ZTE Grand X review

The ZTE Kis showed us that the Chinese company is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to budget phones. This was an Android smartphone with very few flaws for the knockdown price of £60, so we were excited to see what the company would do with the more upmarket ZTE Grand X.

In the event, we’re slightly disappointed. The Grand X is by no means out-of-date, but it’s certainly not cutting-edge. It’s a smart handset with a 4.3in screen, a dual-core 1GHz processor and Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Grand X is a pleasant oval shape with a rubberised back, and its 10mm thickness means it sits well in your hand. The screen has a reasonably high 960×540 resolution, which is the same as similarly-sized phones such as the Motorola RAZR i.

The phone’s screen is nothing spectacular. It has a reasonable pixel density of 256ppi, so text is sharp, but contrast is poor compared to that of most smartphone screens we’ve seen recently. There’s some light leakage around the edge, blacks aren’t very deep and colours lack punch. It’s also very unresponsive, leaving us stabbing at the screen while trying to launch programs or type, and its relatively rough surface means it’s soon covered with fingerprints and general grot. It may be relatively large, but in terms of quality is far behind the displays on phones such as the Sony Xperia U, which is slightly cheaper than the Grand X.

ZTE has installed an almost-stock version of Android 4 on the Grand X, which is no bad thing. We’d much rather see stock Android than badly-made customisations. The only change we could see was the TouchPal keyboard, which we had mixed feelings about. A swipe on the space bar turns predictive text on and off, which is useful, but we found the autocorrect could be over-zealous and didn’t seem to learn from frequently-used words particularly well.

The phone has a useful 1.57GB of internal storage remaining for apps, and there’s also a microSD card slot for added storage. The Grand X runs Android’s main interface smoothly, but isn’t a particularly fast phone – we saw 2281.3ms in the Sunspider Javascript benchmark, which is slow by current standards. However, the Grand X could render the BBC News homepage in less than six seconds, so you won’t have any problems with web browsing. The phone’s battery life is slightly below average, with five hours and 44 minutes in our video playback test, and we had to be fastidious about charging it every night.

The Grand X’s 5-megapixel camera is fairly uninspiring. Outdoor shots showed a huge amount of noise reduction, leading to smearing and muted colours. Indoor shots were noisy and blurry, showing this sensor to be well behind the market leaders and other phones at this price, such as the Xperia U.

ZTE’s Grand X is a fairly average Android phone, and it’s not even particularly cheap. Its £200 prepay price puts it in contention with the £157 SIM-free Sony Xperia U, which, despite its smaller 3.5in screen, is a far superior phone. The Grand X is also free on a £20.50-per-month contract, but ruthless competition among other manufacturers puts this in the same price bracket as the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Motorola RAZR i. It’s not a bad phone, but when you look at the quality of the competition there’s just no reason to buy the Grand X.