ZTE Grand X Max 2 Review

Today we’ll be checking ZTE’s latest affordable smartphone, available on cricket wireless, the ZTE Grand X Max 2.

The Max 2 reminds us a bit of the recently announced Axon 7 with its subtle curve to help with handling and similar port and button locations. Unlike the Axon 7 however, the Max 2 is constructed entirely of plastic. You could even say that the rear covers gloss is similar to what Samsung used in the Galaxy S4 – nice in the hand but definitely a fingerprint magnet.

It’s also not the best at resisting scratches, unfortunately. Sadly our unit did suffer a one meter drop onto concrete and while the plastic fared well, the right side of the band chipped considerably so you may want to pick up a case.

The blue color scheme and pattern rear are both remarkably subtle but nice nonetheless. Although the Max 2 is pretty big, it’s fairly manageable in the hand thanks to it being a bit narrower than similarly sized smartphones like the Nexus 6.

The three illuminated capacitive keys are customizable being that you can choose where you like the back button to go, which is a great setting to have.

Cool and functional design – ZTE Grand X Max 2

The Max 2’s beautiful large 6” 1080p display offers a great immersive media consumption experience. If you watch a lot of videos, TV shows or movies you’ll really enjoy this phone and for the price the display is one of the best we’ve seen. It has great color reproduction very good contrast just the right amount of saturation and it’s reasonably readable outdoors.

The snapdragon 615 successor, that is the Snapdragon 617, is powering the Max 2 – that’s complemented by 2 GB of RAM. Overall the Max 2 – is a solid performer. It’s not going to do particularly well in benchmark tests but it’s still a pretty good day-to-day with only a few UI hiccups.

The Adreno 405 GPU may hinder the phones gaming performance with slower load times and some minor frame drops during gameplay but even demanding games, like Asphalt 8, are still very playable.

Call quality with the ZTE seems to be excellent on the cricket network. There is 16 GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 64 GB with a microSD card. Although we were happy to see ZTE include a quick charge 2.0 enable USB type-c port, which is the newer reversible standard, we were disappointed with the lack of a fingerprint reader.

The vast majority of smartphones this year have shipped with readers so it seems a bit odd not to include one. Even though this is an affordable offering, the single side firing speaker on the Max 2 sounds great with only minor distortion at higher volumes. There’s also a hi-fi audio chipset on board which will appeal to those wanting to use headphones.

ZTE Grand X Max 2

With normal usage the Grand X Max 2 has no trouble reaching about five hours of screen-on time thanks to its 3400 mA battery. During one of our tests however, we used google maps for about an hour and a half and then had a 40 minute Google Hangouts video call which resulted in just under 3 hours of screen-on time. Despite this, we were never able to kill the Grand X next to before the end of our day. Some users may even be able to achieve two full days of use.

The Max 2 two runs a lightly skinned version of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. Outside of a few notable UI and functional changes, the software is pretty much stock Android. The most major change is likely the lock screen, since the unlocking mechanism is to press and hold rather than just wipe off. Although we generally like this idea, we found that the phone would unlock itself while in a pants pocket – opening apps and placing calls on more than a few occasions.

One thing to note regarding our cricket wireless model is the bloatware that comes pre-loaded. It’s not terrible, there’s only about 10 apps that are pre-installed, most of which are games and you can uninstall all but 3, which appear to be helpful for cricket subscribers anyway.

ZTE has included a secondary rear camera which is supposed to add increased depth and sharpness to pictures, but as far as we can tell, unfortunately this mode did not perform very well in our testing. Sadly, the images produced by the Grand X Max 2 13 MP rear camera are disappointing and below-average, even for the price.

Many of the images that we took were noisy despite good lighting. The images are also very soft especially near the corners. To be fair, some of these images are just simply out of focus but that can be blamed on the phone slow and inaccurate autofocus. In addition, color reproduction can be horrendously bad, especially when capturing warmer colors like red and orange.

Low-light performance was also below average for the price, the phone couldn’t focus correctly for virtually every shot and when it did the pictures would come out extra noisy. It’s a shame that the camera doesn’t hold up well too. ZTE’s camera app is actually quite good offering an easy to use automatic shooting experience.

There’s also a built in time lapse and panorama mode as well as a surprisingly comprehensive manual mode

You can purchase the Grand X Max 2, in blue, exclusively from cricket wireless for $200. Unfortunately there is currently only a 16 GB model available. Those wishing to store large files will have to rely on the expandable storage up to 64 GB.