ZTE Blade Z Max for MetroPCS - Full Review - A great follow up to the ZMax Pro! By Donavon Hornbeck

Hey, what's up YouTube down the smartphone guy, coming back edge with another video, and today I'm excited to bring to you my full review of this device right here. This is the ZTE Blade Max. So, as you can see, it's available on metro, PCs for $129, at least at the moment prices may change based on when you're looking at this video. But for now the price is $129, and it's currently only available on metro PCs. So this is a direct follow-up to the very, very popular ZTE blade, Max pro or side, just the Max pro, and that was a fantastic device, kind of change or revolutionize. What I think a budget phone could be, and this is a good follow-up to that device.

So let's go ahead and talk about what all this thing has to offer. So we have of course 4G LTE. We have Android it's running Android 7.1.1 out of the box. We have a six-inch full HD display with 2.5 deg lass. That simply just means that the glass is curved now notice here that it says dragon tail glass, that is the scratching scratch resistance kind of glass that they have on there, which I'll say is not the greatest scratch resistance.

It's certainly not as good as Corning Gorilla Glass, but at least there is some kind of scratch resistance there we have- and this is one of the new features we have a 16 megapixel and 2 megapixel camera on the rear, with autofocus and LED flash. We have an 8 megapixel front facing camera. So that's that one right there we have 32 gigs of on-board storage and 2 gigs of ram. So that's similar to last year. Now we do actually have a Snapdragon 400 series processor in this one.

So that's clocked at 1.4 gigahertz, that's an outscore processor, whereas last year you have the Snapdragon 617, but I'm on Geek bench and really pretty much any benchmark. Scores you're going to find out that they're really about the same, even though the other one, the Max pro, had a 617 in it. This one has a 400 series. They actually clock out at about the same performance, so you can expect whatever performance you got on your Max pro. If you're looking at getting this or switching to this, you will notice that it's probably not going to be a huge difference between that device and this device.

So let's go ahead and talk about the build quality of this. So one thing, you'll notice, right away, is that the phone in terms of the actual build is very similar to last year's Emacs Pro. So this is the blade x max. This is the one for circuit kind of similar device to the Max pro almost the same, build but with a different back, but you can see that this one is actually slightly thinner. I, don't know if you guys noticed that, but it is just slightly thinner than this one here, but the interesting thing is that this one actually has a much larger battery.

This has a 4080 William hour battery or as I believe. This one only has a three thousand four hundred million power battery. You can see this one has a slick back to it, which you know it is what it is almost looks like it could be glass, but it's not it's plastic, whereas this one has a much more drippy textured back and I. Definitely prefer this one hands down. There's no question about it.

This one almost makes you feel like you, don't even need a key for the phone now I would get a screen protector, but I mean unless your seat, you know really worried about dropping your phone. The backing on this phone just feels fantastic. I really like that, and that's a huge thumbs up to ZTE I would say, keep going with this I know. Some people didn't really like the similar back that I had on the blade v8 Pro, but I definitely liked this backing. Now it is still plastic on the sides.

We still have the buttons here in the same position up on the top still plastic. There's a microphone up there as well there's our sim tray, which does also double as a micros expansion slot there we do have a headphone jack, another microphone and type-c for charging. So another big thumbs up to ZTE with that type C, so they're kind of leading the curve on type C. A lot of budget phones don't come with it. This one does so that's nice, so build quality.

We have another 1080p display, so right now, I'm actually running, not the stock launcher, so I should probably run it back to the stock launcher. So this is the stock launcher that comes on. So we have a back button, a home button and a recent app. But now you can actually reverse those two, but obviously the home button cannot be reversed in the software, but in terms of the display again a beautiful display. This one actually feels like it's not quite as bright as the Max pro so I, don't know if you can tell if I bring it up on the blade Max, because this one has the same display as a Max pro.

So let's see what let's go ahead and bring that up. Okay, so I don't know if you can really tell the difference, but for me the blade Max just has a slightly brighter screen, and I'm, not exactly sure why they probably are the same one. But for me this one just seems a little dimmer, but still a very good screen in terms of performance, I kind of already mentioned the performance if you're, if you're familiar with the Max pearl, this has a very similar performance and on Geek bench scores and really just about any score. You're gonna look at it scores right around the same for single core and multi multi-core score, so I get a multi-core score of 2607 in a single core score of six. Seventy-eight so that two gigs of ram coupled with that 1.4 gigahertz processor. For me, you know it performs fairly well in social media like if I were to go into Facebook and Twitter, and things like that.

You will definitely see just a little stutter. It's certainly not as fast as something like this. This is the note 8, but it's still, you know it holds its own in terms of gaming. It does. Okay with lighter games, but certainly not heavier games.

If you are somebody who plays you know like you can see the games that I play beach, buggy racing, NBA, Jam, Hill, Climb, 2, nothing super fancy, it can handle some more graphic intensive games, so I did play asphalt, 8 on it just to test it, and it did do okay with that one. It does drop some frames from every now and again, but it is still very playable, obviously not going to get the same kind of experience. You're going to get on something like the note 8, but still the experience overall is not too bad, so in terms of performance, certainly not flagship performance, so it's definitely not going to compete with something like this and one thing one other thing I'll just kind of compare here. So this is a six point. Four inch display versus the six-inch display on the blade Max here, so the height wise they're, about the same width wise.

Definitely, the note 8 is a little thinner, but obviously the screen on this one is a lot more narrow, and you know I kind of prefer. This kind of screen personally, but obviously can get a lot more screen when you have that almost like bezel list design like the noh8 so who knows maybe ZTE has something up their sleeves soon when it comes to bezel those phones, but for now we have just really nice budget phones with very large displays, and I'm. Okay with that I really like this display. So next thing I want to talk about, so performance is, is pretty good in terms of cameras. So this is a pretty cool feature, so we have a 16 megapixel camera in a 2 megapixel camera and of course we have that dual focus here, so we can do the bouquet effect.

We can do the portrait mode I mean they kind of give you an idea of what those different effects do, so the both will actually make it so that it focuses on one particular area. So if I come in here, and I pick that one- and we take a picture of- let's say this charge right here, so I actually can pick where it focuses, and then I can change after well. I'd have to go into the picture over here and I can actually change how much it blurs out the background. So you can see here that it does a good job of blurring out the background, but I can actually change that here and adjust how much I blur out the background. So right now it's at F, 2.0, and I can turn it F 1.0, and it blurs it out even more so notice, some other things got a little more blurry in the background, or I can go over here to F point 8 and notice. Everything comes back into focus, so pretty cool feature so that both effect o gallery I.

Don't think I've ever had that happen before so. That's what that one does then back into the dual mode. So then we have the portrait, which I'll show some examples of that. Essentially it does the same thing that you would get with the both. Only now it's going to focus on whatever's in the foreground, not necessarily just whatever you pick, and then we have mono color, which of course is going to focus on one color.

So if you take a picture of something like this, and I can focus on blue, and we'll take a picture of the Metro PCS go back in here to my gallery now. I did actually take a picture. Let's see, nope I didn't try again alright. So let's take a picture of the Metro PCS box here and I. Have it focused on blue, and now we'll come in here, and it's kind of being slow about it, so you can see kind of the sluggishness a little there I'MSO notice only the blue comes in color.

Now this is mostly just a blue picture, but notice on the actual box. We have some colors there, but notice on here. It's just pretty much focusing on the blue. So that's what the mono color will do I'm, but overall I'm going to throw up a lot of pictures at the end of this. So if you want a better idea of what the pictures look like with this camera, you definitely get some decent pictures, but certainly again we're not going to get flagship.

Pictures actually took that exact same picture with the noh8 and clearly the noh8 was the winner to actually could see the blue in the background here, whereas this wouldn't get that obviously a more detail in the no tape, but again we're talking about a nine hundred and thirty dollar phone versus a $130 phone. So this is a portrait mode picture, so you can see that it obviously keeps focus on my daughter here, but then it blurs out that background. So does a good job of that now there are some times when it's a little spotty. So notice like in this picture, with the portrait mode, see how her hand got blurred out, so it there definitely can be some improvements in terms of the software with the portrait mode I mean part of that could be just you know my picture taking in quality, but you can see again her hand is kind of blurred out because it was in the background a little too far, and so the software didn't do a good job of picking that up, but overall, it's still pretty decent picture quality. Again, with this being a hundred and thirty dollar phone, if you're taking some pictures in the dark, it's not going to do as well as some more expensive phones, but still a decent job and then, in terms of the video we do not have any kind of stabilization with the video but reshoot we can shoot an up to 1080p.

So 1080p is our max resolution up 720p, but decent video quality, but again there's no stabilization. So if you're moving around you're not going to get any kind of stabilization with it. So next thing I want to talk about is the software, so you can see obviously I'm running Nova Launcher, but the actual stock software really isn't too bad. Again, it's running Android 7.1.1. It's almost stock, really, there's not a lot of tweaks to stock Android on this.

There are just a few software tweaks in here. So if I go up here into the settings, there's just a couple in here I believe in the security there's a couple of things you can do with the fingerprint sensor if I can actually find it, but for the most part you're pretty much. Looking at stock Android with just some very, very minor tweaks now out of the box, I didn't mention this, but you can see that with a hundred and eight apps installed, I currently have a little over twelve and a half gigs remaining of that storage, because about ten is being used out of the box. So you're getting about 22 is what you're actually going to get out of the box now I'm about to get a notification for my wife, probably here in just a second, because I just thought popup on my no date, but we'll see there. It is alright but yeah so stock software here so huge thumbs up to ZTE for that I'm, a big fan of their software, but I just prefer a nova launcher on any phone that I'm using.

So the last thing I want to talk about is the speaker. So let's go ahead and jump into YouTube here for some music, and so this just has that single rear firing speaker. Obviously there you go, I really hit something: I, don't even know what I'm watching now alright. So let's go frontage Tech. Apparently that was the last thing: I was watching.

Alright, so let's go into you can see. I was looking up a video on animes' footrace, the watch that I'm currently wearing alright. So now, let's go into some royalty-free music. Alright, so my favorite is cloud 9. It usually pops up right away.

So let's do the let's go cloud: 9 crank it all the way up, so it gets. It gets relatively loud. It's definitely not the loudest speaker by any means and obviously being rear firing. You can block it like if you're playing games, you're, probably gonna, hold your finger over it and I found that when I was playing some games, that I tend to block it, but you know, thankfully they have the headphone jack and this does actually have Dolby audio built into it as well. So when you're listening to music, if you want to change some Dolby audio settings, you can change those right here and that Dolby audio app there.

It is so you know at least that is an option. So overall I definitely think this is a phone easily worth $129 I mean. There's no question to me that this phone is worth $129, and it's really a pretty fantastic offering from ZTE. So this is the ZTE Blade Max again you can pick it up on metro, PCs for 130 dollars. I hope this review has been helpful for you.

Thanks for watching, and I will see you all in the next video peace.

Source : Donavon Hornbeck