After skipping a year, ZTE’s budget-friendly
flagship is back – check out the Axon 9 Pro. It runs stock Android now (8.1
Oreo) on Qualcomm’s top Snapdragon while sipping power from a large 4,000mAh
battery.
Starting with the screen, it’s still an AMOLED panel
but that’s where similarities end. It’s bigger, 6.21”, it has a notch and it
has 1080p+ resolution (down from QHD on the Axon 7). The good news is that the
screen is HDR10-capable and it has an RGB sensor for accurate white balance.
Even better – Axon’s powerful stereo speakers are
still on board. They are Dolby Atmos-enabled to boot. Unfortunately, the 3.5mm
headphone jack is gone. The dual camera has gained OIS. It’s a 12+20MP setup where the
secondary sensor has a 130° wide-angle lens. The 12MP camera uses a Sony IMX363
sensor with an f/1.75 aperture and relatively large 1.4µm pixels.
Going back to the notch for a second, there’s a 20MP
selfie camera in there (with a fixed focus f/2.0 lens). This camera is also
responsible for Face recognition. There’s a fingerprint reader on the back.As expected, the Axon 9 Pro is
powered by a Snapdragon 845 chipset. It has 6GB of RAM (LPDDR4X) and 128GB of
built-in storage (UFS 2.1). Unlike the OnePlus, the Axon is a dual-SIM phone
that offers a microSD slot.
You can rely on QuickCharge 4.0 to quickly charge up
the 4,000mAh battery over USB-C. Or you could use the Qi wireless charging. So,
the back is made of glass (scratch-resistant, of course). And did we mention
that it’s waterproof (IP68)? Because it is.
The ZTE Axon 9 Pro will cost € 650 at launch. There
are no dates yet, but Germany will be among the first markets to get it and
then availability will expand to more European markets and in Asia. No, it’s
not coming to the US.
