ZTE Axon 40 Ultra Review – Sneaky Good Photos With A Catch

This is a phone that starts at 7.99 for the eight gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabyte storage configuration. And then, if you want more, you can get the 899 version of this phone that has 12 gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage, no micro, sd card slot for expansion, but thats what you get. But this is a very nice looking phone as you can see, it comes in one single color and it has this glass back. That does have a little bit of a texture finish with it. So its not super like sandpapery, its not super slippery, but its definitely really good. At repelling fingerprints and yeah ive been using this phone for a few weeks now and i still havent had to like wipe off the fingerprints when ive been recording footage of it. So as a video content creator, i definitely like that, but one other thing i really do like is the way this camera module looks thats a really cool. Look to it, but one downside to a camera module this size. It does poke out a little bit from the back of the phone. Is that when you do put it down on a desk, it will wobble a little bit more than normal. Once you get towards the top, it stops a little bit but definitely going to get some wobble. But if you do use the case that comes in the box with this phone, you can alleviate this problem.

It just makes up for that difference and depth, and then now the phone is not going to wobble until you get it up here at the top. But if youre using the keyboard, a lot which i do on my desk thats not going to be an issue anymore now, speaking of what comes inside of the box, also, you do get a 65 watt wall charger that does come along with the usb c cable Of course, so yes, this phone does support 65 watt fast charging, but it doesnt have any wireless charging, though. So if you like to be about that wireless life youre not going to get that with this phone, but if you are going wired, you can get topped off pretty fast, and this phone does have a 5 000 milliamp hour battery inside of it, which gave me Plenty of juice to last the entire day, while ive been using this phone now, this phone does have a 6.8 inch amoled display that has a resolution of 1116 by 2480. It has a refresh rate of 120 hertz thats, a maximum that it can get to, but it can go down to 60 hertz and you can select either one of those or allow the phone to automatically switch between those and thats going to be better for battery Life – and this also does have a 360 hertz touch sampling rate thats, going to be great for gaming and speaking of gaming.

This phone does have the snapdragon 8 gen 1 processor inside of it, and when i was playing games like apex legends, it ran really smooth. I was able to turn the uh the frame rates up and also the graphics quality up to. I think it was like the ultra mode or whatever, but yeah everything ran really smooth on this, and it does have a pretty decent cooling system, because i was playing apex legends for maybe like an hour or so, but i didnt feel the phone really get super. Warm it got a little warm, but definitely nothing that was like hot to the touch that sometimes you get with smartphones but outside of gaming when youre just watching, like some youtube videos or just looking at photos, things look really good on this screen now. This is a curved waterfall design, so it is going to be curved on the edges and if you dont like that, youre not going to like the screen on this phone. But if you dont mind it like me, um, it actually feels good in the hand, but also adds to the the look of the foam. Now i forgot to mention this earlier, but the glass back is also curved at a 71 degree angle, so that helps with the overall hold of the phone. So sometimes when phones have curved displays, they dont actually curve the back of the phone either. So the back might be flat, so that will allow for a little bit of an awkward hold, but because the back and the front glass are curved together, it does make this phone feel better when im holding it in my hand.

Now the screen also does support and always on display, and also you do have an under display fingerprint scanner that works really well. But the most interesting thing about the display on this phone is that the front facing camera – you cant see it because it is hidden underneath this display and i actually barely cannotice it unless i really hone in with my eyes and it lives right there and it Did a really good job, because now the individual pixels and things can turn themselves on and off and that just really helps this disappear. Underneath the screen – and this is definitely better than the under display camera thats on the samsung galaxy z, fold 3. But i expect the z4 to be better in this regards, but we have to wait a few months to see that, but for right now this is definitely one of the better looking under display cameras, because its definitely not something you can see. Even when you rotate the phone that much so they did a great job at hiding it but ill take a look at the actual camera quality here in a second when we start talking about the cameras all right so before we get to cameras, lets talk about The software on this phone, so the base software is going to be android 12, but they do have their my os 12 software running on top of that and its a pretty lightweight kind of skin or adaptation of android.

So it doesnt really take away from android 12.. It doesnt add too much to it either. But your quick settings right here very easy to get to. I really like that. Um, you have all these different things that you typically expect from android on here, but one thing i would want to see improve is just when you get down to widgets. I would like to have better organization here of all the different widgets that you have. This is a very minor complaint, but you have to just like scroll through all of them, instead of having them kind of categorize on the screen. But one thing i do like about this: software is when it comes to personalization or just customizing this phone. So, typically, you might have to go to like your display to change your wallpaper or go to somewhere else to change your lock screen um. As far as like the always on display and stuff, they have this one stop shot for your personalization settings right here, where you have all of those things from your themes to your lock screen settings, your icons, your fingerprint scanner, animation, youre, always on display, and all These things are just one tap away, and once you change something you can get right back here and change something else, and this makes it very easy to customize your phone. So i really like this touch in the settings and just going over some of the other general specs about this phone.

You do have dual speakers, one on the bottom, alongside the usb c port and the sim card tray, and then you have another one up at the top and then also you will find 5g in this phone as well. All right so now lets talk about the camera, so this is a triple camera setup, ultra wide wide angle and telephoto cameras, and they all three come in at 64. Megapixels and i have to say, ive walked away, really impressed with the way the photos look. So this first photo is using portrait mode and you can see it came out extraordinarily well, and then these next photos are just a combination of using the main wide angle, camera the ultra wide and also the telephoto, and the telephoto really impressed me. You can get all the way up to 40 times: digital zoom, but definitely the quality is not going to be the greatest, but i did find that the telephoto zoom is one of the best that ive used on cameras this year. The quality is really good. You can still see a lot of detail, especially in the text on this sign. I walked away very happy, especially with portrait mode from this camera, and even these nighttime photos came out really well. So i was impressed with the low light performance and i didnt really use the night mode. I just used the regular mode and i was still able to get some good quality photos with this phone, but i will say that you do need to do a little bit of work to get some of the photos that i just showed you and what i Mean by that is that if you do just take the phone out of your pocket – and you point it at something, it kind of overexposes a little bit – and you can see here between these two photos that the one on the left is the one where the Phone, i just let it do its thing and then the one on the right is where i actually tap to focus and then it actually kind of put everything into check.

So all those photos that you saw me show you a little bit earlier. I had to do the tap to focus in order to get that type of quality. Now this is a pre production phone and the software is not final, so they can fix that in the future, but for right now, youre going to have to be tapping in focus to get some of the the best looking photos out of this phone. Now, on the video side of things, things are good theyre, not as good as they are with the photos, but you can record 4k video up to 120 frames per second on this phone and you cant do that with a lot of other flagships. So this video will slow down a little bit and you can see it did a pretty decent job. There is some focus hunting and the exposure does jump a little bit here and there, and i will say that if you dont slow, this 120 frames per second footage down. All this little jumping is magnified, so it definitely looks worse but um. If you dont plan on slowing the footage down, you can record in 4k, 60 or even 4k 30 to be able to get a little bit smoother video. But one thing i did experience from time to time when i was recording at 120 frames per second, was that sometimes the focus just stopped working and thats. What you see there on the left hand, side, and then i just restarted the camera app and what you see on the right hand.

Side is what i got after. I restarted the app so again pre production software that could be fixed by the final release of this phone, but thats just one thing that i did run into, but generally the video was just okay, you know its definitely usable and when that 4k 120 frames per Second, really does nail it. You can get some really cool, slow down shots like this, where im riding this bike and coming to a complete stop in front of the the phone here. It did a really good job here so when it hits it hits well. But when it does miss a little bit, uh theres, definitely something that leaves you wanting more. But what about that front facing camera that lives underneath the display well heres a photo taken with that, and you can see that from the front to the back of the image um. Actually, things are actually really balanced, its not anything really overexposed and stuff, but the color of this photo definitely doesnt really jump out at me, like it did on the zte axon 30. That came out, like i think, eight or nine months ago, and that photo is on the right here. So the one thing you will notice also is the the difference in the dimensions and thats, because the axon 40 ultra for some reason defaults to 16×9. With the front facing camera, but you can change that to 4×3, like you get with the axon 30 here, but i do like the kind of the cleaner image from the 4d, especially with the the background not being overexposed.

As you see in some spots on the 30, but really i wish that i had a combination of these two photos that would make for a great photo, but as they tweak these front facing cameras were definitely going to see some differences here and there. Some for the better and some for the worse now now im going to compare this to a more expensive phone, the samsung galaxy z fold. Three. Now this phone costs, you know over a thousand dollars more than the axon 40 ultra here, so it should be better. But what do you think so? I i think it does look a little bit softer compared to the um, the axon 40 ultra, but um. I think overall, it is a better image where i think i can throw this into like an editing, app and turn out the brightness a little bit and maybe make it a little bit sharper, and i think it will make a really good looking image. But the axon 40 ultra is definitely just brighter out of the gate, and so there are some things i like about it, but i think the z full 3 takes it a little bit when it comes to the overall quality. But again it does cost more money and heres a look at the portrait mode using the under display front facing camera on the 4d ultra here portrait mode on the left and the regular photo on the right – and here are a couple of photos that i took At night time, with this under display front facing camera and yeah, i would never use this the front facing flash helped out a little bit on the image on the right, but yeah its definitely not made for nighttime shooting okay.

So look for the 799 dollar starting price for this phone. I think zte has a solid phone here, but the biggest thing, of course, is going to be this under display camera for people who watch a lot of videos with their phone or play a lot of games on it like i do not having that front facing Camera kind of cut in into whatever youre, looking at or even having like a notch or something its definitely something that i think people want to see. But you are going to get a bump down in your your camera quality, no matter how improved they made it over the previous generation of phones, its still going to be worse than other phones. That dont have this under display technology. But, depending on how many selfies you take, that might not bother you, so it really does come down to what you really want in the phone, but i think for the under display camera smartphones out there from what ive used. This is definitely the best one when it comes to hiding that camera, and that might be the number one selling point for you, but anyway, these are just my thoughts. What do you think about this zte axon 40? Ultra phone leave your comment down below make sure you hit that like button. If you did like this video subscribe and hit that notification bell to my channel and also ill leave some links down below, if you want to check out this phone for yourself, i think they do have like a pre order, sale as well, but ill leave.

All those links down below for you, but for right now, im heading out of here.