ZTE’s $299 4G Blade S6 reviewed

The easiest button to identify is the one under a circle, and that’s your home button.

It’ll be pretty obvious when you pick up the phone, but what won’t be as obvious will be the left and right soft buttons, because without being switched on, they’re simply white, with no markings.

Once the phone is on, you’ll see two blue dots light up, with one acting as back and the other as the older Android “menu” button, though you can change which is which in the software for the phone.

Overall, the layout isn’t totally clear at first, but you get used to it.

That said, we think ZTE could have just forgone the button markings, minuscule as they are, and just made the soft buttons appear on the screen, as so many other Android smartphones do. That would have made more sense, and could have meant either a bigger screen or less bezel, in theory, anyway.

With the phone on, however, you can get stuck into using it, and being a smartphone, there are, of course, a numbers of things you can do.

You can make phone calls, you can surf the web, you can write notes and take photos and listen to music and capture images with the camera and tweet and Facebook and play games and generally just use the phone.

And you’ll do it all with a barebones basic version of Google’s Android 5.0 “Lollipop”.

Forget the niceties of an overlay, because they can’t be found here, and even Google Now’s menu and news screen is missing here, meaning there’s no stock swipe to the left to find your day and any suggested reading materials loaded for you, nor is there that familiar set of app icons on a white backdrop that Lollipop typically shows.

You could always load Google’s Now launcher later, but the ZTE comes with the a totally barren edition of Android.

That’s not a bad thing, either, and it’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing, and a thing that feels a little out of date, revealing menu layouts and home screen looks similar to that of an older version of Android from when before Google made its Now launcher more friendly.

At least it’s fairly up to date, which is more than some manufacturers can say for other phone releases.

Performance is mostly strong, though, and while the Blade S6 doesn’t arrive with the fastest of processors, its Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 is no slouch either, providing eight-cores of processing power to work alongside 16GB storage and 2GB RAM.

This combination of technology helps the ZTE Blade S6 to handle itself quite well with just a hint of lag as you jump from app to app, browse the menus, and generally use the phone.

 

Sometimes it can be fairly noticeable and is more than a hint, and we’ve even found an app that was able to crash the phone, with one of our synthetic benchmarks working once with poor results, and then crashing out the whole handset every other time.

We’re not sure what’s going on there, but overall, the performance is quite surprising, especially given the $299 price tag, and it’s something we can likely attribute to the combination of excellent specs and up-to-date operating system.

Storage isn’t bad either, with 16GB storage offered out of the box, and a little over 11GB of that available to you.

If you start to run out, ZTE hasn’t cut off upgrades like another S6 manufacturer has, and you’ll find a pin ejection tray offers up a microSD slot for you to throw some extra storage into.

The display isn’t bad either, and while we’ll always prefer a higher resolution screen, the 5 inch 720p IPS display offered up in the Blade S6 is definitely pretty enough, featuring decent viewing angles and relatively clear text and images.

Sure, it’s technically not Retina grade, sitting at roughly 294 pixels per inch compared to the 326 of Apple’s iPhone 6, but you’ll still find a decent screen is being offered up in this phone.