MWC 2019 is all about 5G and today at MWC ZTE were the next to announce a 5G flagship. Their flagship is the next in the Axon line, the Axon 10 Pro 5G.
ZTE have been very light on with the specs they have provided media outlets but luckily we have many boots on the floor and we were able to capture pictures of their specs as well as experience some hands on time with it (more on this below).
The ZTE Axon 10 Pro 5G (yes that is a mouthful) is both 4G and 5G compatible, not surprisingly is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 with the Snapdragon X50M with just 6GB and 128GB of onboard storage. On the front is a 6.47 AMOLED display with a FHD+ resolution (2340 x 1080 pixels) along with a 20MP front-facing camera. Unsurprisingly it will be running Android Pie out of the box.
The rear camera is a triple lens system with a 48MP, f/1.8 with a 20MP lens 125 degree wide-angled lens and an 8MP telephoto lens. All of this is kept chugging along by a 4000mAh battery but of course no one knows exactly how long a 5G phone battery will last in the real world in real world situations with larger numbers of users on the network – whether this is enough time will tell but at this stage most 5G phones seem to have batteries around this size.
AI will be sprinkled liberally throughout the device to help control device usage such as CPU speeds and RAM usage to help keep that battery killing to a minimum. The AI will also be used to aid in camera usage with the usual scenes being detected by the AI and then it adjusting the exposures etc on the fly.
Being a premium phone in 2019 the phone will of course arrive with an in-display fingerprint sensor which seems to be an optical fingerprint sensor rather than the ultrasonic one that is in the Samsung Galaxy S10 devices.
Ausdroid Hands On with the ZTE Axon 10 Pro 5G
We managed to head around to the ZTE booth and spend some albeit brief but quality time with the Axon 10 Pro (before it was quickly whisked to someone else to pawn/fawn over).
Holding the device it was most definitely a fingerprint magnet with its glass back and front but in the hand it felt sturdy, solid and well engineered (as many Chinese phones are these days). In saying that it felt dense and heavy in the hand, most likely due to the 4000mAh battery housed within.
The software felt relatively zippy and fluid but with only a couple, short minutes with the single Axon 10 Pro 5G on display at MWC it was hard to form a definitive opinion of the experience one would expect from the phone. Given ZTE’s penchant for using a very barebones approach to the Android operating system we would expect this to continue for the western market. This, one would expect, result in a snappy experience within the OS.
There was no headphone jack on the phone but we were unable to either confirm nor deny the presence of NFC on the device.
We were unable to confirm the likelihood of this device landing on our shores but we expect it to be unlikely. Hopefully they remember how well the Axon 7 did for them here in Australia and grace our shores with it – although it most likely won’t arrive until after our 5G networks mature. It will be launching in Europe and China in the next few months.
Fingers crossed it lands here.
