Prince of the budget phones!
I am a long time Samsung user.. I've used the s3, note 2, note 3 and note 4 as week as played around with others s7 and this is the fastest phone I've ever used. It's incredibly fast.
The thing that stands out the most are the speakers and the hi-fi chip. I hooked it up to my car via auxiliary. I listen to a lot of EDM, the bass was WAAAAY more rich than any other device I've owned.
This phone is an excellent buy!
UPDATE: 5 weeks after purchase.
So I am still in love with this phone. There ar very few phones that Ifeel like I am going to have to keep simply because of the quality. I have two phones, the axon 7 and the nexus 6p. My axon gets btter battery life than my 6p with the same apps and same usage throughout the day.
Not only that, the speakers on the axon are noticeably better than that on the nexus 6p. The axon's speakers are loud, crisp, and have a surprising amount of rich bass for speakers twice the size.
The phone is still very fast, I have rooted the phone, unlocked the bootloader, and put TWRP recovery, and xposed on it and have not run into a large number of incompatibility issues.
Hi-Fi, Hi-Fi, Hi-Fi.. Can not get over how much better music sounds. What's interesting to me, in my opinion, music coming through auxilary sounds better with Dolby OFF. While music coming out of the speakers sounds much better with Dolby ON.
What's interesting is I hate earpods, I strongly prefer around ear headphones, but man.. The earphoens included wiith this phone are SOLID. I really enjoy listening to them, I am thinking about taking a peek around ZTE's website to see if they have any supplemental headphones for sale or make a request if they do not.
When people ask me to watch a video, I insist on using my own phone to watch/listen to the video because of the amazing screen quality. (Quad-Hd amoled is toooo legit)
Software Updates: The US version is on b27 now, (We've seen 2 major software updates since release which is AWESOME.) B27 Is excellent, if I could describe the update, it was like the previous update had tons of cool features (double tap to wake, shake to activate flashlight on the lock screen, and a few other cool features that I fail to be able to recall at the moment. However, in the previous update it seemed like they were half baked in, you could onlly shake to turn the flashlight on, but could not shake to turn it off, double tap to wake was slow to wake up the device, etc. With b27, those things have been optimized, now you can shake to turn the flashlight on and off, double tap to wake is much faster, and a few other things have been optimized within the phone system as well. Plus we got september's android security update, which is nice to have!
And! With b27 cell phone signal got WAY better. I much more frequently have close to or full bars (100 dBm or more). I get the same signal as my t-mobile note 4 did, and my nexus 6p currently does. So definitely a win in that regard.
So far ZTE seems to be doing a pretty good with this phone. I seriously hope that we will receive Android N, 7.1 pretty soon. It's the end of October now, So I am hoping before February it will be released for the Axon.
Verified purchase: YesCondition: New