We haven’t seen a new flagship smartphone from ZTE yet, but that may change soon. ZTE CEO Zeng Xuezhong has just revealed the new Axon 2 flagship via his Weibo page, giving us the first glimpse of the upcoming smartphone. The phone will reportedly come with a new design, without any screws at the bottom. The CEO revealed the picture down below and said that the company is aiming for a minimalistic design without the use of the boring old screws down at the bottom.

From the image above, we can see that the Axon 2’s design is going to be very simple. Unlike the Huawei P9 or the iPhone 6S shown in the image for comparison, the new Axon flagship will feature just the USB port and the microphone at the bottom. So, no speakers at the bottom. But that brings us to another question, if the speakers are located at the back of the phone, that may not be the ideal location. We have seen that speakers on the back give out muffled output when placed on a flat surface. We hope that the new design comes with a solution to this problem. But there’s another possibility, the previous TENAA images have revealed front facing speakers on the new Axon flagship, which could be the perfect location. We hope that’s going to be the case here.

Another question brought by this image is how well is the built quality of the Axon 2. Traditionally screws do a good job of keeping the body intact, but since ZTE is coming up with a different design, it would be interesting to see how overall built of the phone.

We have already seen the Axon 2 on TENAA in the past revealing most of the specs details of the device. The ZTE Axon 2 is expected to come with the Snapdragon 820 chipset with 4GB RAM, 64GB of storage further expandable up to 128GB. At the back, the phone will have a 20MP sensor while up front an 8MP shooter. Finally, a 3140mAh battery will be powering the phone.

While the above specs aren’t confirmed by the company, what we know for sure is that the new Axon 2 will come with a top-end Sharp 2K panel, which should also be ideal for VR. You can read more about the CEO’s comments on 2K from here.

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2K resolution on a smartphone display has always been the topic of discussion, with some believing that there’s no real need for such high-resolution panel, while others stating that 2K is really the future. Huawei’s CEO, Richard Yu has always been a strong criticizer of 2K resolution on smartphones, that is, until recently. A few weeks back, he revealed that although 2K resolution would be unnecessary on a smartphone display of size less than 6.5-inches, it was needed for VR. Hence, even Huawei was going to release a 2K smartphone this year.

Now, ZTE’s CEO Zeng Xuezhong revealed his views on the matter and his comments indicate that the upcoming ZTE Axon 2 flagship is all set to come with a 2K resolution display that’s better than rivals. He revealed late yesterday that ZTE’s Axon flagship is using the top-end panel from Sharp with 2K resolution which makes it amazing. He further revealed that 2K displays were necessary for VR since in a VR headset the screen was too close to the eyes and the image looks enlarged. This is why smartphones need to have at least 2K resolution displays to deliver a good VR experience.

The CEO also revealed a picture of VR (added above), which hints that the company will release some VR related products soon. A VR headset from ZTE won’t be a surprise given that major tech players are all invested in this emerging market. But according to Xuezhong, a good VR experience is not just about 2K resolution screen, as there are a number of other factors involved as well. The experience will also depend on the screen’s color gamut, contrast ratio, response time and power consumption.

Considering these comments from the company CEO, it looks like the upcoming ZTE Axon 2 will give these factors due attention to ensure a great VR experience. ZTE is said to be working on VR / AR since 2009 and by 2015, it is said that the company has hundreds of patents under its belt.

Since the CEO has started commenting about VR and Axon flagship, it is possible that we will meet the new device soon. We had already spotted the Axon 2 model recently, you can read more about that from here.

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Although ZTE had a conference back at MWC 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, the company didn’t release any flagship smartphone at that time. The company’s next major flagship is expected to be the ZTE Axon 2, which will succeed the popular first gen Axon flagship released in the second half of 2015. Now, more details about the upcoming flagship have been revealed thanks to the TENAA listing of the device.

Looks wise, the company seems to be continuing with the design of the earlier generation model. So, the new ZTE Axon 2 will come with the same metal body, speaker grills up front and slightly curved design as the Axon. However, there seem to be a few changes in the hardware. First of all, this particular model ditches the dual camera design on the earlier model. So, just a single camera sensor at the back with LED flash. You also get a fingerprint sensor located just below the setup.

As for the specs, this ZTE A2017 model, most likely called as Axon 2 will come with the powerful quad-core Snapdragon 820 chipset under the hood with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. This is further expandable up to 128GB via MicroSD. At the back, the phone will feature a 20MP sensor while up front, there will be an 8MP shooter. There will be a 3140mAh battery onboard. As for software, it will run on Android 6.0.1 OS.

 RELATED: ZTE A2017 Spotted on Geekbench

One interesting thing to note here is the thickness of the phone. According to the listing, the Axon 2 is going to be 9.8mm thick. That’s unusually thick for a phone with such battery capacity which makes us wonder what contributes to the phone’s thickness. Is the camera module going to be large? Or are we missing something else? Well, we will have to wait for more details to see what more hardware the phone has in store for us.

Stay tuned.

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ZTE seems to be working on a new flagship smartphone, most likely the ZTE Axon 2. Recently, a new model from the company, namely the ZTE A2017 was spotted on the benchmarking website GFXBench revealing the specs of the device. However, at that time, we couldn’t see the performance of the phone. Now, the same phone has been spotted on the AnTuTu benchmarking revealing specs as well as the performance of the device.

According to the AnTuTu benchmark of the A2017, the phone comes with the powerful quad-core Snapdragon 820 chip inside with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The display sports a resolution of 2K, and it will most likely be a 5.5-inch panel. At the back, there will be a 20MP (most likely 21MP) sensor while on the front, there will be an 8MP camera sensor. As for software, it will run on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow.

These are some pretty great specs and are in line with what we saw on the GFXBench a few days back. With SD820 and 4GB RAM on board, the phone managed to score an amazing 140,086 points on the AnTuTu benchmark. This is even better than the scores posted by Xiaomi Mi 5 and Galaxy S7.

Overall, this looks like a powerful flagship in the making. While all we have is the model number, i.e. A2017, it’s possible that this is the Axon 2. The first generation ZTE Axon was a great flagship (check out our review from here | Axon Mini Review) and with these specs, the upcoming phone seems like a powerful device as well. One of the plus points of the Axon series is its pricing and we hope that ZTE can price its upcoming products competitively.

Anyways, stay tuned for more details. If ZTE plans to release this device anytime soon, we are surely going to hear more about it in the coming days.

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