The ZTE Blade, marketed by Idea in India, sells for a price of `7,995. The network operator includes “free 3G services” worth `3,500 in this price, though what these 3G services are, I wasn’t told. They also include a free IdeaTV subscription and a monthly download cap of 1GB for three months, along with some other benefits relating to 3G. As for the phone, here goes.
Design and Build
The phone is decently designed and the shell is made of plastic with a graphite-black matte finish. It doesn’t feel cheaply made, perhaps with the exception of two shiny strips on the side.
It’s got a loudspeaker, a 3.5mm audio jack, a micro USB port and volume buttons on the sides. There are three keys below the screen, one is the “home” button, the other two being for “menu” and going “back”.
It weighs about 120g and is just over a centimetre thick and fits comfortably in my pocket. It’s also got a single 3.2 MP camera.
The “Phone” Part
I found the call quality to be quite good and the speaker was quite clear. The microphone is quite good too. Navigating through the software to get to the dial screen is too easy, it’s right in front of you. Messaging, contacts and email are also easy enough to manage.
The battery life is really good. According to my own testing, it should last about a day while running a 3G connection under most patterns of use.
Software and Interface
The Blade runs Android version 2.2 (Froyo), which is a disappointment seeing that most phones these days come with version 2.3 (Gingerbread). However, a user upgrade to 2.3 is possible and there are many third party modifications available online, like the CyanogenMod7. The interface is intuitive enough, however it suffers from severe input lag, especially while scrolling or entering text.
Hardware
The phone houses a modified Qualcomm MSM7227processor (at 600 MHz) with an Adreno 200 GPU. It contains about 256 MB of RAM, of which only 166 MB are usable by the OS and apps.
Internal storage is about 200MB, while you can use a Micro-SD card to expand that to 16GB of storage. Even though the graphics chip is quite decent (equivalent to the one used on the Apple A4 chip), the CPU is a tad bit underpowered and causes many of the stuttering and lag experienced while using the phone.
The screen is a 3.5 inch capacitive TFT LCD display with a resolution of 800x480 pixels. I thought the quality of was pretty decent, I can’t point out any negatives here. The camera is a mixed bag. Still photographs look good and there’s a fair amount of control over picture quality. However, the video recording capability is sub-standard.
Connectivity and Misc. Features
Apart from the 3G side of things, Bluetooth v2.1 and Wi-Fi(b/g standards) add to the connectivity options. You can set this phone up as a Wi-Fi hotspot and that works quite well. However, USB tethering (and using the phone as a modem for a desktop) simply failed to work on my PC. The phone features a compass and a GPS that are fairly accurate, but I wouldn’t recommend using them while driving.
Verdict
Overall a good phone for the price. But the interface lag and bad video quality were a disappointment. If you “mod” the OS, you may find it more responsive, as the software may be more efficiently coded. The RAM available for use is a bit too less as well. A decent entry-level smartphone in my opinion, consider this the minimum you’d want to use for Android.