Top cellphone tracking program ZTE Blade

The Blade S6 exceeded my admittedly low expectations -- I'm not a fan of the design, given that most copycat phones from China tend to focus on imitating a popular design while failing on the software part.

That said, ZTE has done well to get the software part right -- adding some useful gesture features -- and the copycat design makes the phone look refined and cool, even if it does feel like a cheap plastic phone at the end of the day. It's no iPhone though. At best it's a decently performing Android phone with some interesting features, a disappointingly plastic build and a poor camera.

It definitely shouldn't be your first choice, but if you're on a budget and looking for a unlocked phone with some design panache and interesting features, it's worth looking into. Let's be brutally honest here. When they picked it up, however, they discovered two things: one, the phone feels much lighter than you'd expect, and two, it doesn't feel as classy as the Cupertino-designed handset. The Blade S6 is slightly larger with a 5-inch display and thicker at 7.

It's also no surprise to find that the phone's front glass display shares the same rounded corners as the iPhone 6. You'll find the home button at the bottom of the display, a round circle that seems to invoke Apple's TouchID sensor but there isn't one. There are two additional buttons, the back and menu, but these are hidden when not in use.

You're able to switch the back button to either the right or left, too. These keys are touch sensitive and vibrate when tapped. Turn the phone around and you'll find a faux-aluminum plastic rear. It feels cheap to hold, and there's even a "Designed by ZTE in California" marking, seemingly just to further emulate Apple.

Located further up on the back is the megapixel camera, and the placement's pretty similar to where you'll find it on the iPhone. As it's quite close to the edge, however, you'll have to make sure not to block it with your fingers when taking landscape shots. The audio jack is located right at the top of the phone. On the whole, I didn't like the Blade S6's design. It seems to blatantly rip off Apple's thoughtful design process, which is not uncommon with some China-made phones. Other Chinese companies such as OnePlus and Xiaomi have already shown they are capable of being original, however, so it just seems to be bad form on ZTE's part.

Furthermore, the liberal borrowing of Apple design elements means it's unlikely to be released in the US, where I suspect Apple would be more than happy to take legal action to defend its work.

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Of course, to get hardware like that at this price point, compromises need to be made -- particularly the screen. It has a p display, not the p resolution usually found on higher-end devices. This isn't necessarily bad, since it's usually very hard to tell the difference between these resolutions on a smaller device. The colors, vibrancy and viewing angles of the display are pretty good as well, so it's no loss here. The phone is powered by a 2,mAh battery, which is a tad on the low side these days see below for my battery test.

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• ZTE Blade V9 Smartphone Review.

Like newer phones released this year, the Blade S6 comes running Android Lollipop 5. The skin comes with its own color schemes, themes and the ability to change the animations of the home screen easily. To stand out from other Lollipop phones, ZTE has included a software tweak called Smart Sense, which are basically gesture commands you can use to quickly access certain features.

Before you get all hung up over the custom skin job though, ZTE has kept some elements of stock Lollipop, such as the notification system and the dialer. The Smart Sense features aren't turned on by default, so you'll need to enable them in the settings. From there, you can select the various features you want enabled.

For example, shake the phone to turn the flashlight on and off, or raise the phone up to a landscape position and hit the volume up button to turn on the rear camera. The middle of Samsung's new Galaxy S20 devices is powerful and large, without being ridiculous. ZTE relies on the standard Android phone app that comes with its standard features. Participants can be heard very authentically and with great sound reproduction through the internal speaker.

On the other end of the line, the microphone makes sure you're understood well, too. The speakers of the Blade V9 or the included stereo headset can be used for hands-free communication. The speakers lack depth and participants sound slightly tinny. The headset sounds much better. It is also well-suited for music, since it is able to play back sounds and music on a very broad sound spectrum. ZTE advertises the Blade V9 as a smartphone with a camera that can take good pictures even in poor lighting conditions. The main camera allows for pictures with a maximum resolution of 16 MP and is supported by a 5 MP sensor for depth information.

Hobby photographers are met with a wide variety of features such as touch auto focus, automatic white balance, variable brightness and adjustable exposure time. The Super-Night photo mode is designed for night shots. It automatically optimizes light sensitivity for poorly lit environments. With it, our low-light test picture came out much better than on comparable smartphones, although a steady hand is still required.

If there is too much movement while taking pictures, the photos become blurry despite Super-Night mode being active. Photos in daylight are sharp and detailed. A closer look shows subtleties that quickly fade into blurriness outside of the focus area.

This effect is reminiscent of the bokeh mode, which uses blurriness around the center to achieve an artistic effect. The actual bokeh mode can be selected in the settings. The Blade V9's camera is also able to capture color gradients and differences in texture in close-up shots with a strong difference in light intensity. The worse the lighting conditions, the worse the image noise in a close-up view becomes. The 13 MP front camera is available for selfie fans.

With its fixed-focus lens, it takes pictures that appear somewhat faint and don't have clearly defined contours or color gradients.

Choose a scene and navigate within the first image. One click changes the position on touchscreens. One click on the zoomed-in image opens the original in a new window. The first image shows the scaled photograph of the test device. The camera of the Blade V9 generally captures colors as too dark. Red and green shades are depicted the most accurately. This is does not stand out in the final picture since the color accuracy is shifted evenly. The ZTE smartphone represents our test chart clearly and with a lot of detail.

We noticed a little bit of blurriness towards the edges that is more prominent to the left and to the right than at the top and on the bottom. Intricacies get lost mainly if the lighting conditions are insufficient. All of ZTE's mobile phones come with 24 months warranty. The virtual keyboard of the Blade V9 can be used to type longer messages. The vibration feedback feels good and conveys a good typing experience, whereby the small buttons are reliable. The keyboard is not too small in portrait mode and in landscape mode all the keys are easy to reach even with smaller hands.

The fingerprint scanner is on the back of the ZTE V9. It often took two or three tries to hit it in a way where it recognizes the fingerprint. This unnecessarily delays the unlocking of the V9, which is why we resorted to the PIN code more than once instead of trying to find the right place to touch. ZTE equips the Blade V9 with a 5.

It displays screen content with a resolution of x pixels. The ZTE mainly lacks in average brightness and has a bad contrast ratio, making it subpar compared to its competition. This frequency is relatively high, meaning even sensitive eyes shouldn't feel strained when looking at the display for a long time. There should be no flickering or PWM above this brightness setting. If PWM was detected, an average of minimum: 5 - maximum: Hz was measured. The display of the V9 shines with saturated colors and with deeply dark screen areas, despite the heightened black value.

High-resolution photos are depicted sharply, and it's easy to distinguish color gradients and differentiated areas.

Quickly-changing sequences of pictures or video-recordings are depicted clearly and fluidly. We were not able to observe disruptive ghosting or distorted colors in our test. The Blade V9's screen content is clearly visible outdoors. There are no disruptive reflections on the display when the sky is cloudy. As soon as it gets brighter, though, the brightness becomes insufficient to outshine the sunlight. The screen has very stable viewing angles while there are no reflections on the display. We can even discern the smartphone's screen content from extreme angles.