ZTE Blade Q Mini – £60 smartphone with IPS from Argos
The new budget handset from ZTE looks to be another Budget Buy award winner
The recent release of the excellent Motorola Moto G has shown that you can get a great smartphone for not very much. However, if £135 is too rich for your blood, then the new ZTE Blade Q Mini should be ideal at just £60.
The new smartphone is a pay-as-you-go handset exclusive to Virgin Media, and follows on from award-winning budget handsets such as the ZTE Kis and ZTE Blade. Because of that pedigree we’re expecting great things from it, and the specification looks hopeful too.
ZTE largely leaves Android unchanged, except for a few icon switches
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It has a fairly small 4in display (480×800 resolution) but this uses an IPS screen and so should look superior to most phones at this price. The dual-core 1.3GHz chipset and 1GB of RAM are nothing to get too excited about, but it comes with the fairly recent, and more than acceptable, Android 4.2. Most new handsets use 4.3 now, but the differences are minimal. There’s 4GB of built-in memory, but you can expand this by up to 32GB using a memory card (32GB ones cost around £15 online).
A 5-megapixel camera is included with a burst shooting mode. There’s also an FM radio packed in, plus a 1,500mAh battery – which should keep things ticking over for a day. It measures a compact 125x64x9mm and its rounded rear shell should make it comfortable to hold.
The ZTE Blade Q Mini will be on sale in Argos by the time you read this, with Sainsbury’s also lined up to stock the budget handset. We’ll bring you a full review when we get a hardware sample to test.
