It seems that ZTE is prepping a lower cost version
of the Axon 7s or perhaps a regional version of it. You can see the new speaker
grills on the front and dual camera on the back, those are straight from the
7s. The internals are closer to the original Axon 7.
The new phone - known as ZTE A2018 for now - gets to
keep some of the highlights of the Axon, including the 5.5” OLED screen of QHD
resolution, the stereo speakers and yes, the new dual camera. Plus, the storage
options goes up even higher than the 7s - you can choose between 256GB, 128GB
and 64GB.
But then there’s the chipset. It has a quad-core
processor at 2.15 GHz, the Snapdragon 820/821AB are the only possibilities we
can think of. And you get “only” 4GB of RAM, while the 7s has the faster
Snapdragon 821 and 6GB of RAM.
There’s one inexplicable downgrade here - 1080p
video recording. It’s possible that TENAA’s table isn’t entirely accurate, but
4K 2160p was to be expected. And the battery capacity went down a hair -
3,320 mAh. It is thinner than
both, though, 7.7mm vs. 7.9mm.
So, not quite Axon 7s, not quite Axon 7 either.
Definitely not the Axon 8. What is this device? For now, our bet is on a
regional Chinese version, perhaps tied to one of the carriers.
