ZTE is taking another swing at the flagship market with the global launch of the Axon 40 Ultra. It’s one of their most striking designs yet with one of the best in-display cameras we’ve seen, with some new AI and software tweaks to round out the edges of the Axon line.
Is this the year that ZTE makes a splash in the US and other markets? Let’s find out.
Cutting edge design
It’s easy to mistake one brand’s phone for another these days, especially from the front. With an ongoing race to zero bezels and huge screens, everything tends to look same-y.
Despite a crowded market, though, I’ve really gotta hand it to ZTE’s design department The Axon 40 Ultra actually feels like a phone that’s ahead of its time, with a nearly edge-to-edge wraparound display with razor thin bezels. Its 20:9 aspect ratio is very tall, especially on a 6.8-inch display, but with a roughly 93% screen-to-body ratio it all just feels slick and modern. There’s no cutout or notch anywhere, either, with the improved camera hiding underneath the top of the screen.
The back of the phone utilizes a curved waterfall glass design that looks striking, especially in black. The camera module is large (maybe a little too large) and keeps the phone from resting flat on a table very well, but that blends in with 2022’s camera aesthetic. Gotta cram in those big sensors somewhere.
The power and volume buttons rest on the right side of the phone, with a USB-C charging port and dual-SIM tray along the bottom.
High quality display
The design of the screen isn’t the only thing that looks great here, don’t worry. The display itself is also very quality, with a 120Hz refresh rate for that extra smoothness and a 360Hz sampling rate to make everything feel a little more responsive.
Colors and brightness are good, delivering up to 1500 nits of peak brightness. That’s good news for your HDR content on Netflix, and makes the phone more suitable for outdoor usage. It’s flagship worthy, although OnePlus and Samsung might still slightly pull ahead in the display arms race.
Speakers are good, and the wide screen is perfect for movies. All in all, the Axon 40 Ultra makes a stellar choice for heavy media consumption and gaming on the go.
Snapdragon performance, but aggressive memory management
ZTE has chosen the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform starting at 8GB of RAM. As we’ve seen in some other devices, this CPU just will not struggle, whether you’re throwing demanding games, video editing, or heavy multitasking at it. Gaming is smooth, you can float a Netflix window on top of your web browsing and social media, and updates and installs are blazing quick.
Phone performance is great, but ZTE is still fairly aggressive with memory management, as we’ve seen on some similar devices. I’ve noticed some small hiccups, like the lock screen having to refresh on wake and taking a second to unlock and register fingerprints. Multitasking seems to be generally unaffected, and I didn’t see many actual app reloads, which does give me hope that this is something that will be addressed down the road with some software updates.
Fortunately, the hardware side of things is custom-built to last for years, with a high quality linear motor for haptic feedback, a 9-layer heat dissipation system, and zippy charging.
MyOS software
MyOS is the customization suite on top of Android 12 for the Axon 40 Ultra. It’s distinct from vanilla Android with ZTE’s usual flavor on top of Android 12’s newer design language in a general HarmonyOS direction, which at least helps separate the company from Samsung’s One UI.
It’s loaded with customization options if there’s something that you need to tweak to your own tastes, from the fingerprint unlock animation, automatically updating wallpapers, accent colors, and icon packs, and ZTE includes many productivity features in their skin of Android, too.
You can adjust how sensitive the edges of the screen are to accidental touches, customize gestures for lots of small tasks and actions throughout the OS, and control how your phone’s 4G/5G/WiFi connections should be managed.
ZTE doesn’t include too much bloat, either, although several of the default apps are skinned to match the rest of their UI. The only strange app I had preinstalled was a Booking.com app, but that’s an easy uninstall.
Battery and charging
The Axon 40 Ultra packs a 5000mAh battery, which should be good for an entire day’s worth of juice with even heavy usage. The sharp screen is surprisingly efficient, although you can put a dent in that battery running games at 120Hz.
Unfortunately it seems like ZTE has run into the same issues that OnePlus did, and the global/US variant of the Axon 40 Ultra will only launch with 65W charging, as opposed to the 80W charging that’s available in the original Chinese version that launched earlier this year. With that being said, as we found with the OnePlus 10 Pro, 65W charging is still generally going to be fine. You can fully recharge the battery in a little over half an hour, which I’d assume would work for 99% of our readers.
Camera
ZTE has opted for a triple camera system that, on paper, seems solid. It’s built to handle weird photo situations, but in practice can be a little inconsistent.
Outdoor shots are generally pretty good, and capture a lot of detail.
But it’s certainly not perfect. Certain scenes, especially with heavy shadows, can quickly blow out and overexpose in the weirdest ways. This is one of those things that I really do think will probably be addressed with a software update within a couple months, if not weeks, but as is it leaves something to be desired.
The Axon 40 Ultra is still a perfectly capable camera, though, snapping some great shots.
The moon mode is also really cool.
Worth it?
I’m impressed enough with the design of the Axon 40 Ultra that I’d recommend the phone on that alone. The material, shape, and notch-less screen are big enough selling points on their own that make the phone very pleasant to use. The Snapdragon muscle and great battery life are the cherry on top.
It’s not a perfect phone, though, with a camera that lags behind the competition and an update policy that doesn’t have the track record of what you’ll get from a Samsung phone. But even with those complaints, it’s one of the most appealing phones I’ve reviewed in a while, and anyone that’s looking for a well designed phone could do much worse than what ZTE’s got on offer.
If you’re interested in jumping on the Axon 40 Ultra early, ZTE is offering a promotion where you can put down a $1.99 pre-order to knock $50 off the phone’s $799 list price. That entry model is the 128/8GB variant, but ZTE is offering a some steps up if you need more.
It’s a cool phone, and I’m excited to see if ZTE can smooth out some of these rough edges with a couple software updates. What are you thinking about the Axon 40 Ultra?
