ZTE Axon 30 5G review: value fighter for T-Mobile

ZTE Axon 30 screen and under-display camera design

‘All-screen’ lightness

The phone’s gargantuan 6.92″ 1080p display would typically mean one cumbersome to handle in the palm device, if it weren’t as tall and narrow, with a 20.5:9 aspect ratio. That doesn’t mean that the Axon 30 is not a big phone, at 6.70 x 3.06 x 0.31 inches (170.2 x 77.8 x 7.8 mm) in dimensions, just that it is manageable to use with one hand relative to its screen size.

What the handset is, however, is very light for that same screen diagonal, and also incredibly thin. Its housing is made of 3D composite polymer material with “nano-level glow texture,” sort of the glass lookalike hybrid like Samsung’s A-series designs, so the phone weighs just 6.67 oz (189.0 g). 

The volume rocker and power keys on the side also offer a good tactile feedback and ergonomic positioning. There is a fingerprint reader embedded under the screen, and it offers competitive unlocking and finger sensing speeds.

Moving on to the big, uninterrupted screen whose under-display selfie snapper is barely visible, we have to say that ZTE did a better job with this type of camera than the UPC unit in the Galaxy Z Fold 3 that is visible at all times. Through employing some layering trickery, ZTE managed to hide the selfie camera very successfully, returning a true “all-screen” feel the first time you stare at the Axon 30’s front.

The display itself is sufficiently bright but, at the phone’s $499 price point you shouldn’t expect a 1000 peak nits or per-unit color calibration. The colors are a bit on the cold side of the spectrum in the standard color gamut, as you can see from our tests below, and the phone’s panel doesn’t return an “excellent” score in any of the color representation categories. It does offer a 100% wide P3 color gamut coverage, though, for those HDR flicks, and is eye-health certified for low emissions by TUV.

In essence, the Axon 30 offers a very good display which, while not very bright for comfortable usage outside under direct sunlight, is entirely sufficient as a daily driver otherwise, with adaptive 120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling, gaming, and interface animations, a rarity at this price point. 

ZTE Axon 30 interface and performance

Smooth moves, fast processing

Speaking of the interface, it is mostly stock Android 11, with 12 on the way, and a thin layer of ZTE’s own paint on the top, introducing features as the abovementioned night/reading/dark mode switches directly accessible from the control panel.

Add a full settings list and a few live wallpapers or themes thrown in for a good measure, and there is barely an extra feature you’d demand from the Axon 30’s Android overlay. 

The new Snapdragon 870 processor that runs it also performs very well on the light interface, with no visible delays or stutters while navigating.

While a rehash of last year’s Snapdragon 865+ built on the 7nm process, the 870 is clocked at the whopping 3.2GHz peaks, and returns some very good benchmark scores. That’s why it seems to be a perfect solution for the upper midrange category, with ZTE even managing to shoehorn it in a sub-$500 phone. 

The 8GB RAM provided are adequate enough for lining up many apps open at once, and about the only thing we could complain about in the processor and memory specs departments is the 128GB amount of base storage of which about 110GB are user-available. 

ZTE Axon 30 camera samples

The best under-display camera, out of three

ZTE used a quality 64MP Sony IMX682 camera sensor for the main shooter, and an 8MP ultrawide angle camera. Sorry, no telephoto but the phone does offer 2x lossless crop magnification thanks to the large main sensor resolution. 

Unfortunately, since we don’t have two or three identical 64MP sensors for the camera functions on the back, there is some color and white balance discord that happen on most other phones that go with disparate sensors, too. Check out some Axon 30 camera samples below.