ZTE Grand X Hands-On Preview

There's a reason why you shouldn't always believe rumours, as they can lead to large disappointment when it exceeds that of reality.

When ZTE invited us to come down to look at its latest smartphone, with gaming being a key focus, we were naturally very interested. Then some rumours surfaced of it being a high-end gaming device that might render the Xperia Play obsolete, making us even more excited.

The reality was somewhat less grandiose. Although by no means a disappointment, the Grand X is basically another Android smartphone that can play games, as against a device specifically designed for gaming.

There's no fancy gamepad to give it a gaming edge, and its only gaming pedigree comes from the use of Nvidia's Tegra 2 chipset and its resulting access to games exclusively optimised for its graphic hardware.

With a sub-£200 price (£190 on prepay from Virgin Media), it joins a range of high performance devices that can be picked up for a lot less money than the likes of Samsung's Galaxy S III or HTC's One X, but still offer an excellent user experience.

The Grand X is a fairly average looking smartphone (but aren't they all these days?). It looks a bit like a Galaxy Nexus, but keeps a dedicated row of capacitive shortcut buttons beneath the 4.3-inch, 960x540 pixel, display rather than using on-screen icons.

The phone ships with Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) without any ZTE-specific customisation. Given the huge improvements made by Google itself in ICS, that's a good thing and it still leaves the customer the option to download alternative app launchers, live wallpapers, or widgets to create a totally personalised look.

The phone has a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera (with autofocus and a LED flash), with a slightly less impressive 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calling. For storage, there's 4GB of internal space and a microSDHC card slot to expand by a further 32GB.

The only disappointment here is the 512MB of RAM, which did cause at least one game demonstrated to us to pop up a warning about 'low memory' part way through.

Given it was a pre-release model and other apps might have been left running in the background, we'll give it the benefit of the doubt until we get the finished model in our own hands to properly test.

A 1,650mAh battery is also slightly above average, but possibly a little on the small side for the latest crop of devices that come with large screens and powerful processors.

ZTE has pre-loaded the Grand X with Nvidia's Tegra Zone app that is a single resource for all news relating to Tegra enhanced games, with direct access to a wide selection of games and live wallpapers that take advantage of the chipset. Tegra enhanced games include a number of graphical effects you won't see on devices using, say, Qualcomm processors.

While there are a number of free games available, others will set you back up to £5 a pop.

The Grand X will only be available from Virgin Media or from Phones 4u stores when it goes on sale in August, and the phone will be promoted by Professor Green, suggesting the target demographic for the phone will be a fairly young market.

For the money, whether for gaming, enjoying music or watching HD video on a large display, the Grand X seems to tick all the right boxes.

ZTE also used the day to announce the launch of its new website dedicated to all of its mobile devices in the UK, which is open for business now at www.ztedevices.co.uk.

Local competition

Meanwhile, ZTE's rival Huawei has announced the pending launch of its Ascend P1 smartphone on Vodafone in the UK, which packs a similar specification, namely a dual-core processor and qHD-resolution display, but with the addition of an 8-megapixel camera over the Grand X's 5-megapixel snapper. The Ascend P1 is also thinner at just 7.69mm thick over the Grand X's 9.9mm thick frame.

The P1 also trumps the Grand X on the battery front, but only by a rather insignificant 20mah at 1,670mAh, making it fairly level.

We can't wait to get our hands on the final versions of both devices to give each of them a proper test.

Both models will set you back a similar amount per month on contract (from £24 on Virgin Media for the Grand X to £26 a month on Vodafone for the Ascend P1).