Our Score
8/10
Pros
- Great value
- Neat-looking metallic rear
- Decent screen
Cons
- Poor camera
- Some lag
- Quad-core CPU a red herring
Review Price £99.99
Key Features: Quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A5 Qualcomm MSM8225Q CPU; 1GB RAM, 4GB storage; Android 4.1; 4-inch 480 x 800 pixel LCD screen; 5-megapixel main camera with LED flash
Manufacturer: ZTE Corporation
ZTE Blade V - Design and Screen
What is the ZTE Blade V?
The ZTE Blade V is one of the lowest-cost quad-core phones ever made. You can buy one for under £100, making it a quarter the price of high-end quad-core phone like the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Given the low internal memory and the laggy interface, the benefits of such a processor are limited. But this remains a solid budget phone that looks better that most cheapo mobiles.
ZTE Blade V - Design
The ZTE Blade V is a plastic phone – it’s all you ever get at this price – but it’s one with a rather snazzy finish. Taking inspiration from the original ‘pebble blue’ Samsung Galaxy S3, it has a brushed metal effect on the back, designed to make it look upmarket.
It doesn’t do a bad job either. With a small-but-chunky body you would never mistake this for a top-end phone, but the blue metallic rear looks more luxurious and more exotic, than the black plastic used in most budget phones. However, look closer and it suffers from the same sort of aesthetic problems as most cheap phones – the three-tone, seam-heavy sides are not beautiful.
At 10.9mm thick, the ZTE Blade V is quite chunky by current standards, and its screen bezel is fairly wide too. However, that’s not to say it’s much worse than the competition. The pricier LG L5 II and Galaxy Ace 3 are around 1mm thinner, but don’t offer hugely better style or build quality.
Thanks to its mid-size 4-inch screen, the Blade V is perfectly comfortable to operate in one hand despite its chunkiness. There are no layout surprises here, either – aside from that the microUSB socket is on the left edge rather than the bottom.
The blue back of the ZTE Blade V comes off, revealing the removable (therefore replaceable) battery and the microSD card slot. Expandable memory is a necessary feature here as the phone only has 4GB of internal storage.
Although stripped-back in some respects, the Blade V does have some extras generally missing from bargain basement phones. For example, there’s a multi-colour LED indicator above the screen that flashes green, red and amber depending on the notification in waiting. It’s a neat addition in a phone like this.
The ZTE Blade V also uses light-up soft keys, making it a pretty handy phone in the dark. You can turn the notification light off if you find it a night-time annoyance, though.
ZTE Blade V – Screen
With a 4-inch display, the ZTE Blade is nowadays among the smaller-screened phones. It has a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, giving a pixels-per-inch rating of 233.
It’s not sharp enough to produce the immaculate text and images you’d see on a higher-end phone. Display quality is sound but – as we expected at the price – not fantastic.
Colours are solid but a little muted and top brightness is good, but the reflectivity of the screen makes it a bit of a pain to use outdoors when it’s sunny. It has an IPS panel, making angles viewing no problem, but the screen is really a bit too small to share videos longer than a short YouTube clip.
There were always going to be compromises involved in a sub-£100 phone display, but ZTE has made the right ones. Many phones at the price have lower-resolution screens, where ths Blade Vs 480 x 800 pixels is the acceptable baseline these days. The screen cover of the phone is glass rather than plastic too, which is less likely to get scratched in day-to-day use.
ZTE Blade V - Android 4.1, Peformance and Apps
ZTE Blade V – Software
The ZTE Blade runs the ageing Android 4.1 software with a custom interface made by ZTE. Although not a massive departure from vanilla Android in most respects, in the parts it does change it’s clear the interface has not been made with the same sort of budget as Samsung’s TouchWiz or HTC’s Sense.
It’s visually overwrought in places, most notably the lock screen. Press down on the lock screen and a green bolt of ‘electricity’ fires around your finger. It’s over the top, and not consistent with the visual style of the shortcut icons you can summon by ‘pinching’ the lock screen. This dual lock screen mechanic feels clumsy too.
However, this is really one of the few parts of the interface that tries (with limited success) to paste a visual personality on the phone. You also get some pretty inoffensive Calendar, Clock and Contacts widgets, but they’re fairly generic.
ZTE Blade V – Performance, Apps and Games
Aside from these minor – not entirely successful – additions, the ZTE Blade V is a completely standard Android phone. You have access to the Google Play app store and all the official Google apps, and can swap out most parts of the phone to your heart’s content, including keyboards, SMS texting interfaces and so on.
This is where the internal memory becomes a problem. It’s not enough for a large apps collection, and while you can use a microSD card to increase storage, not every app lets you install to the SD card. It’s a particular problem with data-heavy 3D games like Real Racing 3.
Despite being quad-core, this doesn’t always seem a super-powerful phone either. There is minor glitchy lag in operation – a slight stuttering of the animation when flicking between pages – and it seems a shame when theoretically less powerful phones avoid this sort of low-level lag completely. 
The ZTE Blade V uses a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm MSM8225Q processor with 1GB of RAM. It’s a processor that’s out there to supply the ‘quad-core’ tagline without incurring much cost. The phones cores are not particularly powerful. They’re Cortex-A5 cores, much less powerful than the Cortex-A9 type cores used in the Galaxy Ace 3.
Of course, these phones are only closely comparable in terms of features, not price. The Ace 3 costs around twice as much as the ZTE Blade V. Closer to the Blade V’s price is the Galaxy Fame. It too has a Cortex-A9 processor, but with one core instead of four – as well as a much worse screen, less RAM and a bunch of other limiting factors.
Benchmarks show that the Blade V is theoretically marginally faster than the much more expensive LG L7 II – we just wish there was a bit more evident. If anything the Blade V comes across better when performing more advanced tasks like gaming and so on, then with real basics like Android navigation.
It’s not a hugely irritating kind of lag – it is minor – but if you’re expecting a phone that performs as snappily as one of the famous quad-core kings of the smartphone world, this is not it. Many dual-core phones offer better performance.
ZTE Blade V - Cameras and Video Recording
ZTE Blade V – Cameras
The ZTE Blade V has two cameras, a 5-megapixel sensor on the rear and a VGA camera on the front. Phones this cheap often leave out the front camera, and the LED flash that accompanies the rear sensor.
Early signs are good, but it all falls apart as soon as you start using the thing. Given evenly-lit scenes with no intense light sources, the Blade V can produce some reasonable shots. However, give it anything more challenging and it simply can’t cope.
Exposure judgement is very poor, causing bright areas to bleed into darker ones unless you force the Blade V to expose images based on the brightest part of the image. This is not something you do naturally – touch focusing encourages you to tap on the subject, not the sky.
Focusing is also a little slow, and shutter lag varies from being slight to seriously bad – a couple of seconds at the worst.
Zoomed-in - Purple fringing is a real problem with the Blade V camera
Light bleed can at times be horrendous
This image is severely overexposed - a common effect with the Blade V
However, try hard enough and the Blade V can produce reasonable shots
The front camera too is poor. Any images appear heavily processed to the extent that they look as though they’ve been put through a Photoshop filter, and there’s significant halo’ing around light sources.
That the flash suggests the Blade V is well equipped is a bit of a red herring. Low-light performance without the flash is extremely poor, and in counter-intuitive fashion, the Night mode actually prohibits the use of the flash.
The single-LED does so its job to an extent, but its performance too is poor, again thanks to the fundamental issues with the camera itself. Exposure levels in flash shots are all over the place, and as the LED is not used as a focusing aid, getting a firm focus in poor lighting is anything but guaranteed. 
More overexposure is evident when using the flash
There are many worse cameras out there at the price, but the ZTE Blade V is bettered by similar-spec, higher-price rivals from better-known names. These are mobiles the phone wants to appear to be a serious lower-cost rival too. Outside of Android, the Lumia 520 and Lumia 620 offer more reliable cameras at a similar price.
ZTE Blade V – Camera App
As well as offering generally poor camera image quality, the ZTE Blade V’s camera app is pretty bare. There are few additional modes, and limited creative filters.
You do get Panorama, and there are some sliders within the settings menu that let you control exposure, brightness, contrast and so on, but you don’t get HDR or a burst mode. HDR could help with the exposure issues of the camera. However, we think it might be too sluggish to be useful given the performance of the camera when shooting single pics.
ZTE Blade V – Video Recording
The ZTE Blade V’s video recording tops out at 480p – significantly less detailed than ‘baseline’ 720p HD. Image quality in videos isn’t great and there’s significant motion noise, but it doesn’t appear to suffer from the odd exposure ‘light bleed’ effect anywhere near as much as stills.
With an 1,800mAh battery, the ZTE Blade V has a marginally larger power source than the previous Blade III. It offers decent but generally unremarkable battery stamina. You’ll get a day a bit out of a charge, but unless you’re going to be a light user only, two days is too much to ask.
The ZTE Blade V also offers no power saving modes. These usually cut down the amount a phone tries to access mobile internet data, and even throttle the CPU and manage screen brightness. That the Blade doesn’t have one of these at all is a sign of how little investment has gone into optimising the phone’s software.
You can download apps that’ll do a similar job – and the most effective way to increase stamina is to control mobile data, which you can do manually. 
ZTE Blade V – Sound Quality and Call Quality
On the back of the ZTE Blade V is a single speaker that outputs through a grille on the back. As we saw with the camera, it’s capable of performance that’s above-average in its price range if youre careful, but suffers from some serious problems too.
At low to mid-level volumes, the Blade V offers decent tone for a low-cost phone. It’s not a reed-thin sounding speaker, with that extra bit of warmth and body that makes it tolerable to listen to.
However, at top volume, the sound distorts horribly with most music, causing an unsightly crackling noise. Finishing elements like properly managing the volume output of the speaker are things that the Blade V lacks.
Call quality is perfectly fine, however. Like the speaker, it’s not too thin-sounding, and there’s a secondary microphone on the back to provide active noise cancellation during calls.
We experienced no hardware-derived signal issues, or unexpected call drops. The sound is slightly boxy, but in isolation you’re unlikely to have too many complaints.
Should I buy the ZTE Blade V?
The ZTE Blade V is a phone that offers lots of spec cred and features for little money.
Its quad-core processor is ultimately a disappointment, failing to rid the phone of the lag of previous-generation Blade phones, but the decent-quality screen alone makes it a good value proposition.
For the price it outclasses most of the competition. The Acer Liquid Z3 has a poorer screen, as does the Samsung Galaxy Fame. Some of its most attractive price rivals are not Android phones at all, but the Lumia 520 and Lumia 620 – which are often available around the £100 mark.
Those phones offer better all-round performance and more reliable cameras – although the apps and games selection on Windows Phone is still much worse.
As is common with ZTE’s low-cost phones, we imagine some buyers will purchase the Blade V with a view to installing a custom ROM on the thing, which may solve the performance issues. Otherwise, this is a phone that requires some patience, but remains cracking value.
Verdict
The ZTE Blade V offers great specs for the money. A lack of attention to detail in some areas and finishing touches stop some from being entirely effective, but you will pay more elsewhere for a phone of this grade.
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