ZTE Blade A2 Plus Review

Product Introduction

The ZTE Blade A2 Plus is the newest predecessor of the ZTE Blade A2 model, which is a mid-level Android smartphone, equipped with more advanced specifications, suitable for both mid-level and high-level users. The new model runs under Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system, powered by a Mediatek Octa-core MTK6750 processor.

It comes with lots of good features worth exploring. Main specifications include a 5.5-inch touch screen, metal-made body, and a large capacity 5000 mAh non-removable battery that theoretically should last phone up to one-day usage, or more depending on the type of usage.

Review Focus:

• Introduction
• Price when reviewed: $165
• Specs & Product Key Features
• Package
• Package Contents
• Build Quality & Design
• Display
• Hardware & Performance
• Software
• Cameras
• Speaker, Sound Quality
• Microphone
• GPS
• Battery
• Final verdict
• Product Ranking

ZTE Blade A2 Plus Highlights

1. 64-bit Octa-core MTK6750 CPU – Up to 1.5GHz
2. 5.5″ FHD 2.5D Display (1920 x 1080 pixels)
3. OS: Android 6.0
4. 5000mAh Large Battery (Quick Charge).
5. 3GB RAM + 32GB ROM
6. Multi-functional Touch ID
7. Cameras: 13MP Rear + 8MP Front
8. Metal Body
9. Bluetooth 4.1
10. Sensors: Light, Geomagnetic, Proximity, Gravity, E-compass, Hall sensor

 ZTE Blade A2 Plus Package

 ZTE Blade A2 Plus Unboxing

Package Contents

• 1 x ZTE Blade A2 Plus Phone
• 1 x User Manual
• 1 x Charger (5V-1.5A , 9v-1.5a)
• 1 x USB Cable
• 1 x Eject Pin

Build Quality, Design

From the first impression, the ZTE Blade A2 Pluslook of a high quality device. The back cover of the phone is composed of plastic and metal materials. When you hold the phone in your hands the general feeling is of a solid build design device. The speaker grills where are designed smart, located on the side of the phone and not on the rear of the phone, which normally “block” sound when placing the phone on a surface, such as a table.

ZTE Blade A2 Plus

Display

The ZTE Blade A2 Plus comes with a 5.5-inch FHD (1080P) IPS capacitive Touch screen with gorilla glass protection on top of it. From my tests, the screen is a 3 point touch screen and not 5 or 10 points normally used on known brands and probably selected to cute some production costs. Nerveless, despite this poor selection of touch panel in a user standpoint I didn’t feel any impact on user experience when typing. As for the Sharpness and brightness levels of the screen, they were excellent and very easy on the eyes.

Notifications: When you get Notifications, for examples incoming emails, IM Messages the round-shaped home button flashes its light on and off.  The Navigation Keys on the sides are a doted type of illumined keys, that need some time to get used to, but overall they had a nice design to the general look of the phone.

Hardware And Performance

The ZTE Blade A2 Plus hardware platform is based on Octa-Core (8 Cores) MT6750T 64-bit Processor, running at clock speeds between 286MHz up to 1.5GHz max (for each core) along with a Mali-T860 GPU. My General impression was nothing but good. The phone didn’t hurt when running “heavy” games and running high consuming applications such as AnTuTu Benchmark. The ‘Smart power’ feature included in the phone ROM did a good job in managing system resources and also preserve battery power for long operation time.

AnTuTu benchmark

Software

Maybe one of the top highlights of this product. ZTE company did an Impressive work providing rich functionality and features integrated in the phone software. The phone came with the customized International ROM called: ‘Mifavor UI’ which basically runs top of Android 6.0 OS, packed with ZTE Tools for operating and managing software to the most optimizes level.

ZTE packed their ROM with lots of apps with few innovative functions such as monitoring and viewing internet bandwidth consumption for running apps, Mi-Assistant for cleaning the unused space with spam blocking and anti-virus functions to protect the phone. The ‘App duplicator’ Application lets you install “duplicates” of the same apps in case you want to use multiple accounts using the same app. A practical, handy function that might be useful for running multiple instances of Facebook, Wechat, QQ and so forth. The user can also have the ability to define navigation key functionality through the ‘Navigation Key’ option.

ZTE Blade A2 Plus | Software & UI 

Cameras

• Rear 13MP: Preformed well under optimum light conditions, producing slightly above average quality photos. Under low light picture quality wasn’t so great and pixels of were very grainy and the picture was blurry.
• Rear 8MP: Produced average quality photos.
• dual-LED flash: When used in dark environments produced reasonable and sharp photos.

Outdoor Photos

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Indoor Photos (With Flash)

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Speaker (Sound Quality & Audio levels).

The speaker produced high-quality rich sound. The speakers were loud in a reasonable volume level limit, No complaints here.

Microphone: Microphone performance was OK, not super sensitive as I expected, but still reasonable.

GPS

“Worked out of the box”, without installing any 3rd app party for Tweaking the GPS Settings. GPS performance was superb, tested with ‘Here Maps’ and ‘GPS Test’ Applications. It took about ~3 seconds to for a first satellite fix and less than a minute with an accuracy of approximately 4-5 m.

GPS Test App

Battery

Was very impressive. With the combination of ‘Smart power’ function enabled, the power manager built-in the Rom and the high capacity 5000 mAh Battery the user can expect long battery operation, especially in standby mode. Depending on usage, which includes some Web browsing, Data Connection turned On you can get about 1 day of work and 2+ days of operation in standby mode.

Power Manager

Final verdict

Overall the ZTE Blade A2 Plus is a very well designed phone in terms of quality, features, and specifications and I highly recommend it.