ZTE Axon 40 Ultra Review: The ALL SCREEN Samsung Galaxy Look-Alike!
At a glance, the brand new ZTE Axon 40 Ultra is essentially a Samsung Galaxy S22 / Note 20 Ultra lookalike. BUT there is one big cosmetic difference here: this features ZTE’s 3rd generation under-display selfie camera - giving it a truly immersive screen. We’re looking at a 6.8” FHD+ AMOLED display with curved edges and a refresh rate that can automatically flip between 60 or 120Hz. Even if you are perfectly fine with a hole punch, you can’t deny just how good this screen looks without one. C’mon now - It just looks better. Look really, really closely and you can sort of make out the outline of the camera, but otherwise - you wouldn’t even know it’s there.
ZTE Axon 40 Ultra (left) & Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (right) side by side comparison.
Alright so, they did a good job hiding the camera, but what are the selfies like?
Yeah… after 3 generations, it’s still not great. It’s actually pretty underwhelming when you compare it to a proper selfie camera. This literally feels like a camera from like 10-15 years ago. Bottom line - if you like your selfies - this still isn’t gonna cut it. Unfortunately, that’s just a tradeoff for these under display cameras right now.
Paired with that awesome all-screen display are dual stereo speakers tuned by DTS. The cut out at the top made me think that, that’s where the top speaker was, but no. Like most phones these days, it’s actually where the ear-piece is. Some sound does come through the cut out & there is a mic in there, but yeah - not an actual speaker. I'd rank the sound quality a notch below top-end Samsung & Apple devices. I'd like a little more bass and at loud volumes, the sound can sometimes pierce your ears a bit, but overall the speakers compliment the screen nicely.
There's also an optical fingerprint scanner under the display - I do like the location because that’s where my thumb naturally lands. This one works really well so no complaints from me.
The phone’s design isn’t gonna win any awards for originality, but at least they changed up the finish. It has a soft matte texture that almost shimmers when light hits it. I like it.
For the most part, you’re looking at a typical top-end android phone in terms of specs, but it does lag behind in a couple of areas. The phone only has an IP52 water/ dust resistance rating & it doesn’t support wireless charging. Considering that even mid-range phones these days are rated IP68 and can charge wirelessly, I’d definitely want to see both here too.
SPECS RUNDOWN
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
6.8-inch OLED, 2480x116p, 120Hz
8GB + 128GB or 12GB + 256GB (non-expandable)
Battery: 5000mAh with 65W charging (no wireless charging)
Water / Dust resistance: IP52
IR Blaster | Dual SIM support
Front Camera: 16MP f/2.0
Rear Cameras: 64MP f1.6 Main | 64MP f/3.5 Telephoto | 64MP f/2.4 Ultrawide
TRIPLE 64 MP CAMERAS!
A major draw for this phone is that there are three 64MP cameras on the back, yes three. The main camera takes pictures that are equivalent to a 35mm lens, meaning they’re a little more zoomed in than a typical smartphone camera. The telephoto lens gives you 2.6x optical zoom and up to 40x digital - this actually turned out to be my favorite lens on the phone, I really like the extra reach for framing subjects and yeah it was just a lot of fun to use.
This phone also has a ton of camera modes - it actually might be TOO many, but one of my favorites is “multi-camera”. Basically it lets you hit the shutter once and capture a picture from all three lenses at the same time. Such a cool way to capture multiple perspectives in one shot - more phones should steal this. One annoyance I’ve noticed is that there’s a big color temperature difference between all three lenses, which is obviously not ideal.
Overall, while I’m not blown away - I’ve been pretty satisfied with the pictures taken on this phone. I think they’ve done a good job not overdoing the processing and keeping things more true to life. Auto HDR can be very hit or miss though and you’ll get a lot of blown highlights especially with back lit scenes. Because of that - it can be unreliable at times and you might have to take a 2nd or 3rd picture to get one where it kicks in properly.
One of the software bugs I’ve run into is with the video recording, whenever I try to switch to the telephoto lens the camera app crashes. Every. single. time. So yeah, I couldn’t test that at all. ZTE says that you can technically record up to 8k video on every lens, which is impressive but probably overkill for most of us. What I do like is that it can actually do 4k at 120fps - then when you go to view your footage - you can choose which parts of the video you want to slow down for that slo-mo cinematic look. The video quality is fine but also unreliable. Under direct sunlight it tends to clip highlights and on several occasions it had a hard time finding focus. It’ll get the job done, but falls behind a lot of other flagship phones.
MyOS 12 IS SUPRISINGLY CLEAN
The phone runs Android 12 with ZTE’s MyOS 12 skin on top. If you’ve never used a ZTE phone before, the automatic assumption is that: “oh, it’s gotta be full of 3rd party apps and other bloatware” right? But this is one of the cleanest phones when it comes to preinstalled apps. They don’t even have their own apps, they stick with Google for all the basics - like phone, messages, photos, and gmail, those all come pre-installed as the default apps. There’s only like 2 ZTE apps that you can’t uninstall, but hey - at least you can disable them.
Diving into the settings, I actually like that they’ve made things a little more visual by adding large images of the different options - like for example, you can change up the animation speed and even the icon shapes. This is far from the most feature packed skin I’ve tested, but they’ve thrown in a couple of really handy ones that I can see lots of people actually using. This shake to turn on the flashlight is something I wish more phones had.
IN THE BOX & BATTERY LIFE
In the box, you’ll also get a 65W charging brick, A USB C cable, a headphone dongle and a fairly basic clear case. This phone has a 5,000mAh battery and I’ve been ending most days with like 30 - 40% left. Charge times are great too, you’ll get about 40% in 15 mins, 70% in 30 mins and a full charge should take just around 45mins.
A big part of why I think the battery has been so good is that the adaptive refresh rate on here is really really aggressive - most 3rd party apps that support and would normally run at 120hz on other phones - run at 60Hz on here. This is definitely a bug that needs to be fixed. I’ve tried locking the refresh rate to 120hz for a couple of days and while the battery does drain more it still gets me through a day.
WOULD I RECOMMEND THE AXON 40 ULTRA?
Like anything else, there’s pros and cons here. You’re getting likely the most immersive screen on a phone & pretty good camera hardware too - with the triple 64 MP lenses. Unfortunately, the under display camera takes very underwhelming selfies, it’s missing a couple of flagship features and the phone needs an update or two to clean up some of the bugs. At the suggested retail price of $799 (8+128) / $899 (12+256), there’s just so many question marks around their update policy - ZTE informed me that you can expect security patches every 3 months, but no confirmation on anything outside of that which worries me. I just can’t see them being able to match what Apple, Samsung and Google are offering in terms of updates. But hey, if you’re okay with the drawbacks and wanna experience this awesome screen for yourself - I’ll put it this way, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by it.
