ZTE Grand X review

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.