ZTE V5

Like most of the phones these days, the handset has a candybar design and at first glance, there are no surprises as such. However, look closely and what will catch your attention are Android navigation buttons in blue. Not only do they look better than the plain capacitive buttons on most smartphones, but they also manage to make the device look distinct, as noted during our hands-on impressions. There are several other traces of blue in the device which we'll be coming to subsequently.

The Chinese giant might have named its offering the V5 based on its screen size. Following the norm, the brand has fitted the smartphone with a 5-inch display. With the resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels, one might discard it against the full HD-toting phones out there, but trust us when we say that the V5's display reproduces excellent colours and sharp text. The screen offers ample brightness and good viewing angles. Even though it turns slightly reflective in outdoors, we felt no problems in viewing the display.

Just like all its Chinese counterparts, ZTE has heavily customised its offering's interface. Although the underlying layer is Android 4.4.2 KitKat, you won't notice it unless you visit the 'about' section for the simple reason that there's hardly anything that gels with Google's vision of Android. ZTE is calling its custom skin as Nubia UI, which is currently in version 2.5.1.

Till now, none of the specs of the ZTE V5 would have made you jump from your chair considering you get similar specs in most devices at this price point. However, ZTE’s camera hardware will definitely make your eyes roll thanks to a 13-megapixel Sony Exmor sensor with f/2.2 aperture at the back and a 5MP front camera.

Inside, the smartphone packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz paired with a gigabyte of RAM – exactly the same combination as the new Moto G. However, there's a  difference of earth and sky between the two when it comes to actual performance. While the second-gen Moto G is helped by its vanilla Android interface, the poorly-optimised Nubia UI drains the resources at its disposal. Even while basic navigation, there were several hangups in the ZTE V5. What's even more frustrating is the fact that the device will show a prompt saying 'applications are loading' quite often. This happened not only when we unlocked the device, but also when we exited an app after a long time. Another problem we noticed is that after pressing the unlock button, the phone will take long time to display the lock screen.

We have a huge dislike against the Android smartphones which offer measly 4GB of onboard storage, out of which some portion is already consumed by the OS itself. The dislike is even more when the device is not an entry-level offering. It's akin to dangling a carrot in front of the mule, since you can't use the storage for installing multiple apps, let alone installing heavy games like CSR Racing.