ZTE Blade S6 Review Part 1

The name might lead you to expect the Blade S6 to be a copy of the Samsung Galaxy S6, but it’s much more iPhone 6 in design. The clean white front with circular home button, rounded corners and curved screen edges is certainly reminiscent of Apple’s fl agship smartphone. Even the SIM and microSD slots are very iPhone-like, not that there’s much scope for diff erentiating there. And the MiFavor UI’s lack of an app tray is just Apple all over. For a budget- to mid-range phone the ZTE Blade S6 is good-looking, at least from the front with its slim bezels and slick design. But this unibody phone is built from a very slippery white and silver plastic, and compared with the iPhone 6 has a larger, lower-resolution 5in screen and slightly bigger and chunkier – but still commendably thin for the price – 7.7mm chassis. The weight is identical though, with both phones coming in at 129g. The home button might be circular, but as soon as you put the phone on charge or get a new notifi cation it glows a cool blue.

That constant glow can be irritating when charging the phone overnight, and you should note there’s no fi ngerprint sensor built into this button either. On either side sit touchoperated Back and Multitasking keys, and you can switch these around if you’d rather have the Back button on the right than the default left. That 5in screen is a usefully bright IPS panel, which off ers realistic colours and excellent viewing angles. The ZTE Blade S6 might have only an HD (720x1280) resolution, but its 293ppi pixel density isn’t far behind the 326ppi of the iPhone 6, and it’s quite acceptable for the price. A small speaker is found on the rear. If you’re lefthanded or place the phone screen-up you’ll fi nd it easy to muffl e, but it otherwise does an acceptable job. There’s also a headphone jack up top, which lets you take advantage of the Blade’s FM radio. Hardware and performance Equipped with a 1.5GHz Snapdragon 615 64-bit octacore (quad-core 1.7GHz Cortex-A53, quad-core 1GHz Cortex-A53) processor, Adreno 405 graphics and 2GB of RAM, performance is very decent for a midrange phone. The ZTE Blade S6 also feels nippy in operation, with no sign of lag when launching apps or moving between home screens and menus.

In real-life use we couldn’t fault it. We ran our usual trio of synthetic benchmarks, recording 658 points in Geekbench 3 single-core and 2420 multi-core. General performance is therefore more iPhone 5s (2556 points) than iPhone 6 (2794), and pretty much on par with last year’s fl agship LG G3 (2465). We also ran the GFXBench 3.0 graphics test, with the ZTE Blade S6 turning in 25fps in T-Rex and 11fps in Manhattan, matching the performance of the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge and HTC Desire Eye. Lastly, in the SunSpider JavaScript test the ZTE recorded 1088ms. In this test its nearest rival is the Samsung Galaxy S4 with 1092ms. That’s not bad for Android, and especially not at a touch over £150. In terms of storage the ZTE Blade S6 has 16GB built in, and it has microSD support up to 32GB.

That will be plenty for most users, although you can also make use of cloud storage with Google’s own- and third-party apps. Connectivity Not only is this ZTE Blade S6 a 4G LTE phone, but it supports dual SIMs as standard (both Nano-SIMs). Note, though, that the data connection is accessible by the fi rst SIM only on this dual-standby handset. As with all phones you should check the ZTE Blade S6 will work with your network, which we understand may be an issue in the US. ZTE lists support for GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz, UMTS 850/900/2100MHz, and 4G LTE 1800/2600/900/700MHz. The Blade S6 also supports dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and A-GPS. There’s no NFC, but Alive Share software lets you transfer fi les and play multiplayer games with nearby compatible handsets. Cameras At the ZTE’s rear is a 13Mp Sony Exmor IMX214 camera with a 28mm wide-angle lens and f/2.0 aperture that can shoot full-HD (1080p) video at 30fps. We were generally impressed with our test shot and video, which you can see for yourself below. Colours are realistic and detail is sharp, although the LED fl ash does little to help grainy low-light photos, and we found video can be rather jerky as you move the camera.