Hoping to snare the local budget conscious consumers, ZTE launched a whole range of smartphones ranging from entry level to flagship in October 2014. Naturally, ZTE was kind enough to send us some review units of the midrange Blade V5, which was wrote about last month, and the Blade Vec Pro for this review.
SLIP OF A PHONE
Though just one notch higher on the range, the Blade Vec Pro is more similar to the Star 1 than the Blade V5. Its sleek and slim profile is lightweight enough that you might not even feel it in your pocket sometimes. At the front is the 5-inch display 720p, with the 5MP front facing camera, while the 13MP rear facing camera is, obviously, at the rear. On the right side of the phone you have the power button and the volume rocker, while the two 3G SIM slots are on the other side.
FAMILY FRIENDLY
What about features? A noticeable feature is the Family Mode, which turns the phone into a series of large tiles. The closes use I can think of is that it’s for children, or elderly people who need the larger fonts to read text and navigate the phone. Other than that, the Vec Pro is as vanilla Android Kitkat as it gets.
AVERAGE PERFORMER
Powering the Blade Vec Pro is a 1.4GHz MT6592 Octa-core processor with 1GB of RAM, just enough for some web browsing, social media and maybe a few simple 2D games. It’s not a multi-tasking powerhouse, but it gets by. The battery life is decent, even though it’s only a 2200 mAh, and likely to last you through work or school before you have to charge it.
TOUGH COMPETITION AHEAD
The ZTE Blade Vec Pro is for all purposes, a capable midrange phone. Unfortunately, the problem is that it doesn’t stand out against its other competitors. Its asking price also makes it a hard choice to pick, when you can pay just a bit more for flagship devices from other brands.
SPECS
Dimensions 142.3 x 70.4 x 7.8 mm
Weight 152 g
Chipset MediaTek MTK6592 ARM-Cortex-A7
Graphics Mali-450
Memory 1GB RAM
Display 5 inches, colour IPS TFT 720 x 1280 pixels
Camera 13MP rear-facing, 5MP front-facing
Storage 8GB, expandable via microSD
Operating System Android 4.4.2 Kitkat
Battery 2200 mAh