Axon 40 Ultra Review & Unboxing (EU Release)

So looking at it closely, the screen you wouldnt even know that it actually does have a 16 megapixel sensor behind the screen. The pixels cover it up so well that its very difficult to make out its only really in direct sunlight that you can see it now. This model here does have a 6.8 inch full hd plus screen amoled 120 hertz. It is powered by the snapdragon 8 gen 1.. My review unit here that they sent out to me does have 8 gigabytes of ram and 128 gigabytes of storage. It will be selling here in europe for 829 euros. This model has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery with 65 watt fast charging and the camera setup on the rear, 364 megapixel sensors so ill be going over this in depth and ill. Let you know all the pros and the cons now in my time, testing out the zte axon 40 ultra included with the axon 40 ultra youll find a tpu case. There is a 65 watt charger, its quite a good nice small size, type c to type c. Cable, some earbuds with a microphone theyre 3.5 millimeter ones, but we do have a adapter too so type c to 3.5. Why? Because of course, it does not have a 3.5 millimeter headphone out now this axon 40. It looks a lot to me, the design very similar to that of a samsung galaxy s22 ultra. You can see side by side, youll see what i mean here, see the three camera modules more or less in the same exact position, the same rectangular shape to them.

The curved edges, and then the flat tops and bottoms of both of them youll see looking at the screens right now too, that they look so similar. So this phone does weigh 204 grams, its not exactly what i would call light fingerprint location really good. I do like the way it unlocks its relatively quick and it is accurate, but the best part is the location they put it there. So when youre holding it with one hand, you can simply just place your thumb there and not like others that have it a little bit lower. So the thickness of this phone is 8.4 millimeters. We do have a bit of a texture on the power button. Then the volume up and down button right here, camera module, does protrude out by approximately three and a half millimeters so adding to that thickness a little bit. So the 8.4, of course, is counting here and i, like the material of the back of it. So the glass here is curved its a little bit like the oneplus 10 pro that ive reviewed the import version i did have from china and also the xiaomi 12 pro that it does have this shininess to it. The black, especially when you look at it in direct sunlight, you see how it kind of reflects the light, and this is a matte glass finish. So it doesnt really pick up. Fingerprints, which is great zte, has put a lot of effort into these cameras.

So weve got three identical: 64 megapixel cameras. They are the imx 787. So here is a periscopic camera 3.5 times optical zoom, then a 35 millimeter equivalent main camera and then a 16 millimeter ultra wide camera there. So dual tone: flash microphone for the rear and laser assist focus then the bottom of it weve got these antenna lines microphone our sim tray, which takes two nano sim, so no micro, sd card support and one of two loudspeakers so youll see again the similarities comparing It to the s 22 ultra here, of course, its got these stylus, which is right there, but even the layout where the loudspeaker is is identical there and the top youll see that we do have an ir transmitter and then that secondary loudspeaker, whereas you just have The microphone at the top there with the s22 ultra and you can see the antenna lines of course here and here the phone isnt too bad to handle, even though it is a large 6.8 inches. Now, of course, not having that cut out there. It just looks so much better, so this is a phone for people that dont actually take a lot of selfies. I personally dont take a lot of selfies. You might not believe that, but i only take selfies just for youtube and maybe twitter thats, really it so im, not too fussed about it, because there is a degradation in the camera quality, because the pixels are in the way and the camera has to look through It which ill get on to later on when we see the camera samples and video samples from it but thats just a bit of a spoiler there, but this is a really good screen, so its a full hd plus resolution.

The resolution is 1116 by 2480, so its full hd, so its not a quad hd screens, full hd plus resolution its super bright too. So it gets up to 1500 nets and it can be made out in direct sunlight as you see right now. So no issues with that and even in direct sunlight, you can barely see that its meant to have a front facing camera. The display, of course, does run at a maximum of 120 hertz, which im running the whole time we get auto so itll swap between 16 120, but sadly, yet again, another manufacturer that doesnt give us the 90 hertz option. I really want manufacturers to start offering that, because it is that sweet spot that perfect in between battery saving and fluidity of everything. So theres a lot of things in here that you can adjust. That are all typical that i wont go over. But we do have the settings you want, which is the color mode temperature. You can then adjust and scale and tweak everything here to your own personal preferences when it comes to the white balance, color temperatures and if you want the display to look more saturated or more natural looking, that is all there. So gestures are working really well. This phones, ui, is called my os 12 from zte. Now ive never been really a massive huge fan of it, but i will give them credit. Where do with this myos 12 that its really well optimized, i dont seem to have any major bugs or anything that ive detected in my time now using it.

So i do have eight gigabytes of ram with this model. Here the gestures, as i mentioned, are detected really well very quick and the animations are all fluid and smooth going into recent apps here, thats, quite quick. Normally, things will have to load in the background if you havent used them for a while, if its not a system app, that is, if its like a third party, one then youll see it reload, especially when its a heavy game or something that which is typical With there, with android so no noticeable lags, there were swiping down for the notifications for gestures, which i cant say about this the s22 ultra. However, it is getting now a lot better to this model after about five patches thats, taken them a while this straight out of the box is performing a lot better than my s22 ultra when it comes to the ui performance. So there are lots of different customization settings and whatnot that you can do with this one here, but i wont go over that because it is really quite self explanatory im sure most people know what these uis are like the options you do get of course, with Android 12., its all there and its just that performance. Im really happy with. I do take back what i said about it being bug free. I havent counted this bug here where i want to swipe down for toggles and im, pushing really hard here, but swiping down.

Doesnt do anything i dont know what is going on, so i can swipe up, but down at least down from the very top nothing im able to normally pull down the notifications or then the toggles adjust my brightness and hello. The only way to fix it. It seems is to turn it on and off or unlock again, and now it should work there. We go okay. Now it wants to work now. Zte has done an excellent job when it comes to additional unwanted, really applications that theyve installed pre installed. Bloatware, okay, thats not really present at all. There are the google, you could almost say bloat apps there, that maybe you want to remove some of those zte cares. That is really it so thats amazing compared to other brands that have just so much bloatware. So well done id like to see more brands doing this, just giving us the normal kind of typical stock android apps, not all this junk, like games and other applications and tick tock, and all that stuff that you probably dont even need thats already pre installed on There, for you, no not here so at the time of this video, this well that actually isnt the latest update now theres one that came through. That was very small. That was only just under around 200 megabytes and the battery charge time. So its 65 watt charging, with a 5 000 milliamp hour battery 41 minutes to go from 12 to 100.

You know what thats good anything thats under an hour in my book now in 2022 is acceptable. I still think its not the fastest out there, but i still think thats more than adequate to charge in 41 minutes. So this storage – i have 128 gigabytes here worth and its ufs 3.1 storage. We do get some very good, sequential reads and the rights are good and the randoms, but these arent, the fastest ive, seen normally with larger storage capacities like 512 or 256. You would get slightly better random reads and writes, but by no means is this going to cause any slowdown at all with this phone. You can see here from the synthetic benchmark of course and tutu that its fast, it is very fast at short, bursts, but the snapdragon 8 gen 1 is still in my experience. This really has not changed. Its a hot chipset went up 10 degrees. Just from that test, it really does need to be fan cooled like weve seen in the likes of say the red magic 7 or the 7 pro. So here its got a great peak performance. This is when its cool, but then, when it heats up, it really does slow right down. You can see throttling almost 40 percent the performance just to keep that chip set from overheating, so really quite a hot chip, of course, from uh qualcomm there. So i dont know whats going on here, but there was a fail with the safety net uh with our cts profile match.

So i do hope that that can be corrected there for people that need that for your banking apps. So we do have im a broken record here: widevine level, one cert and yes, netflix – will work in full hd, but no amazon, prime video does not its going to be standard definition until its white listed uh hardware support here for camera 2 api is full maximum. Thats great so gcam ports, open camera, its gon na have full access to those cameras and the gps is typical here. I probably end up scrapping this in my future videos, because its always good now uh the lock, is very quick. It maintains the lock its good fine battery life, all right, 120 hertz, fixed battery life test mark test benchmark. Sorry at 200, nits calibrated, brightness, yeah, almost 13 hours, just shy of it, not bad at all, but real world. You see looking around eight hours, maybe a little bit less uh. That is better than my samsung, which is not a surprise to me. So my samsung actually gets 11 hours and 14. So a little bit lower im only getting around seven hours on screen time. Out of this, i can squeeze about eight um, but, yes, okay, this phone does have a higher resolution, its just for me. The exynos chipset has not been quite as efficient as the snapdragon 8 gen 1. audio now, so it does of course, have active noise canceling with voice calls voice, calls sound fine and you can use a type c adapter to plug in your favorite set of headphones.

Now the volume out of the type c port is very good. Its really loud and overall, the audio quality is great. Just like these two loudspeakers they are powerful. They are really loud. Theyve got a little bit of bass to them and decent enough mid. So id have to rate these as some of the definitely some of the better sounding louds, because youll find on an android phone, so heres a sample now just a short track at 100 volume. Gaming performance is excellent, as youd expect for eight gigabytes of ram and snapdragon 8gen one this game here. Pubg is running on the extreme frame rate option thats. All it lets me have, even though it does support 120 frames per second, the screen. At least it only allows me to run 60., so the performance excellent, no problems i already do – have two kills here, but what ill do is play now for at least a couple of rounds well see how warm its going to get because already into this game. Now, for about five ten minutes, or so i can feel quite a bit of heat building up around this area, where the cameras are so its going to be interesting to see just how hot is the snapdragon 8gen1 going to get in the axon 40 ultra. Here all right, i can clearly feel it getting quite warm so its up to about 43 here on the back, which is not too bad ill.

Just flip it over well take a look at the front of it thats getting up to about 42.41 now. This is only just playing pubg, but ive found it get definitely warmer than what it currently is. So it will heat up that snapdragon 8 gen 1. over to our cameras, now video performance here, if youre shooting vlog footage, this is not really the phone for it. Now it looks like hey chris clean the front of the screen, no thats just what its like, because that sensor has to look through and around those pixels. So it has this blurriness to it and if youre in direct sunlight, you even get like a bit of a halo around like a white shirt and clothes, and that is the downside to it. It does not have any electronic image stabilization, either with the front facing camera. It seems because it is shaking around all over the place, rear cameras now. So all three of the sensors are the imx 787 with optical and electronic image stabilization. So, looking at the tower here, the clock that is on top of the council building, if i try to zoom back, i cannot so it wont automatically swap over to the ultra wide. This stability is looking very good here. The audio bitrate is 156 kilobits per second and the ultrawide now so this ones 16 millimeters. It does fit a lot into the shot and we do get the optical and electronic image stabilization.

So just jogging ahead, you can see its actually working out really quite well. There, the stability i do like with the camera, so this is 4k 30. It can shoot 4k, 60 and 8k too. Now there is a little bit of room now. I think, with that low light performance that they could improve upon it, especially compared to ztes competitors out there. Now some of the stills as well, i noticed, were a little bit over saturated and at times i did have problems with the focus that id have to take the shot again its not like one of those camera phone setups that you can simply just take one Photo – and you know its going to be great now – i recommend definitely taking about two or three just in case. One of them is out of focus. I did have a problem where, if you get close enough to your subjects, but not too close, it would struggle to decide what camera it actually wants to use. So it would swap between the ultra wide using a macro mode, with focus autofocus to then the main camera would go back and forth back and forth. That was a little bit annoying, and then i did have that bug where i swiped down from the top that i showed you and the toggles would not appear or notifications and thats happened to me now a few times. Apart from that, the ui is very fast.

Its stable, but that bug yes and the performance generally is really quick and good. With this phone excellent loudspeakers the battery life isnt bad charge. Time 65 watts will take you up to a hundred percent in around 41 to about 45 minutes which isnt bad at all. Now i dont know about their updates, but ive already had a couple come through, but i dont know how long theyd be going to be going for and price wise. This phone is this model here: the eight gigabyte version, with 128 gigabytes of storage, going to be selling for 820 euros, which is for a flagship, the spec of it i dont think, is bad. So who is the phone really for? I think its for people that really hate notches cutouts and you basically never use a selfie camera anyway. You dont take vlog footage either then youre going to have that full screen experience without the ugliness of the cutouts or the notches. That bother you. However, if youre someone that takes a lot of selfies takes a lot of vlog footage, this really clearly is not the phone to get then because, as you saw from my samples, even though yes, the tech is improving and its really good to see that theyre improving The selfie quality youre still going to get quality that is subpar and below a normal front facing camera set up, especially for video performance. Youre gon na get that halo that blurriness effect to it theres simply no way to get rid of that.

Just yet because the sensor has to look around and through those pixels really so thats what is going to happen there, of course. So.