The Mobile World Congress (MWC) always brings pleasant surprised and this time it wasn’t different either. This is the year of phablets; the rise of these devices from all manufacturers clearly indicates that. In this clash of the titans, not only the biggest titans have brought outstanding products.
Manufacturers like ZTE has participated with their best devices as well and stammered us with their awesome built quality devices. They brought two real smart smartphones to the MWC, as much as it could be. The ZTE Grand Memo phablet is 5.7 inch Android Smartphone while the ZTE Open is an entry level smartphone running on the newly released Firefox operating system.
ZTE Grand Memo
It is the phablet from ZTE showed on this MWC 2013. Let’s see what ZTE has brought.
Design
The memo looks handsome. Though it resembles the look of Samsung Galaxy Note 2, well many manufacturers can’t help copying stuffs from the Samsung looks. Even the LG Optimus G Pro resembles the Note 2 a little so it’s forgivable. The brushed design and the metallic blue color is nearly same to the Galaxy and both sides of this phone attracts finger prints like magnets. So you need to handle this carefully if you don’t want to clean the prints the whole day.
Display
The walloping 5.7 inch display with HD resolution has the potentials to compete against the Note 2 and the Optimus G Pro. The display sports a resolution of 720×1280 pixels. No stylus is included with this phone, not many people needs this but you should also keep in mind that it’s a huge device, you might need one.
Configuration and Features
The phone is powered by a Snapdragon 6oo processor. This one is a quad core 1.5 GHz processor and it’s backed up with a 1 GB RAM. The internal memory is 16GB, and there’s a memory expansion option; the most desired for many people. The rear camera is 13 MP and the front camera for video calling is 1 MP; they perform well. The 3200 mAh battery delivers the power for a full day using but still sometimes you might suffer from a battery outage.
The operating system is Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean but ZTE has heavily modified the software and made it sluggish.
ZTE Open
This is the first phone that launches Mozilla’s mobile operating system – Firefox OS. This one is an entry level smartphone from the manufacturer ZTE and it’s based on HTML5. The Firefox OS is anticipated to be a very worthy opponent against the Android and iOS, if the developments go right. The phone provides a basic set of apps for the time being; like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. and more are expected to come soon. The UI sort of resembles the iOS interface.
The 3.5 inch HVGA display is not impressive. It has an ARM Cortex A5 based processor and the clock speed might be 600 or 800 MHz.
The device was laggy and snappy to run Firefox OS – not a good first impression.
The camera is 3.2 megapixels and the focus is fixed. No front camera. You get all standard connectivity features. There’s only one physical button to go back to the main screen – like an iPhone.
The overall experience of this phone was decent, but could have been better.
So, have you decided your pick?
