The Axon 30 with Under Display Camera: Hands-on Mini-Review

A few weeks ago, ZTE had announced a new device in their flagship line-up, the new Axon 30. The phone is an interesting device for a few reasons: it’s one of the more rare devices this year that opted to use the Snapdragon 870 rather than the newer Snapdragon 888 chip, also pricing itself much more aggressively versus the higher-end Axon 30 Ultra which we reviewed also around a month ago.

What also makes the Axon 30 interesting is the fact that this is now the second-generation under-display camera implementation from ZTE. Although we never had the chance to experience the first-gen Axon 20, we’re now starting to see more vendors attempt to implement the new technology in their new devices, and the Axon 30 is a good opportunity to have a literal closer look at how these under-display cameras work.

The Axon 30 as aforementioned is one of the rare devices this year released with the Snapdragon 870 SoC. As a reminder, the 870 is a higher binned variant of the Snapdragon 865 and 865+, this time increasing the CPU frequency on the fastest Cortex-A77 core to up to 3.2GHz – quite considerably faster than the 2.84GHz of the X1 cores of the Snapdragon 888, and still faster clocked than the 3GHz Snapdragon 888+. Due to the power efficiency regressions or non-progress of the Snapdragon 888’s manufacturing node, the Snapdragon 870 should still be a perfectly viable and competent SoC in a flagship device in 2021.

The device comes in either 8+128 or 12+256GB options, similar to the Axon 30 Ultra. Other device internals of the phone are a bit more conservative versus the Ultra variant, such as the lack of WiFi 6E, only USB 3.0 connectivity, and some notable features lacking such as only a single bottom-firing speaker.

The display is a very large 6.92” AMOLED at 2460 x 1080 resolution. It still features high refresh rate up to 120Hz, but even now increases the touch sampling rate to 360Hz to reduce latency and increase responsiveness.

The phone is extremely large; at 77.8mm width it’s considerably wider than even most “large” devices out there, and definitely dwarfs the Axon 30 Ultra. Because of the quite thin side frame design and curved back glass, as well as the quite thin 7.8mm body, the phone does still manage to have good handling and does feel smaller than what it really is.

The rear of the phone is defined by the camera setup: It’s mostly just a dual-camera device for all practical purposes. The main sensor is the same as on the Axon 30 Ultra, the IMX686 at 64MP resolution which bins down to 16MP 1.6µm in regular shots. The difference here is that the Axon 30 has a smaller f/1.8 aperture optics compared to the Axon 30 Ultra.

Alongside the main camera there’s also a small 8MP ultra-wide unit with f/2.2 optics. There’s also a 5MP macro and a 2MP DoF camera – but these are generally irrelevant for photography in most use-cases. In general, the Axon 30 evidently puts a much lower focus on the camera system than the Axon 30 Ultra.

The phone has one further pratical drawback compared to the Axon 30 Ultra and that is that it’s only featuring a single bottom firing speaker. The Axon 30 Ultra was able to use the earpiece speaker as a stereo unit, and although quality there wasn’t great at least it’s better than just a mono-speaker setup like on the Axon 30.

Naturally, the most interesting aspect of the phone is the fact that it’s one of the very rare devices today with an under-screen camera. While this isn’t ZTE’s first foray into the technology, it’s definitely a much more mature and interesting implementation we’ll be taking a closer look at.

The Axon 30 comes at much cheaper pricing than the Axon 30 Ultra, starting at only $/€499 – which very much puts it well below the usual flagship device price point, so we should adjust our expectations accordingly.