this is eta's axon 40 ultra it has an under display camera set up with it and it's the new
gen one so looking at it closely the screen you wouldn't even know that it actually does have a
16 megapixel sensor behind the screen the pixels cover it up so well that it's very difficult to
make out it's only really in direct sunlight that you can see it now this model here does have a
6.8 inch full hd plus screen amoled 120 hertz it is powered by the snapdragon 8 gen 1. my review
unit here that they sent out to me does have 8 gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of storage
it will be selling here in europe for 829 euros this model has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery with
65 watt fast charging and the camera setup on the rear 364 megapixel sensors so i'll be going
over this in depth and i'll let you know all the pros and the cons now in my time testing out the
zte axon 40 ultra included with the axon 40 ultra you'll find a tpu case there is a 65 watt charger
it's quite a good nice small size type c to type c cable some earbuds with a microphone they're 3.5
millimeter ones but we do have a adapter too so type c to 3.5 why because of course it does not
have a 3.5 millimeter headphone out now this axon 40 it looks a lot to me the design very
similar to that of a samsung galaxy s22 ultra you can see side by side you'll see what i mean here
see the three camera modules more or less in the same exact position the same rectangular shape to
them the curved edges and then the flat tops and bottoms of both of them you'll see looking at the
screens right now too that they look so similar so this phone does weigh 204 grams it's not exactly
what i would call light fingerprint location really good i do like the way it unlocks it's
relatively quick and it is accurate but the best part is the location they put it there
so when you're holding it with one hand you can simply just place your thumb there and not
like others that have it a little bit lower so the thickness of this phone is 8.4 millimeters we do
have a bit of a texture on the power button then the volume up and down button right here camera
module does protrude out by approximately three and a half millimeters so adding to that thickness
a little bit so the 8.4 of course is counting here and i like the material of the back of it
so the glass here is curved it's a little bit like the oneplus 10 pro that i've reviewed the
import version i did have from china and also the xiaomi 12 pro that it does have this shininess to
it the black especially when you look at it in direct sunlight you see how it kind of reflects
the light and this is a matte glass finish so it doesn't really pick up fingerprints which is great
zte has put a lot of effort into these cameras so we've got three identical
64 megapixel cameras they are the imx 787 so here is a periscopic camera 3.5 times optical zoom
then a 35 millimeter equivalent main camera and then a 16 millimeter ultra wide camera there so
dual tone flash microphone for the rear and laser assist focus then the bottom of it we've got these
antenna lines microphone our sim tray which takes two nano sim so no micro sd card support and
one of two loudspeakers so you'll see again the similarities comparing it to the s 22 ultra here
of course it's got these stylus which is right there but even the layout where the loudspeaker is
is identical there and the top you'll see that we do have an ir transmitter and then that secondary
loudspeaker whereas you just have the microphone at the top there with the s22 ultra and you can
see the antenna lines of course here and here the phone isn't too bad to handle even though it is
a large 6.8 inches now of course not having that cut out there it just looks so much better so this
is a phone for people that don't actually take a lot of selfies i personally don't take a lot
of selfies you might not believe that but i only take selfies just for youtube and maybe twitter
that's really it so i'm not too fussed about it because there is a degradation in the camera
quality because the pixels are in the way and the camera has to look through it which i'll get on to
later on when we see the camera samples and video samples from it but that's just a bit of a spoiler
there but this is a really good screen so it's a full hd plus resolution the resolution is 1116 by
2480 so it's full hd so it's not a quad hd screens full hd plus resolution it's super bright too so
it gets up to 1500 nets and it can be made out in direct sunlight as you see right now so no issues
with that and even in direct sunlight you can barely see that it's meant to have a front facing
camera the display of course does run at a maximum of 120 hertz which i'm running the whole time we
get auto so it'll swap between 16 120 but sadly yet again another manufacturer that doesn't give
us the 90 hertz option i really want manufacturers to start offering that because it is that sweet
spot that perfect in between battery saving and fluidity of everything so there's a lot of things
in here that you can adjust that are all typical that i won't go over but we do have the settings
you want which is the color mode temperature you can then adjust and scale and tweak everything
here to your own personal preferences when it comes to the white balance color temperatures and
if you want the display to look more saturated or more natural looking that is all there so
gestures are working really well this phone's ui is called my os 12 from zte now i've never been
really a massive huge fan of it but i will give them credit where do with this myos 12 that it's
really well optimized i don't seem to have any major bugs or anything that i've detected in my
time now using it so i do have eight gigabytes of ram with this model here the gestures as i
mentioned are detected really well very quick and the animations are all fluid and smooth going into
recent apps here that's quite quick normally things will have to load in the background
if you haven't used them for a while if it's not a system app that is if it's like a third-party one
then you'll see it reload especially when it's a heavy game or something that which is typical
with there with android so no noticeable lags there were swiping down for the notifications
for gestures which i can't say about this the s22 ultra however it is getting now a lot better to
this model after about five patches that's taken them a while this straight out of the box is
performing a lot better than my s22 ultra when it comes to the ui performance so there are lots of
different customization settings and whatnot that you can do with this one here but i won't go over
that because it is really quite self-explanatory i'm sure most people know what these uis are like
the options you do get of course with android 12. it's all there and it's just that performance i'm
really happy with i do take back what i said about it being bug free i haven't counted this bug here
where i want to swipe down for toggles and i'm pushing really hard here but swiping down doesn't
do anything i don't know what is going on so i can swipe up but down at least down from the very top
nothing i'm able to normally pull down the notifications or then the toggles adjust
my brightness and hello the only way to fix it it seems is to turn it on and off or unlock again and
now it should work there we go okay now it wants to work now zte has done an excellent job when it
comes to additional unwanted really applications that they've installed pre-installed bloatware
okay that's not really present at all there are the google you could almost say bloat apps there
that maybe you want to remove some of those zte cares that is really it so that's amazing
compared to other brands that have just so much bloatware so well done i'd like to see more brands
doing this just giving us the normal kind of typical stock android apps not all this junk
like games and other applications and tick tock and all that stuff that you probably don't even
need that's already pre-installed on there for you no not here so at the time of this video this well
that actually isn't the latest update now there's one that came through that was very small that
was only just under around 200 megabytes and the battery charge time so it's 65 watt charging with
a 5 000 milliamp hour battery 41 minutes to go from 12 to 100 you know what that's good anything
that's under an hour in my book now in 2022 is acceptable i still think it's not the fastest
out there but i still think that's more than adequate to charge in 41 minutes so this storage
i have 128 gigabytes here worth and it's ufs 3.1 storage we do get some very good sequential reads
and the rights are good and the randoms but these aren't the fastest i've seen normally with larger
storage capacities like 512 or 256 you would get slightly better random reads and writes but by
no means is this going to cause any slowdown at all with this phone you can see here from
the synthetic benchmark of course and tutu that it's fast it is very fast at short bursts but the
snapdragon 8 gen 1 is still in my experience this really has not changed it's a hot chipset went up
10 degrees just from that test it really does need to be fan cooled like we've seen in the likes of
say the red magic 7 or the 7 pro so here it's got a great peak performance this is when it's cool
but then when it heats up it really does slow right down you can see throttling almost
40 percent the performance just to keep that chip set from overheating so really quite a hot chip
of course from uh qualcomm there so i don't know what's going on here but there was a fail with the
safety net uh with our cts profile match so i do hope that that can be corrected there for people
that need that for your banking apps so we do have i'm a broken record here widevine level one cert
and yes netflix will work in full hd but no amazon prime video does not it's going to be standard
definition until it's white listed uh hardware support here for camera 2 api is full maximum
that's great so gcam ports open camera it's gonna have full access to those cameras and the gps is
typical here i probably end up scrapping this in my future videos because it's always good now uh
the lock is very quick it maintains the lock it's good fine battery life all right 120 hertz fixed
battery life test mark test benchmark sorry at 200 nits calibrated brightness yeah almost 13 hours
just shy of it not bad at all but real world you see looking around eight hours maybe a little bit
less uh that is better than my samsung which is not a surprise to me so my samsung actually gets
11 hours and 14 so a little bit lower i'm only getting around seven hours on screen time out
of this i can squeeze about eight um but yes okay this phone does have a higher resolution
it's just for me the exynos chipset has not been quite as efficient as the snapdragon 8 gen 1.
audio now so it does of course have active noise canceling with voice calls voice calls
sound fine and you can use a type c adapter to plug in your favorite set of headphones
now the volume out of the type c port is very good it's really loud and overall
the audio quality is great just like these two loudspeakers they are powerful
they are really loud they've got a little bit of bass to them and decent enough mid so i'd
have to rate these as some of the definitely some of the better sounding louds because you'll find
on an android phone so here's a sample now just a short track at 100 volume
gaming performance is excellent as you'd expect for eight gigabytes of ram and snapdragon 8gen one
this game here pubg is running on the extreme frame rate option that's all it lets me have even
though it does support 120 frames per second the screen at least it only allows me to run
60. so the performance excellent no problems i already do have two kills here but what i'll
do is play now for at least a couple of rounds we'll see how warm it's going to get because
already into this game now for about five ten minutes or so i can feel quite a bit of heat
building up around this area where the cameras are so it's going to be interesting to see
just how hot is the snapdragon 8gen1 going to get in the axon 40 ultra here all right i can clearly
feel it getting quite warm so it's up to about 43 here on the back which is not too bad i'll
just flip it over we'll take a look at the front of it that's getting up to about 42.41 now this
is only just playing pubg but i've found it get definitely warmer than what it currently is so
it will heat up that snapdragon 8 gen 1. over to our cameras now video performance here if
you're shooting vlog footage this is not really the phone for it now it looks like hey chris
clean the front of the screen no that's just what it's like because that sensor has to look through
and around those pixels so it has this blurriness to it and if you're in direct sunlight you even
get like a bit of a halo around like a white shirt and clothes and that is the downside to it it does
not have any electronic image stabilization either with the front-facing camera it seems because it
is shaking around all over the place rear cameras now so all three of the sensors are the imx 787
with optical and electronic image stabilization so looking at the tower here the clock that is on
top of the council building if i try to zoom back i cannot so it won't automatically swap
over to the ultra wide this stability is looking very good here the audio bitrate is 156 kilobits
per second and the ultrawide now so this one's 16 millimeters it does fit a lot into the shot
and we do get the optical and electronic image stabilization so just jogging ahead
you can see it's actually working out really quite well there the stability i do like
with the camera so this is 4k 30 it can shoot 4k 60 and 8k too
now there is a little bit of room now i think with that low-light performance
that they could improve upon it especially compared to zte's competitors out there now
some of the stills as well i noticed were a little bit over saturated and at times i did
have problems with the focus that i'd have to take the shot again it's not like one of those
camera phone setups that you can simply just take one photo and you know it's going to be great now
i recommend definitely taking about two or three just in case one of them is out of focus i did
have a problem where if you get close enough to your subjects but not too close it would struggle
to decide what camera it actually wants to use so it would swap between the ultra wide using a macro
mode with focus autofocus to then the main camera would go back and forth back and forth that was a
little bit annoying and then i did have that bug where i swiped down from the top that i showed you
and the toggles would not appear or notifications and that's happened to me now a few times
apart from that the ui is very fast it's stable but that bug yes and the performance generally is
really quick and good with this phone excellent loudspeakers the battery life isn't bad charge
time 65 watts will take you up to a hundred percent in around 41 to about 45 minutes which
isn't bad at all now i don't know about their updates but i've already had a couple come through
but i don't know how long they'd be going to be going for and price wise this phone is this model
here the eight gigabyte version with 128 gigabytes of storage going to be selling for 820 euros which
is for a flagship the spec of it i don't think is bad so who is the phone really for i think it's
for people that really hate notches cutouts and you basically never use a selfie camera anyway you
don't take vlog footage either then you're going to have that full screen experience without the
ugliness of the cutouts or the notches that bother you however if you're someone that takes a lot of
selfies takes a lot of vlog footage this really clearly is not the phone to get then because
as you saw from my samples even though yes the tech is improving and it's really good
to see that they're improving the selfie quality you're still going to get quality that is subpar
and below a normal front facing camera set up especially for video performance you're
gonna get that halo that blurriness effect to it there's simply no way to get rid of that just yet
because the sensor has to look around and through those pixels really so that's what is going to
happen there of course so thank you so much for watching my review here of the zte axon 40 ultra