ZTE Blade Velocity review: slimline stamina for under £150

Written in accordance with Gadgette’s Reddit-inspired review policy.

It’s fair to say not many people in the UK have heard of ZTE. Before using this phone, I knew nothing of them. But while it might seem like an obscure brand in the UK with a very small footprint, it’s big in its home of China - and with China being gadget central, that’s usually a good sign.

The company looks to be gearing up to be taken very seriously in the next few years though, having invested hugely in research and development, and joining the top six global smartphone manufacturers this year.

So I went into this review open-minded (and following a poor iPhone experience) and was both pleasantly surprised and a little disappointed in equal measure.

1. The handset

• 147 x 72.5 x 7.6 mm
• Black and silver
• 145g

It’s slippery. So slippery. It very easily slides out of your hand, which isn’t an unusual trait among handsets these days but if you’re anything like me (I’m a dropper), you will drop this phone unless you buy a case that’s got a bit of grip. Because the brand is less common here in the UK, you don’t have as much choice of case as you would if you had an iPhone or Samsung, for example, but there are still plenty of options.

The back panel is slightly flexible (I guess a trade-off for making it lightweight - at 145g, it is light) and if you squeeze the handset in the right place you get a teeny tiny clicking noise which makes it feel less solid on the whole.

My other main bugbear is at 72.5mm wide, it’s a bit big for a small-handed human to comfortably use one-handed, which is a little annoying if you just want to check your emails with a cup of coffee in one hand, but again, that’s a bit of a given these days with the trend towards larger handsets, and there are certainly worse offenders on the market.

2. Audio

It’d be unfair to compare the Velocity to a top-end phone in terms of audio, but for what it is the sound quality is pretty good with and without headphones (it has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which is now apparently not a standard feature on mobile phones thanks to Apple).

I’m a pretty big podcast listener - I have them on loudspeaker while I’m doing housework and through headphones on public transport/when going for a run (side note: if you don’t like running, give it a try listening to a podcast and you might feel different).

The sound is nothing exceptional and, like most phones, can be drowned out next to a very busy road or on a loud train. Legally, there’s a limit to how loud manufacturers can make phones so if you struggle to hear when in particularly loud surroundings, it might be best to replace the cheap earphones that come with the Velocity with something better quality.

The biggest let-down for me though which – granted – is an insignificant feature for most people, is the volume of handsfree calls. I often ring people for work, put them on speaker and then type as they talk. I did this twice with the Velocity and both times I could barely hear the other person above the sound of the fish tank in my office, even with the volume turned up to full. It’s a bit of a shame, since the speaker can go reasonably loud with other apps.

3. The screen

• 5.2 inches
• Full HD

This is one thing the Velocity does very well. The display is bright and vivid on its standard settings, but not glaring. The screen goes almost right up to the edges on the vertical sides but not quite to the sides. That’s a benefit in my book, as with curved phones like the S7 Edge, it’s so easy to select the wrong thing by inadvertently touching the side.

The touchscreen is mostly good, bar the odd fiddly occasion trying to select the right word if I did a typo and wanted to go back and correct it, but I wouldn’t use it for drawing. It worked well for all the apps I regularly use though, which are mostly social media and work related.

TV and movie-wise, the Velocity didn’t have the remotest bit of trouble with anything I wanted to watch, even the most dark and gloomy films. I’d say the 5.2-inch screen is about right to get the full perspective and detail of any videos you might want to watch without making the handset unwieldy.

4. The hardware

• Qualcomm MSM8952 octa-core processor (4 x 1.5Ghz + 4 x 1.2GHz)
• Adreno 405 GPU
• 2GB RAM

As the name suggests, the Velocity is fast, but it’s not gaming-fast. 2GB of RAM is plenty to run most apps fine, considering I only really use about three quarters of that even at peak times.

Remarkably, it hasn’t crashed or overheated at any point in the couple of weeks I’ve been using it. There have been a few times when running multiple apps at once and a message has come in which I’ve opened immediately, where I’ve expected the thing to fall to bits (like my iPhone did at times) but so far it’s met every challenge.

5. The software

• Android 6.0 Marshmallow

The Velocity runs Android Marshmallow (ie the previous version), which is a breeze to use and is mostly intuitive - with a few quirks. Android is the antithesis of iOS in the sense it is desperate to show you all its features at once, giving you a myriad of constant incoming notifications telling you the weather in your location, how busy your road is and what the football scores are for the team in your area.

It’s great in some ways - as it really lets you know what your phone can do, compared with other operating systems which arguably could do better in signposting their features. But it took me a couple of weeks of changing settings to get to the point where I wasn’t being constantly interrupted with pointless notifications or could put my phone down for a couple of hours and and not have to scroll through a lot of crap to get to missed calls or messages.

If you’re prepared to use its features (some people prefer to leave location services turned off, for example) Marshmallow has a lot going for it. However, while ZTE market the phone as “pure Android,” it does have some extras: for instance, mine pointlessly came with a superfluous browser called Ume (which runs Russian search engine Yandex as standard). It can’t be uninstalled, either, which is not a great experience - but obviously, handset manufacturers have to make money, and they’re probably not making much selling phones like this at £150.

6. The storage

• 16GB
• Expandable by up to 1238GB with microSD

16GB isn’t a ton of storage, but it’s more than fair at this price - especially with the microSD option. The onboard storage is fine for someone who really only uses their phone for calls, messaging and web, but you’d need to be pretty proficient at transferring or deleting things like photos and videos to use the Velocity for the length of a typical mobile phone contract without a memory card.

Considering you can pick up a 64 gig microSD card for less than £20, which would provide more than enough storage for even the happiest snapper, the small amount of built-in storage is negligible in my opinion.

7. The selfie camera

• 5MP
• 80-degree wide-angle lens