Last month, ZTE launched its most affordable 4G smartphone dubbed the ZTE Blade Qlux 4G in India at Rs. 4,999. Because of its brand value, decent specifications and 4G support at very affordable price, we at FoneArena decided to keep it in our Top 10 list of Android smartphones under Rs. 5,000 as well. But is it worth the money? We find out in our detailed review.
Unboxing
httpv://youtu.be/hJlxh2iYeiw
Box Contents
- ZTE Blade Qlux 4G smartphone in Black
- 2-pin charger (5V-1A)
- Headset
- 2200mAh battery
- Quick start Guide and Warranty information
Build and Design
The design of ZTE Blade Qlux 4G is very basic, which you have already seen with a lot of Chinese smartphones. Complete body is made out to plastic and feels cheap. Considering the price bracket of Rs. 5,000, we were not expecting the overall build to be great too, but since we have recently reviewed two devices in the same price segment – InFocus M2 and Micromax Canvas Spark Q380 – with better build and design, we can safely say that ZTE Blade Qlux has got good competition to deal with.
Front of the Blade Qlux packs a 4.5-inch FWVGA (480×854 pixels) display. Above the display sits notification LED, earpiece grill and the front facing 5-megapixel camera. Below the display features three capacitive backlit touch buttons – Back, Home, and Menu. You can also interchange the functionality of Back and Menu from phone’s setting menu.
Back of the smartphone boasts of soft rubberized matte finish, which feels very smooth in hand. The top center back features an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash. There is ZTE branding slightly below the camera. Bottom-left corner has the loudspeaker grill.
Coming to the sides, the Blade Qlux has got rounded edges. The top features a 3.5mm audio jack. Right side of the handset has power / lock key and the volume rocker. The Micro-USB charging port is placed on the left side and the bottom only has primary microphone. Overall, the device fits and feels okay in hands. It is light weight with 154 grams and measures 134.5×67.4×10.3mm.
Display
ZTE Blade Qlux 4G packs a 4.5-inch display with 480×854 pixels (FWVGA) resolution and roughly 218ppi pixel density, whereas the competition Micromax Canvas Spark offers 4.7-inch qHD (540×960 pixels) with 234ppi and InFocus M2 4.2-inch HD (768×1280 pixels) display with 355ppi.
We felt the display quality of ZTE Blade Qlux is just about okay for the price. It is little reflective and prone to fingerprints / smudges. Sunlight legibility is poor, but the display looks decent indoors with full brightness. Viewing angles on the phone are good as well.
Performance and Software
Under the hood, the Blade Qlux 4G packs a 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6732M 64-bit processor with Mali-T760 GPU and 1GB of RAM. Overall performance of the smartphone is pretty decent. Apps and games run smoothly, and of course it’s worth the value. Audio and video playback is average. Audio output with loudspeaker is loud enough, but the quality isn’t good. ZTE ships headphones in the retail unit and the output of it is decent as well. It also has FM Radio support.
The ZTE Blade Qlux runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat OS out-of-the-box, and company says that it is upgradable to Android 5.0 Lollipop. The UI is mostly stock Android, which is a good thing. There are two launcher options, default launcher gives you app drawer and the other one is Family mode, which is similar to Huawei’s Emotion UI lite launcher and InFocus EZ UI launcher.
Out of the 8GB of internal storage, only 5GB (4.96GB) of storage is available for the user. You can expand the storage up to 32GB via microSD card. One good thing about the device is that you can move apps to microSD card. It lacks USB OTG support though.
Benchmarks
httpv://youtu.be/auEcogk-0EU
The ZTE Blade Qlux 4G scored 8537 points in the Quadrant Benchmark and lies behind the Zenfone 5. It manged to clock 42.4 fps in the NenaMark 2 benchmark. Find out more here.
Camera
The ZTE Blade Qlux 4G packs an 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash and a 5-megapixel front facing camera. Rear camera can only take decent images in bright daylight and it is terrible otherwise. We can’t even comment on the indoor shots or even the night shots. Front camera too can only click pictures when there is ample light. We had high hopes from the two cameras, and Blade Qflux disappointed us on that front. Checkout image samples below (click to enlarge).
Connectivity and Battery life
The ZTE Blade Qlux is a dual-SIM (Micro-SIM cards) device with SIM slot 1 for 4G LTE/3G/2G connectivity and SIM 2 supports only 2G. These can be found beneath the removable back panel along with microSD card slot that supports expansion up to 32GB. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and GLONASS.
Coming to the removable 2200mAh battery, the phone will easily last about 16 to 18 hours on a single charge with single-SIM on 3G and average usage, which is decent. But to note here, with continuous 4G data, the battery life will reduce drastically as the network requires more battery. Similar for two operational SIM cards, the device should give about 12 hours of battery life without recharging.
Verdict
Overall, it’s an average smartphone, but with 4G support at this price you can surely give it a try, especially considering that the Rs. 5,000 budget segment is mainly for beginners and doesn’t have many smartphones with specifications like the ZTE Blade Qlux 4G. The smartphone is exclusively available online from Amazon India website.
Yes, you definitely make some compromises with the Blade Qlux, but if you can extend the budget for about Rs. 1,000 than Xiaomi’s Redmi 2 with recently slashed pricing of Rs. 5,999 should serve you better.
Pros
- Decent performance
- 4G support
- Battery
Cons
- Display
- Camera