Meet the party host – ZTE Axon 10s Pro
Android powers a whole lot of devices and Samsung, as the manufacturer has been dominating the space for quite a while now. With its Galaxy S20 series being just around a corner, it seemed as though it would keep the crown yet again, however, there is an unexpected underdog – ZTE
ZTE is a strange company and it always was. They used to make some low-end, budget-oriented phones and made a sudden switch to the close to the flagship market. Last year’s Nubia devices were possibly the best mid-range phones you could get and Red Magic series didn’t fail to impress us. This year is no different.
We didn’t see this coming.. ZTE
The unexpected announcement of Axon 10s Pro officially brought ZTE the world’s fastest Android phone award, not for one reason though – but for two! Snapdragon 865 SoC is nothing to wait for now, it’s there and we can see the benchmarks as well. Completely outperforming all the previous generation smartphones ZTE showed everyone who’s the best of them all.
The other improved aspect of this phone degrades Samsung to yet another level. It features the 12GB LPDDR5 memory coming directly from Samsung. Samsung even claims this memory brings 30% performance to the smartphones, which lunches ZTE to new heights. Seems like Samsung wasn’t prepared for such a hit, knowing they were about to release, possibly, even better smartphone.
Is Snapdragon 865 SoC that good, really?
It’s not a perfect package, nothing close to it. The camera is just about average, there is no 5G connectivity for now, the AMOLED screen has a cutout and only 1080p resolution, but all in all, it is a pretty solid handset. But we still can’t call it a flagship, primarily because of its screen and cameras. Besides that, it includes the latest Android operating system and 256GB of incredibly fast storage.
Our last complaint here is its battery and expected battery life. The 4,000Mha battery may sound enormous, but only by the 2019 4G-ready standards. Supplying the latest 5G technology and a power-hungry SoC is a bit tougher task than what it sounds like. For most users, it may be good enough, if one day of battery life is what they need, but the power users can say goodbye to their phone lasting the whole day.
When it comes to the price of this weird piece of hardware, we wouldn’t necessarily say it will cost more than $450-$500, at least that would be fair pricing. Knowing ZTE, this can vary quite a bit, so they may decide to price it at as low as $400 or as high as $750, which would ruin the whole smartphone.
It beats Samsung, how about Apple?
We know everyone is interested in knowing about the latest SoC and how it performs and we are happy to say it outperforms (almost) everything on the market. It’s certainly better than the last year’s 855, but Apple still seems to be a bit ahead of its competitors, at least that’s what benchmarks suggest.
The software can make some difference here and that’s why it is so hard to announce the winner. Apple chips always seemed to have better performance, but in some real-world testing there never seemed to be any difference. After all, we are comparing completely different platforms that utilize resources differently.
Back in the day, iPhone mobile phones performed slightly better with half or quarter the amount of RAM of their competitors. Their dual-core processing units did better than the competing quad-cores and sometimes even octa-core systems, but only in the benchmark software.
Despite all of this, this year’s unofficial Antutu results show the latest SoC being slightly faster than A13 Bionic chip, but it still loses a battle on the Geekbench 5 battlefield. Nevertheless, it is quite safe to say Android phones are catching up, but it still doesn’t mean Apple doesn’t have a backup plan.
The release date ZTE Axon 10s Pro
So it sounds like a good bang for a buck, right? Well, kind of. There’s still one major problem. For those of you in the U. S., we’re sorry to say, but with all the mess between the Chinese and American government, we don’t expect it coming to America, ever. And that doesn’t apply to the 5G model only, but also the 4G one which is planned to release during the week.
For those of you living on the Asian continent, you are in luck as it is planned to release during the week. Prepare your money and spend it wisely. In case you’re wondering whether it is worth saving up for the Galaxy alternative, probably not. We expect the pricing of the flagship to be double the price if not more and that’s only for the regular S20 5G. The Plus or Pro version will go much higher.
ZTE Axon 10s Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra
All in all, it seems like a fairly good device for the price. Some sacrifices have to be made. The battery doesn’t last long and it lacks some storage. Don’t expect the latest display technology, nor the best camera, but next-generation processing power and RAM tech are here. It may not be Samsung’s competitor, but it can be priced fairly competitively, considering the power it packs.
America certainly won’t go wild for this the ZTE Axon Pro 10s, but at least be informed. We don’t expect it to set more records or beat Samsung’s sales, but it’s interesting to see some smaller companies offer the alternatives, no matter how weird they are…
