ZTE has entered the Nepali market with some appealing products for the general Nepali consumers. The budget range of phones with moderate feature set has made the ZTE phones a viable option for those seeking a good phone within an affordable price.
The latest addition to this mobile series is the ZTE Blade V7 Lite which expects to satisfy smartphone users with its collection of noticeable specs and relatively low price of NRs. 18,990. However, is it really worth the price? Let’s take a look at the review and help you decide about it.
Desgin and Build
The phone comes with a sleek design with almost no bezel at the side of the screens but with noticeably thick black borders around the screen which almost seems like a bezel. The phone still has a good look with its clever design trick. It has a metallic frame with a unibody-like design(but not completely unibody design as advertised) and a slightly thin metal back. The metal frame gives it a sturdy feel and the phone is light and comfortable in hand. The phone, therefore, has a good design and average build which is as much as we can get at this price.
Display
The V7 Lite comes with a 5.0-inch 720p HD (720 x 1280 pixels) IPS LCD display with a pixel density of 294ppi and 2.5D curved glass on the front giving it a mixture of protection and aesthetic bonus with light curves at the edges. The display doesn’t do well under direct sunlight but handles day-to-day use with ease showing decent colors and average viewing angles.
Software
Talking about the software, this phone comes with a slightly better Android v6.0 Marshmallow with ZTE’s Mi Favor UI skin on top by default. V7 Lite gives an android experience close to stock but with some of its own additions. The phone has a customized icon set, gestures and quick settings with some options to customize capacitive buttons from the settings menu. There is no app drawer in Mi Favor UI as expected from a Chinese manufacturer so all the apps are present on the home screen. If this is a problem for some, it can be easily solved by using an Android launcher. We recommend Nova Launcher for this purpose but any decent launcher on the play store will do.
Performance
Inside, the Blade V7 Lite is powered by MediaTek MT6735P quad-core chipset with a clock speed of 1.0GHz and Mali-T720MP2 GPU. The phone handles multitasking and day to day usage pretty darn good, thanks to the 2GB RAM. The phone has a 16GB internal memory which can be supplemented by adding microSD card of up to 256 GB as external memory. The phone makes for a good mobile experience with smooth calls and media consumption while handling HD videos with no noticeable lag. As for gaming, the phone struggles at some high demanding areas and also exhibits minor heating issues but does score a respectable score in our benchmark test.
Camera
The phone sports a 13 MP primary camera on the back with LED flash. The phone’s sensor provides satisfactory images and when focused properly under suitable lighting conditions also clicks the picture with good details. However, the autofocus is not so good due to lack of some viable technology such as PDAF. The camera suffers in low-lighting conditions with dark pictures with image noise and reduced sharpness. Although this is one of those compromises we have to make at this price range.
The default camera app has an auto mode and a pro mode. The pro mode is like the manual mode in cameras with adjustable shutter speed and ISO. Advanced camera users, therefore, can tweak the camera’s settings to capture shots with preferred adjustments.
Here’s some camera sample clicked by us using the phone.
The front facing 8 MP camera takes good selfies with better details than other smartphones with 5 MP front cameras in its price range. The LED flash at the front also enables night time selfies and is ideal for low light conditions. Both cameras can record videos at 720P and have good video recording options.
Battery
The Blade V7 Lite houses a 2500 mAh non-removable battery which can last about 4-4.5 hours for regular multimedia consumption and basic web browsing. For heavy users using the phone with maximum brightness and continuous high-end gaming, the battery can deplete more rapidly. Other than that, the battery should be enough for regular users and last a day of average use.
Nice Feature Addition
The phone comes with a nice new addition which most of us really wanted in the latest budget phones, a fingerprint reader. Yes, the phone comes with a fingerprint reader and it can be used to unlock phone easily and also perform more actions configurable in the settings. By default, the fingerprint reader only works when the screen is on but it can be configured so as to unlock the phone even when the screen is off. The fingerprint is not as fast as one would want but it still performs well and provides slightly late but a smooth experience.
Verdict
ZTE Blade v7 Lite, thus, provides most of the things you would expect from a smartphone at this price and some more. The phone is an excellent alternative to people who are tight on their budget but prefer excellent design and hardware. The phone easily challenges the budget market with new feature additions and has even outmatched its competitors at certain points. For a price of around 18,000, this phone provides an average 13 MP camera with a good 8 MP selfie snapper, fingerprint reader, and a clever design which appeals to most of the user base.
