in display
camera to help you guys decide if this is the phone for you before we get started though smash
the like button if you're a fan of the axon series let me know in the comments what country you're
watching today's video from if you haven't already then hit subscribe now so you don't miss a thing
in the future so here we have the zte axon 30. it's zte's second attempt at an in-display selfie
camera and things are definitely improving this year seems to be the year where lots of
manufacturers are pushing this technology out there but some are doing it better than others
now thankfully i would say the axon 30 is on the better side and it's barely noticeable thanks to
a 400 ppi pixel density for the in-display camera and it's really nice to use overall but it's not
going to be suitable for everyone out in daylight i really never notice where this camera is but
when you're indoors you can see it a little bit but when you start using your phone properly and
stop concentrating on the camera then you tend not to see it at all especially when gaming is it just
blends into the phone now if we zoom in though you can see it's a small rectangle at the top
basically the lighter the color of the display the easier the camera is to see when it's black
at the top you can't see it looking straight on and you only see it if you look at an angle
when it comes to the camera quality it's also greatly improved but it's still not perfect and
we'll go through the quality shortly when we cover the camera samples so with the axon 30 you can see
we've got a full screen display with slim bezels all round we've got no notches and no punch holes
it's a 6.92 inch AMOLED display making it on the larger size of phones but it's still comfortable
hold and it's great for gamers or those who just love big phones it's a 10 bit display with a full
hd plus resolution of 2460x1080 it's got a 120hz refresh rate and a 360hz touch sampling rate we've
got an in-display fingerprint scanner on the front which does work very well now the only downside
with the fingerprint unlock is if the phone is off and you put your finger on the fingerprint scanner
it does take a little bit longer to open but if the phone's already on and you put your finger
there it pretty much unlocks instantly of course we do also get the face recognition to unlock
which is only 2d but it works surprisingly well and surprisingly fast on the right side we've got
the volume rocker in the power button then heading on to the bottom we've got the sim tray the usb c
port and the speaker grille over to the left on the back we've got some axon branding in the new
nano scale micro beam texture we've also got a holographic color effect on the axon logo when
it comes to the cameras we've got a 64 megapixel sony imx 682 and this has an aperture of f 1.8 and
it is of course the main sensor it's supported by an 8 megapixel wide angle lens with a 120 degree
field of view we get a 5 megapixel macro lens and a 2 megapixel depth lens there's a little bit of
aggression and boldness to its look but it's also got a lot of subtleness to it as well and i think
it's a great balance overall now the axon 30 is a mid-range phone and i'd say this is aimed at
people that want a full screen phone mobile gamers and people that just want to use their phone as a
phone it takes good pictures and videos but that's not really the target market for this device we're
going to go into that in a lot more depth shortly the axon 30 is powered by the snapdragon 870 which
is a 7 nanometer chipset this one comes with 8 gigs of ram and 128 storage which is of course
ufs 3.1 but it's also available in a variant with 12 gigs of ram and 256 storage it's powered up
by a 4 200 milliamp hour battery and it also has support for 65 watt fast charging and unlike many
other manufacturers we get a 65 watt charger in the packaging the axon 30 is however wire charging
only and it's got no wireless capability it's packed with a triple cooling system that's made
up of a large vapor chamber a graphene copper matrix and a high power heat transmitting gel
in the packaging we also get some 3.5 millimeter headphones a usbc to 3.5 millimeter dongle a
plastic protective case as well as a usbc to usb c cable and the charging brick overall
use of the phone has been great the screen is bright and colorful and it's a pleasure to use
it ships with my os 11 which is pretty close to stock android and there isn't much bloat so it all
works pretty well we've got an auto refresh rate function that automatically switches between 60
and 120 hertz to save power but i turned this off straight away and set it to 120 as i found
the phone to be running at 60 hertz when i didn't want it to it uses the standard keyboard keyboard
and my only annoyance here is that quite often i found myself accidentally pressing this close
keyboard arrow at the bottom left and i wish there was an option to remove it i also didn't like
the power saving mode on this one as i found it just cut the power too much for me everything it
became too sluggish and i ended up disabling the power save as well now this is just my personal
preference though as of course the reason it runs slow and sluggish is to save on power to make sure
that you don't run out of battery the power save mode is set to come on at 15 battery and this
can also be customized to whatever percentage you want you can also enable it from the quick
launch bar in terms of my os features that we can choose from system navigation or gestures
enable their zed pop buttons which personally i'm just not a fan of so i leave switched off it's
got a built-in screen recorder which does work well we've got screen edge miss touch prevention
now this came as light by default and i haven't had any issues with missed touches so i haven't
changed this now as i said this is aimed at people that just want to use their phones as a phone use
their favorite apps or just play mobile games when testing with the games it runs well on everything
i've thrown at it and it's always been nice and smooth it's using the snapdragon 870 so it's
not the latest flagship from qualcomm but it's still a capable chip the speaker is fine and it's
pretty much what i expected from a mid-range phone although it is a little bit on the tinny side and
there's only a single speaker at the bottom the cool speaker is not being used as a loudspeaker
because of the location of the speaker as with many phones you do need to be careful
not to block it with your hand when gaming in headphones that can be very useful it does however
feature wi-fi 6 for great connectivity along with an anti-block antenna system to ensure that you
don't block the wi-fi or cellular antennas while you're gaming it's a great choice as
a mid-range gaming phone for those of you that don't want that bold colorful gaming phone look
and for those of you concerned with synthetic benchmarks i've run it through geekbench 5 and
i got a single core score of 752 and a multi-core score of 2986 it's also a well-built phone that
feels comfortable to hold now unfortunately i dropped this from a very high height on top of
my wall when trying to get a shot for this video and it survived the impact impressively there are
no marks anywhere on the phone although it did unfortunately crack the screen ever so slightly
as you can see at the bottom left here the wall is however very high and taller than me so this
accidental drop test has yielded a good result for the phone so now on to the photos in the
videos we get lots of video options on the axon 30 and it can shoot at 4k at 60 frames per second and
you've also got multi-camera recording that will allow you to record from two cameras at the same
time and we've also got a multi-vlog template now this section is a little bit gimmicky but it's got
some useful presets to help you record the style you've selected you hold your phone still and the
camera does all the work i guess in these times where things like tik tok are incredibly popular
features like this are going to be a bonus to many now the selfie camera is axons next gen
under display selfie camera it's got a separate 400 ppi display which is double that of the
predecessor it's a special oled display with a more transparent cathode so the seven layers of
the screen are more transmissive we've also got some post processing going on which does a great
job in refining the image so we're just gonna take a look it's a 16 megapixel camera and when looking
at the photo or video you can see that it's well not great but it's okay once you take the photo
though things get better and there's definitely sharpening of the image if we take a look at the
samples you can see it's fine if you just want to take a photo but if you're someone that needs some
high quality selfies or something for instagram then this just isn't going to be for you simply
put if you care about selfie photos it's not the phone for you but if you just want a full screen
display with the option to still take selfies if you need to then it's great when it comes to the
rear camera photos that they perform pretty much as i'd expected one annoyance as usual is that
if you want 64 megapixel photos you have to go into more and pick the 64 megapixel mode when you
just take the photo using the normal photo mode it comes out at a resolution of 4624 by 3472 and this
means it's 16 megapixel as standard when taking photos you can switch to the ultrawide camera
use the standard camera or there's also a two times digital zoom there's also the macro camera
which takes okay macro shots but there's still a lack of detail as it's only a 5 megapixel camera
overall though photos from the axon 30 are okay they're nothing special but they're certainly
not the worst photos i've seen from a camera phone when it comes to the video again it performs okay
it shoots 4k at 60 frames a second and to be fair the stabilization is reasonable and the videos
come out fine it's just not really comparable to the flagship phones of today but then saying that
this isn't a flagship it's a mid-range phone 1080p at 60 frames a second it seems to have
better stabilization but of course we lack some detail due to the lower resolution we can also
take video from the ultra wide camera but this is restricted to 1080p at 30 frames a second and
as you can see from the footage it's not the best there's plenty of noise and it's not very stable
overall though i think the axon 30 is a great step up from its predecessor but as i said it's more
for those of you that want a full screen phone or a phone to use in terms of apps or gaming rather
than taking photos it's priced pretty well with eight gigs of ram and 128 storage coming in at 499
or 429 pounds if you want the 12 gigs of ram with 256 storage that comes in at 599 or 519 pounds
of course the links to take a look or purchase this device are down in the description below
and it goes on sale today so go ahead and check it out of course if there's anything i've missed
or you've got any questions at all just leave them in the comments below and i'll get back to
you as soon as i can but thanks for watching the video if you liked it smash a thumbs up
if you didn't hit the thumbs down twice and i'll see you guys in the next one
you