Review: Telstra Tough Max

Screen

With most mobile devices cutting back on buttons and killing the notion of the feature-phone, you’re pretty much going to be staring at a screen here, and that’s not so bad.

While the Tough Max won’t win any award for its 720p (1280×720) 4.7 inch screen, it’s still not bad, pleasing enough to the eye, and offers a pixel quality not far off that of the iPhone 6 and 6S, with 312 pixels per inch compared to the iPhone’s 326.

That might seem like a bunch of numbers, but the easy way to explain it is this: the screen size on the Tough Max is spot on with the iPhone 6S and the details pop in much the same way, but the colors and brightness don’t feel quite on par.

It’s a good screen, not a great screen, but at least there’s no real reason to complain about this screen, and since there’s a degree of Gorilla Glass protecting it not to mention a severely thick plastic casing on the body, there shouldn’t be too many complaints.

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Performance

At least there won’t be too many complaints on the screen, but you may find a few over on the performance side of things, with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor not necessarily pulling its weight.

Let’s talk usability first, though, because while Telstra and ZTE have stuck with Android, it’s pretty much the bare minimum for what constitutes Android.

On the one hand, it’s stock with no overlay so close to what Google wants, but on the other, it’s not the same version of Android that Google brings to its Nexus devices.

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Rather, this is more “vanilla”, with the same basic black apps and widget menu separation we saw when Android 4.0 first started appearing, supporting up to five widgetised home screens with very little control for quickly deleting the screens.

It’s a basic version of Android, that’s for sure, and we’d look into changing it as soon as you can with another launcher, all of which can be easily found on the Google Play Store.

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System performance for this generic Android phone isn’t the greatest, and even our standard benchmark struggled to run on the phone, stalling in ways we hadn’t seen prior.

It worked eventually, but it didn’t leave a good taste in our mouths, delivering a performance index closer to a five year old phone than anything, well, new.

Fortunately, the noticed performance fared better than the synthetic benchmarks, because while you’ll likely see a bit of lag, it won’t be quite as traumatic.

You don’t need a tremendous amount of patience for the Telstra Tough Max, but you will need some, because while loading apps is fast, jumping between them isn’t always the same.

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At least the 4G speeds are solid, and with a Category 4 modem here, a technical limit of 150Mbps down and 50Mbps is possible.

It is more likely you’ll find speeds closer to 40 to 80Mbps down and 30 to 40Mbps up, which still isn’t anything to sneeze at, especially since there’s a Blue Tick rating here, meaning you should get a greater reception as you make your way out of the city.

Battery

While the performance is a little all over shop, the battery handles its own, and one could even lay claim that this phone is a battler, not just in its ability to survive the world, but also a day to day existence.

We didn’t completely exhaust the battery, but we did find that after a day of texting, web surfing, taking pictures, emails, making phone calls, listening to music, and stopping to work (sorry, but we have to do that, too), the Telstra Tough Max provided a full 24 hours of life, offering enough for an extra half day if chose to push on.

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Based on this performance, it is technically conceivable to expect two days is possible, though you’d want to use the screen and the modem inside less.

That’s not bad like for a touchscreen phone, though we suspect that underperforming processor has something to do with this.

Camera

Next up is the camera, and while the megapixels on paper are decent, the performance of this shooter is like the overall performance: all over shop.

Let’s get something straight here: decent images are achievable from the ZTE T84, just not most of the time.

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In fact most of the time, the camera interface is either too simple or just plain ugly, but the results will always be a little blurry, with okay results in day and night, but very little detail, or very little sharp detail, at that.

So the camera here does the job, but isn’t quite the reason why you end up on the Tough Max.

No, there are better reasons to consider this phone.

Test image from the Telstra Tough Max
Test image from the Telstra Tough Max