ZTE Grand X review

Fairly or not, the first issue in most users’ minds when encountering a Chinese smartphone will be build quality — sadly, the Grand X does little to dispel the stigma. While the overall design is relatively sleek, resembling the Nexus S in its preference for slimness and rounded corners, most of the materials used to execute it are noticeably cheap and plasticky. A matte black backplate with a washboard-type print provides good, solid grip, but is let down by the outer bezel around the display, a familiar (and disappointing) metallic plastic. Worse, the backplate itself has a tendency to wobble under moderate pressure, such as when rubbing the screen on a thigh to clean it (which you’ll have to do a lot — but I’ll get to that).

Oddly, the capacitive area at the bottom of the Grand X’s screen includes the outdated Menu and Search buttons eschewed in newer stock devices such as the Galaxy Nexus, suggesting that it might have been designed with an earlier version of Android in mind. Still, Menu, Home, Back, and Search will be familiar to many users, and they work perfectly well in Ice Cream Sandwich too. Up top, the phone carries a small ZTE logo and the speaker, as well as its front-facing VGA camera and a single notification LED, hidden behind the front plate but still visible in all but the darkest conditions. A silver plastic power button sits on the right of the device’s top edge, with a volume rocker of the same material taking up the top section of the left flank. Both feel solid, offering a good amount of give without shaking or looseness.

Filling out the bottom-left corner of the phone is a standard Micro USB port, making one-handed, plugged-in use awkward for both righties and lefties — while the former will brush up against the cable with their fingers, the latter will end up with it embedded in their palm. Annoyingly, the placement feels like an afterthought, dictated by the position of the camera and SIM assembly in the diagonally opposite corner. A 3.5mm headphone jack sits at the top left, more central than on many comparable phones but still conveniently located.

Reviewing the Grand X’s display is a game of two halves. A 4.3-inch, Sharp-made qHD (960 x 540) panel offering 256 PPI, it can go head-to-head with some of the market-leading smartphones in terms of size and pixel density. It provides solid color reproduction, avoiding the grainy edges that have become familiar with the recent popularity of Pentile screens, even on much higher-end devices. While a little dim when set to anything below 75 percent brightness, the Grand X’s display produces consistently vivid detail, suitable for viewing high-resolution video and photos.

Sadly, that’s where the praise ends. Unluckily for ZTE, I picked up my review unit on one of the sunniest days that London had seen in weeks. Taking the Grand X for a walk to capture some sample photos, the display was practically unusable — I found myself ducking under trees to get a good look at it. Not only does the screen perform poorly in direct sunlight, but it picks up fingerprints and smudges on virtually every touch, further obscuring the relatively little that’s visible. This is less of a problem on a cool day indoors, but when swiping the lock screen with sweaty fingers in the heat of a midday sun, the marks tend to add up.

Frequent cleaning of the Grand X’s screen is a necessity, but anything too vigorous reveals the flimsiness of the overall construction. Unfortunately, the display doesn’t seem to have any sort of effective oleophobic coating — view it in indirect light, even after a quick clean, and it looks like something out of CSI, littered with prints. It’s tempting to lump the screen surface in with the overall build quality as one of the inevitable compromises that have to be made with a mid-range device, but the the cost of fixing simple problems like these needs to be weighed against their impact on the experience as a whole. In this case, the scales certainly don’t fall in ZTE’s favor.

The second major issue with the Grand X’s display is a more forgivable cost-cutting measure. As with many low-end smartphones, the device’s touch responsiveness is far from satisfying — a deliberate tap in the center of the display will always come out well, as when selecting an app from the home screen, but more casual touches have a tendency to be ignored. The problem is most obvious when bending a thumb down to the bottom of the screen to tap the phone or mail icon, with anything less than a direct hit likely to leave the user hanging.

This also makes for some frustrating experiences in Chrome for Android — while perhaps more Google’s fault than ZTE’s, the small X’s in the browser’s "card view" for tabs are extremely difficult to hit accurately, a problem that I’ve never experienced on the One S’s identically-sized screen. Other apps that require the user to accurately hit small touch targets present similar problems.

The Grand X offers a familiar dual-camera setup, providing a 5-megapixel sensor with LED flash on the back and a simple VGA job on the front. Sadly, neither is very special. The front-facing camera performs exactly as you’d expect, shooting washed-out, grainy footage suitable for Skype or other video calling services; its rear-facing brother makes a valiant attempt to be a decent smartphone camera but falls short.

Even when exposure and brightness are set to their lowest possible values, the Grand X’s main camera copes poorly with direct sunlight — point it at a window in a dimly-lit room and you’ll be treated to an explosion of white with very little discernible detail. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much better in the dark — bumping up the settings for night shots leads to predictably noisy and grainy results, with any white object standing out like a beacon.

The Android 4.0 camera app’s automatic white balance generally does a fairly good job of keeping photographs looking natural, but there are situations where a quick adjustment can help achieve a much better effect, particularly when working with natural light. In fact, keeping a close eye on the settings should be a rule of thumb whenever using the Grand X’s camera. While five megapixels may sound unimpressive in a world where eight is the high-end standard and outliers such as Nokia’s 808 PureView provide up to 41, there’s plenty of potential for capturing decent, detailed images here, as long as the camera’s limitations are borne in mind.

Like its stills, the Grand X’s videos fail to wow. In an apparent performance-saving measure, ZTE has limited the phone to capturing at 720p, despite the Tegra 2’s proven ability to handle 1080p. While movement is relatively smooth, any attempt at digital zoom while recording proceeds in huge jerks, ruining any resulting footage. A similar problem occurs with the automatic white balance and brightness adjustment — again, it’s a case of keeping a close eye on the settings to get reasonable results. Whether this sort of settings-watching should be necessary with a modern smartphone is, of course, another question.

There are a couple of great things about the Grand X’s software. For one thing, it’s Ice Cream Sandwich, still a rarity in the low- to mid-end market. While Android 4.1 Jelly Bean seems set to make its stately progress across high-end devices in the coming months, Android 4.0 still feels fresh and clean, and really adds something to the perceived quality of the device. More importantly, though, it’s almost completely stock, lacking any sort of proprietary ZTE skin to get between the user and the experience that Google intended. That the Grand X fails to carry the very latest build, 4.0.4, hardly seems important, with 4.0.3 packing all the really essential features and fixes added since the first 4.0 release late last year.

While the specific benefits of the default Google experience over the panoply of manufacturer-made Android skins may not be immediately obvious to this phone’s target market, they’re still very real. Android on the Grand X just works: there’s nothing particularly complex to learn, and the operating system behaves predictably and consistently in pretty much every ordinary use case. The startup animations are cheesy and there’s the odd piece of Sinicized English here and there — when an alarm goes off while the phone is powered down, it flashes up a message asking "Your phone whether boot?" — but there’s nothing that really distracts from the overall smoothness of the system.

The only non-stock feature that immediately springs out is the pre-installed TouchPal keyboard, and whether it provides any real advantage over the stock Android 4.0 offering is a matter of opinion. Its headline feature is the "Curve" input system, essentially a rip-off of Swype, which allows users to type by drawing a continuous line on the keyboard before selecting predicted words from a list. Unless this is how you ordinarily type, you’ll probably want to revert to the standard Android keyboard, which is included by default and provides a much more aesthetically-integrated experience.

In the days before its official announcement, ZTE’s UK Twitter account billed the Grand X as "one of the MOST ADVANCED GAMING SMARTPHONES," stoking expectations of something special. What this somewhat hyperbolic label means in practice is that it’s got Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset inside and comes with the company’s proprietary TegraZone marketplace, allowing users to download games optimized for the system. Unfortunately, TegraZone constantly draws attention to the Tegra 2’s age, with top titles such as Shadowgun now optimized specifically for its successor, the Tegra 3.

The only pre-installed game on my device was a demo of Riptide GP, an arcade-style 3D jet ski experience in the vein of Nintendo’s classic Wave Race series. At one of the Grand X’s twin London launch events, ZTE management took turns playing the game through an HDMI link, a feature not provided in the phone’s production version. The graphics held up well on the big screen, though the quality of the players was less impressive — one exec got stuck with a "Wrong Way. Touch to Recover" message for a solid three minutes.

The Grand X comes with Dolby Mobile surround-sound audio, which is accompanied by a pre-installed Dolby Mobile Control Panel app. It’s little more than a selector for presets, offering long lists of settings for "Music" and "Movie" listening, but it works well, significantly modifying the quality of the sound.

With the music set to "Flat" by default, it’s well worth venturing into the control panel before judging the Grand X’s audio performance too harshly, particularly if using the bundled earbuds — while the inline play / pause button is useful, the buds themselves are tinny and much too quiet. General sound reproduction through speakers or higher-quality headphones, on the other hand, is more than passable.

Call quality / reception

For modern smartphones, reception is in many ways the ultimate bottleneck — when out of Wi-Fi range, poor data access can render a handset virtually unusable for many of its most important tasks. Thankfully, the Grand X appears solid in this respect. Using a prepaid Vodafone SIM, I placed the device next to an HTC One S on Talkmobile (a UK MVNO using Vodafone’s network) and achieved comparable results. 3G data comes through at a reasonable rate and calls are crisp and clear, with no dropping.

One area in which the Grand X’s reception did disappoint was GPS, with the device significantly underperforming in most comparisons. Some indoor degradation is to be expected, and the device generally performs well outside, but it completely failed to locate a satellite under clear skies in at least one of my impromptu tests. As with any Android device, pin-pointing is usually improved by turning on Google’s location service, and using Wi-Fi and mobile network data to boost accuracy, but in this case it had no effect.