ZTE Blade 10 Prime Review: Cost Effective By A Margin

If you want to purchase a new phone, ZTE Blade 10 Prime is not a bad choice considering its price ($200). On the other hand, Moto G7 Power is stronger, with a double capacity battery.

ZTE provides a double lens rear camera and a 6.3-inch screen on the top, sides with slim bezels and a micro SD slot to store more than 2 TB data. This might not look so shabby on paper, but while the Blade 10 Prime works for its size, it is not one of the best smartphones for those who have a tight budget, because of its deceiving battery life, dim display, and sluggish cameras.

Design & Display

The Blade 10 Prime is a well designed and good looking phone as others in the market. Except that it is more bright and compact. Red power button comes out to add some modern cut to ZTE’s invincible aesthetics, and the curved back of the phone makes it easy to keep the phone in your hand.

Nonetheless, ZTE’s glittery plastic for the Blade 10 Prime is not the strongest we used. Under our office lighting, there is a bright orange peel effect that automatically makes you feel that the system is built of glass. However, in the sub-$200 segments, it is not particularly unusual and all still physically strong.

The Blade 10 Prime fingerprint sensor is a bit small to my taste, yet it is very easy to locate with your index finger since it is deeply recessed. There was a way to shoe this scanner in Blade 10 Prime’s bottom bezel if ZTE had noticed, provided that the device’s front panel has some empty space.

You’ll find a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack on the top end, a little bit awkward to a headphone jack. It would be more common to hide it in the base. You will find the single speaker of Blade 10 Prime at the bottom.

Camera

Dual-cameras telephones are common today, though many lenses are seldom seen to be in a $200 phone. There is a main 16megapixel, a secondary 5-MP lens distinguishes itself from the other phones in the same budget. These lenses are preceded by a 16-MP front shooter with a relatively high resolution on such a cheap device for a Selfie app.

In specific when considering the best efforts of the Moto G7, Blade 10 Prime will take surprisingly sharp images with its 16-MP lens. On a rainy night in LA, even the ZTE phone was much more accurate, with the edges more clearly defined.

For bokeh effects, there is a 5-megapixel lens mounted at the rear side in Blade 10 Prime. I claim it as the camera repeatedly failed to use the backdrop blur, no matter if I used portrait or bokeh mode when I was mildly surprised by the sharpness, white balance, and general photo quality.

It isn’t an enormous loss, honestly. Inexpensive telephone cameras cannot treat bokeh well. Nonetheless, it reveals a more severe software problem, even if the image quality of the Blade 10 Prime is still overall good. ZTE cameras can sometimes be remarkably slower too, and although it is true that most of the cheap phones need to breathe between the pictures, the breaks on the Blade 10 Prime are much longer than those in the G7.

Though the Blade 10 Prime depends on Google Photos after it has been taken to search photos, it can also be oddly lagging in displaying only snapshots in the camera framework as animations swipe back very slowly.

Battery

You could be okay with average camera quality, design, and power, but no one can ever compromise on battery life.

That’s less than half the power of Moto G7 Speed, which turned out to be the most reliable smartphone we’ve ever attempted in a spectacular 15 hours and 35 minutes of web surfing on 4 G LTE, nowadays..

I charged both Blade and G7 Power before a weekend and then continued to use them intermittently in the following days while working on this study. On Monday, the phone of Motorola was still at about 62%, whereas the ZTE, though, was about 13%.

Only Nokia 4.2 costs $189, fitted with a battery marginally less than the Blade 10 Prime, defeated the underwhelming outcome for ZTE by 2 hours 10 minutes. The impact was even slightly smaller. The longevity of Nokia is still not good, though it is much closer to the regular smartphone. Even when buyers are making sacrifices with such an inexpensive handset, seven hours of charge from Blade 10 Prime is not good enough.

Final Words

If you’re willing to spend less than $200 for a new smartphone, you will have to make some compromises. ZTE Blade 10 Prime works fine, performs well, and has a solid image quality but lags in other areas such as short battery life and a dim display.

ZTE Blade 10 Prime is not that inaccurate handset, and you can do worse for less than $200. The unlocked Blade 10 is a solid option for people who are looking for a small, non-contractual smartphone with a large screen and are supposed to bring it to a discount carrier.

I can pay a little more for Moto G7 because of its battery performance. ZTE Blade 10 Prime may be a little more cost-effective, but that doesn’t matter that much if it drains in one working day.

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