14 DAY TRIAL // ZTE seemed to have hit a homerun with its affordable premium smartphone, ZTE Axon 7, which it released back in May and made available in multiple markets. During its press conference at IFA 2016, ZTE has announced a toned-down variant of its flagship, the Axon 7 Mini.
The Axon 7 did manage to capture the market's attention with its powerful specs and reasonable price, thus keeping to the company’s promise to offer “affordable premium” smartphones. The ZTE Axon 7 Mini doesn’t fall far from this statement, as it does borrow some specs from the flagship Axon 7, and consumers certainly won’t break the bank in order to get their hands on the device.
Despite its moniker, ZTE Axon 7 Mini comes with a rather reasonable display size of 5.2 inches. It has a full HD screen unlike Axon 7’s 5.5-inch 2k display, but it has a lower pixel density of 424ppi. Aside from this, the smartphone comes with a smaller battery compared to the Axon 7, just 2,700mAh.
Rear camera capacity reaches 16MP, with an 8MP unit on the front for snapping selfies. However, the Axon 7 Mini comes with a single-tone LED flash rear camera, which isn’t as accurate as Axon 7’s dual-tone snapper.
Processor power was downgraded to Snapdragon 617 on Axon 7 Mini
One of the biggest downgrades in the Axon 7 Mini is certainly the processor model and power. Axon 7 came with a powerful Snapdragon 820 SoC found in many of this year’s flagships while the Axon 7 Mini is equipped with the lower-end Snapdragon 617.
RAM and storage capacities were also lowered from 4GB of RAM / 64GB of internal storage and 6GB of RAM / 128GB of memory on the Axon 7 to 3GB of RAM / 32GB of memory on the Mini variant. Nevertheless, the battery comes with Quick Charge 3.0, which gives users 46% of battery after 30 minutes of charging. Surprisingly, the smartphone runs Android 5.1 Lollipop.
Axon 7 Mini is certainly an attractive option for a mid-range smartphone, considering that it does come with some rather reasonable specs for the price of just $330. The handset will be available in the US in October.
