ZTE Blade 3 review

ZTE is known as a maker of budget handsets, but the company has three distinct inexpensive smartphone ranges. There’s Kis at the bottom, Grand at the top and in the middle sits Blade.

The Blade 3 is ZTE’s latest mid-range handset, and as we expected, it doesn’t cost very much. At £80 on prepay with Virgin Mobile it’s one of the cheapest Android handsets there is. ZTE says it will be available SIM-free, but we’ve yet to find anyone stocking an unlocked handset.

Apart from the fact the phone is SIM-locked to Virgin, you don’t get any prepay branding shoved down your throat. The Blade 3 runs an almost-stock version of Android 4.0.4, and the handset is plain, understated and good-looking, with a rubberised back and raised chin to help protect the screen against knocks. It’s also remarkably heavy for a small handset, and feels pretty weighty in your hand. We actually rather liked the weight, as it helps make the phone feel tough and well made; an impression helped by the exposed metal chassis around the edge of the handset.

The touchscreen is responsive, which makes a welcome change from that of phones such as the Huawei Ascend G 300, which had us stabbing at the onscreen keyboard when typing. This isn’t the fastest phone we’ve ever seen, though. The 1GHz single-core processor means there’s some slight jerkiness when flicking through app screens and a slight hesitation when opening apps, compared to the lightning-quick responses of a high-end smartphone.

The slow performance was borne out in our benchmark tests. In the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, the Blade 3 completed the test in 2,587ms. This is a slow result, and what we were expecting from a single-core chip. We saw the difference in web browsing to a certain degree, in that desktop mode pages took a couple of extra seconds to render compared to the fastest handsets and zooming in and out isn’t particularly smooth, but it wasn’t especially distracting.

The screen’s resolution certainly helps when it comes to web browsing. It has an 800×480 resolution, which isn’t huge but dwarfs the 480×320 of some similarly cheap handsets. This larger resolution also helps with apps such as the calendar and when composing email, showing that the Blade 3’s low price doesn’t make it any less useful to have in your pocket.

When set to automatic mode, we didn’t find the display bright enough for comfortable use, and it was almost illegible on a bright day outside. Things were better when we set the display to maximum brightness. This had an impact on battery life, but even with the screen at its maximum setting the Blade 3 still lasted 8h 55m in our video playback test – impressive for any phone, especially a budget one. At medium brightness we saw 11h 17m when playing back a video on loop, which is an excellent score.

It’s also not an astoundingly inspiring screen, with fairly low contrast and greyish blacks. It’s also susceptible to reflections, but even after all this complaining we still think the display is perfectly acceptable considering the Blade 3’s price.

Unfortunately, you’ll struggle to watch films on the Blade 3, as we found it just wasn’t powerful enough for smooth playback. 1080p H.264 films were right out, as were 720p variants. Even standard-definition videos showed the occasional jerk. We had no problems viewing YouTube content, though.

As budget cameras go, this is a good one

We were also pretty impressed with the Blade 3’s camera. While the ZTE Kis’s photos looked like something from five years ago, the Blade 3 takes outdoor shots with accurate colours. The only problem we found was that photos tended to be underexposed, leading dull British days to look even duller.

The ZTE is a good-looking phone with a reasonable screen and camera, and performance good enough for most Android tasks if you’re not fussed about using the phone as a portable media player or serious gaming device. Everything about it screams middle-of-the-road Android, until you look at the price. For £80 it really is a bargain, and that includes £10 of call credit. If you’re after a cheap prepay phone and you like the look of Virgin Mobile’s tariffs, it’s an excellent Budget Buy.