patriotaki
New Arrival
You can get this phone for 179$ from the Spain Warehouse of Geekbuying which Europeans will like that , but you can also get it from the Hong Kong warehouse for a little cheaper but if you are located in Europe it will take longer to arrive
ES Warehouse : http://www.geekbuying.com/item/-Spa...O ... 42089.html
HK Warehouse : http://www.geekbuying.com/item/ZTE-...O ... 41742.html
Design
Let’s be honest here, there’s no mistaking that the ZTE Blade S6 is an iPhone 6 rip-off.
The first thing you notice is the 3 touch-sensitive soft keys, and the other two are pretty much invisible. Until they light up.
You’ll get a bit of a shock when you pick up the ZTE Blade S6 looks like aluminium from the back, but it’s actually plain old plastic. As smooth as it is, trying to look like aluminium only reinforces how plasticky it feels. The back picks up scratches pretty easily too. Other than that there is nothing premium or different in the Blade S6 design.
Specs
Smooth & slim surface, rounded corners and curved edges, Blade S6 has an ultra-smooth feeling.
ZTE smart sense, S6 come with a bunch of fun and unique motion controls
V shape, Shake it to open the LED light, Easy-to-access MIRROR app, Air track, etc.
13MP Sony Exmor IMX214 CMOS sensor, f/2.0 aperture; 5.0MP front camera.
ZTE AliveShare, no network or Wifi requirement, high-speed data transfers between phones.
2.4GHz & 5GHz dual band Wifi, you will always have access to fast internet.
Get Personal, MiFavor 3.0 with many different themes, background colours, wallpapers and icons.
Powerful 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon Octa Core CPU
Adreno 405 GPU for spectacular visual performance
5.0inch 720p HD IPS display for razor sharp images
Android 5.0.1 Lollipop with MiFavor 3.0 UI for a stunning user experience
2GB DDR3 RAM and 16GB RAM (expandable)
Stay connected: Dual SIM, 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth v4.0 and fully unlocked for worldwide use
Dual SIM Card Dual Standby, two Nano SIM card
Display and resolution
ZTE Blade S6 uses a 5-inch 1,280 x 720 pixel screen, matching popular budget phones like the Motorola Moto G, which is low in todays standards, we would love to see a 1080p display on that beast smartphone. Although with that kind of resolution the battery life is significantly better than other 1080p phones. we appreciate that the ZTE Blade S6 gives you the option to either make the screen more vivid or more natural-looking. This option lives in the Settings menu, and unusually we were even pretty happy with the “vivid” mode.
UI Impressions
The Blade S6 comes with 5.0.2 Lollipop with a custom ZTE Interface called ΜiFavor. The MiFavor 3.0 Launcher has no app drawer, that means all apps-icons sits on your homescreen. It also features some nice customizations by swiping up the homescreen, its easier to change wallpapers swipe effects and many more, people who want to customize their phones without installing new launchers will love this feature. The truth is that the S6 comes with some bloatware preinstalled like AliveShare,backup and MirrorCam which I never used them since I got this phone, I find them unnecessary.
Now lets talk about the keyboard, it uses the TouchPal X which in my opinion is a big downside. The keyboard itself is really messy and I was struggling to type since im using the Google Keyboard in my other devices. There are plenty of settings though but the app is not user friendly at all, I installed immediately the Google Keyboard. ZTE should have put their own Keyboard or a better one from PlayStore like Kika Keyboard.
Performance
Unlike its outside shell the Blade S6 has some really good hardware on the inside. As we said before the S6 comes with the SnapDragon 615 which is a octa core CPU clocked @1.5Ghz with the help of the Adreno 405 GPU , the S6 can score up to 654 on Single Core and 2495 on Multi Core , unlike the Elephone M1 which scored 615 and 1775 respectively. You can check below the screenshots for more info about the benchmarks.
(will upload them later)
The gaming experience was pretty good, all games that we tested run flawlessly, on some heavy games like Asphalt 8 we had some micro frame drops but nothing to worry about. The ZTE Blade S6 makes a pretty good budget gaming phone, please notice that during the gameplay the internal speaker causes the back to buzz a bit, which feels a bit weird.
Battery Life
If you are careful enough you can achieve up to 2 days of usage with this phone. We have tested it by looping a 720p video and we managed to get 10 hours of Video Playback with WiFi and Mobile Data OFF, unlike the Moto G which lasts less. Overall the battery is decent can totally last you a day even if you play some games that don’t require advanced graphics (does not drain the battery that much when on idle) .
Camera
The phone uses the same Sony IMX214 sensor as the OnePlus One and has a pretty fast f/2.0 lens. On the rear camera we have a 13MP camera and a 5MP on front. Unfortunately the stock camera app is the worst I’ve seen, don’t bother using it at all. The rear camera quality is not bad but not great also. You can shoot fantastic pictures with the correct lighting but if you want to shoot some night pictures, forget it they get too dark, but I have seen other devices with much worse camera so don’t worry. Now let’s talk about the front camera, thanks to the 5MP you can get good pictures with some extra quality, what I did not like though was the beautify/beauty face effect it’s too much even in the google camera app and I couldn’t find a way to lower the level of this effect like you can do on many Samsung devices. Both cameras perform good but not great, exactly how we expected from a medium range smartphone.
Conclusion
The ZTE Blade S6 comes with some sensible specs and a great feeling while holding it. In terms of design I would like to see an aluminum body and not a plastic one that gets easily scratched. The performance of this phone is way better than Elephone M1 which we reviewed few weeks ago ( you can see it here ) and also a fingerprint scanner. The rear camera is very good, not the best one in the market but it does its job pretty well but I wouldn’t say the same for the front camera though. The battery life is decent too it will definitely last you a full day. One big issue for this phone is the UI, it has some bloatware and the pre-installed keyboard is awful , I wish it had a cleaner UI.
ES Warehouse : http://www.geekbuying.com/item/-Spa...O ... 42089.html
HK Warehouse : http://www.geekbuying.com/item/ZTE-...O ... 41742.html
Design
Let’s be honest here, there’s no mistaking that the ZTE Blade S6 is an iPhone 6 rip-off.
The first thing you notice is the 3 touch-sensitive soft keys, and the other two are pretty much invisible. Until they light up.
You’ll get a bit of a shock when you pick up the ZTE Blade S6 looks like aluminium from the back, but it’s actually plain old plastic. As smooth as it is, trying to look like aluminium only reinforces how plasticky it feels. The back picks up scratches pretty easily too. Other than that there is nothing premium or different in the Blade S6 design.
Specs
Smooth & slim surface, rounded corners and curved edges, Blade S6 has an ultra-smooth feeling.
ZTE smart sense, S6 come with a bunch of fun and unique motion controls
V shape, Shake it to open the LED light, Easy-to-access MIRROR app, Air track, etc.
13MP Sony Exmor IMX214 CMOS sensor, f/2.0 aperture; 5.0MP front camera.
ZTE AliveShare, no network or Wifi requirement, high-speed data transfers between phones.
2.4GHz & 5GHz dual band Wifi, you will always have access to fast internet.
Get Personal, MiFavor 3.0 with many different themes, background colours, wallpapers and icons.
Powerful 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon Octa Core CPU
Adreno 405 GPU for spectacular visual performance
5.0inch 720p HD IPS display for razor sharp images
Android 5.0.1 Lollipop with MiFavor 3.0 UI for a stunning user experience
2GB DDR3 RAM and 16GB RAM (expandable)
Stay connected: Dual SIM, 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth v4.0 and fully unlocked for worldwide use
Dual SIM Card Dual Standby, two Nano SIM card
Display and resolution
ZTE Blade S6 uses a 5-inch 1,280 x 720 pixel screen, matching popular budget phones like the Motorola Moto G, which is low in todays standards, we would love to see a 1080p display on that beast smartphone. Although with that kind of resolution the battery life is significantly better than other 1080p phones. we appreciate that the ZTE Blade S6 gives you the option to either make the screen more vivid or more natural-looking. This option lives in the Settings menu, and unusually we were even pretty happy with the “vivid” mode.
UI Impressions
The Blade S6 comes with 5.0.2 Lollipop with a custom ZTE Interface called ΜiFavor. The MiFavor 3.0 Launcher has no app drawer, that means all apps-icons sits on your homescreen. It also features some nice customizations by swiping up the homescreen, its easier to change wallpapers swipe effects and many more, people who want to customize their phones without installing new launchers will love this feature. The truth is that the S6 comes with some bloatware preinstalled like AliveShare,backup and MirrorCam which I never used them since I got this phone, I find them unnecessary.
Now lets talk about the keyboard, it uses the TouchPal X which in my opinion is a big downside. The keyboard itself is really messy and I was struggling to type since im using the Google Keyboard in my other devices. There are plenty of settings though but the app is not user friendly at all, I installed immediately the Google Keyboard. ZTE should have put their own Keyboard or a better one from PlayStore like Kika Keyboard.
Performance
Unlike its outside shell the Blade S6 has some really good hardware on the inside. As we said before the S6 comes with the SnapDragon 615 which is a octa core CPU clocked @1.5Ghz with the help of the Adreno 405 GPU , the S6 can score up to 654 on Single Core and 2495 on Multi Core , unlike the Elephone M1 which scored 615 and 1775 respectively. You can check below the screenshots for more info about the benchmarks.
(will upload them later)
The gaming experience was pretty good, all games that we tested run flawlessly, on some heavy games like Asphalt 8 we had some micro frame drops but nothing to worry about. The ZTE Blade S6 makes a pretty good budget gaming phone, please notice that during the gameplay the internal speaker causes the back to buzz a bit, which feels a bit weird.
Battery Life
If you are careful enough you can achieve up to 2 days of usage with this phone. We have tested it by looping a 720p video and we managed to get 10 hours of Video Playback with WiFi and Mobile Data OFF, unlike the Moto G which lasts less. Overall the battery is decent can totally last you a day even if you play some games that don’t require advanced graphics (does not drain the battery that much when on idle) .
Camera
The phone uses the same Sony IMX214 sensor as the OnePlus One and has a pretty fast f/2.0 lens. On the rear camera we have a 13MP camera and a 5MP on front. Unfortunately the stock camera app is the worst I’ve seen, don’t bother using it at all. The rear camera quality is not bad but not great also. You can shoot fantastic pictures with the correct lighting but if you want to shoot some night pictures, forget it they get too dark, but I have seen other devices with much worse camera so don’t worry. Now let’s talk about the front camera, thanks to the 5MP you can get good pictures with some extra quality, what I did not like though was the beautify/beauty face effect it’s too much even in the google camera app and I couldn’t find a way to lower the level of this effect like you can do on many Samsung devices. Both cameras perform good but not great, exactly how we expected from a medium range smartphone.
Conclusion
The ZTE Blade S6 comes with some sensible specs and a great feeling while holding it. In terms of design I would like to see an aluminum body and not a plastic one that gets easily scratched. The performance of this phone is way better than Elephone M1 which we reviewed few weeks ago ( you can see it here ) and also a fingerprint scanner. The rear camera is very good, not the best one in the market but it does its job pretty well but I wouldn’t say the same for the front camera though. The battery life is decent too it will definitely last you a full day. One big issue for this phone is the UI, it has some bloatware and the pre-installed keyboard is awful , I wish it had a cleaner UI.
