ZTE Blade V50 Design: one of the best phones you can get for around $120

I played around with the ZTE Blade V50 Design 4G phone for close to 2 weeks. Right off the bat, that is a ridiculous name, it’s almost as if the team responsible for naming the device came to a stalemate and ended up picking every name on the table. Thankfully, the device itself makes up for its Portuguese-style name.

The V50, which is what I’m going to call it, is a budget device that punches a little above its weight. Let’s get the price out of the way, you can get the phone for between $110 and $130. Keep that in mind as we talk about this impressive smartphone.

The V50 is a slab smartphone and we have been using those for over a decade now and know what to expect. So, let’s jump right into the main pillars of a smartphone.

Battery

I’m starting with this because it is easily the V50’s greatest strength. I tried my best to deplete the battery in a day but I’m afraid, it is not possible.

You suck the battery by watching hours of YouTube, scrolling for hours on various social media and playing some games and the V50’s battery takes all that you give it and keeps standing. It can feel like magic when you’re used to finishing the day in the red.

The V50 manages this by packing a 5000mAh battery and then pairing that with an efficient little processor. Check out this crazy day I had:

The phone almost broke me on this day. I had 10 and a half hours of screen on time on this day and about 14 hours of standby time on a single charge and yet I had 11% battery still to go.

I had charged the phone to 100% just before bedtime, unplugged it and woke up to about 96%. It loses about 4-6% overnight. Then I proceeded to abuse the phone, racking up over 10 hours of screen on time.

A typical working day is 8 hours + 1 hour for lunch, meaning I could have had the V50’s screen on from 8am to 5 pm and still have plenty of battery to spare. That’s ridiculous.

So, in short, you won’t have to worry about battery life with this bad boy.

However, do note that although it supports 22.5W fast charging, the huge battery takes a while to top up. It takes 30 minutes to go from 3% to 36% and an hour to get to 65%. It takes close to 2 hours to fill it up.

Design

Let’s stay on the V50’s strong points. I know design is subjective but objectively, this phone looks good. That’s especially so in the beach green colour.

There’s no denying that the design was heavily inspired by the iPhone. The flat sides, which even Samsung was inspired by are here and then there is the back which straddles the inspiration/shamelessly-copied line.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you get your inspiration. At the end of the day, the V50 is pleasing to look at and that’s good thing for a $115 phone.

You wouldn’t expect premium materials on such a budget and you’ll be treated to plastic on both the back and the sides. Yes, it doesn’t feel as premium as glass and metal flagships but it also doesn’t feel bad.

The V50 is well built. The chassis feels solid, there is no creaking or give anywhere. The buttons feel good, not mushy at all. All around pleasant, if you ask me.

I don’t like the huge chin on the front though. In fact, the bezels are just downright ugly. The top bezel is bigger than the side ones then the chin just sticks out annoyingly.

Performance

The phone packs the 12nm Unisoc T606 processor and it is not a powerful chip by any stretch of the imagination. For those that understand benchmark scores, the T606 has multicore Geekbench scores that are beaten by the single core performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 which came out in 2021 just like the T606.

So, we have established that the processor is on the weak side. However, how does that translate to real world use? Not bad, I gotta say.

See, the processor in the V50 is the same as the one in the Itel S23 and ask any Itel S23 user and they will tell you that the performance is decent. Or in short, it’s ‘Not bad.’

That may be because smartphones have matured and the apps we spend most of our time using can easily be handled by budget processors.

The weaker processor will come in to bite you when it comes to camera modes and heavy games. You’re not going to be shooting 4K video on the V50 for example.

The GPU, the Mali-G57 MP1 is decent. Do not try to play Genshin Impact on this phone though.

That said, if the game is not too heavy, the V50 will handle it without breaking a sweat. For example it can handle Asphalt Nitro 2, no problems. The same applies to moderately demanding games like Mordern Combat: Rebel Guns.

This means if you’re not that deep into heavy gaming, you will be satisfied with the V50’s performance.

ZTE managed to provide a mostly lag-free experience and so when scrolling around the interface, you will hardly encounter any stutters.

Of course, if you’re coming from a flagship, you will notice that things aren’t as chippy, taking half a second or a second longer to open some apps. Noticeable but not a deal breaker by any means.

You can get the V50 with either 128GB or 256GB of storage, which is great. I tested a 256GB variant. ZTE did cheap out on RAM though, the 256GB models come with either 4GB or 8GB of RAM.

You can expand that with virtual RAM but as you may know, virtual RAM is not as fast or efficient as physical RAM. Not to mention that virtual RAM can reduce the lifespan of your storage.

Anyway, I found that you can multitask a little on the V50. I have found that it can hold about 4 apps in memory which you can switch between with no refreshes. Beyond that, you will see refreshes, even if the apps won’t necessarily load from scratch every time.

Even the side-mounted fingerprint reader works well enough. It rarely fails, which is great to see.

Display

The display is really good for the price point. It is a 6.6 inch display with a welcome 1080*2408 (~400 ppi). It simply means it looks sharp and you won’t be able to see individual pixels.

What’s good to see is that high refresh rate screens are making it to this price point. Shame on Apple for not including these high refresh screens on their non-Pro phones like the iPhone 14 I use.

The V50 can refresh its screen at 90Hz, as opposed to the normal 60Hz. The difference, while not mind-blowing, is noticeable and 90Hz does feel a little smoother when scrolling.

The quality of the LCD is not bad but it’s also not great. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t ruin your video watching experience but coming from flagship phones, the V50’s display will a little look off. It’s not a knock on the phone, the display is okay for what the phone costs.

Camera

As it is with the display, you get what you pay for. The camera will help you document memories and that’s about it. The images the V50 produces won’t wow you but they also won’t necessarily disappoint you either, especially when you’re shooting a well-lit scene.

The camera does tend to overexpose images and they can come out looking a little washed out with blown highlights. In some cases, it handles exposure well and when you remember the $115 price, the images it produces are really good.

When it gets dark outside you might as well take a mental note of the scene, the phone won’t do much better. You’ll be treated to boatloads of grain and images will come out darker than it actually is to your eyes. In short, there is no night mode.

Then when it comes to versatility, do not be misled by the three cameras on the back. It’s as good as you have one camera on the back – the 50MP main shooter. The second camera is a 2MP macro camera that is decent, I guess, but how many micro shots do you take?

The third camera is just a depth camera that’s meant to assist the main shooter when you take pictures. There is no telefoto (zoom) camera but the camera app will allow you to quickly take 2X shots. The results aren’t great because they just digitally zoom into your image.

Like I mentioned, the main shooter has a 50MP lens but it shoots at 12MP by default. You can choose the 50MP mode and it does provide more detail at the expense of slower shutter and processing speeds. However, if you hold your hand relatively steady, you will like the 50MP images.

The 50MP has more detail but is also darker than the standard one. The digitally zoomed in one is disappointing.

In summary, the photos the V50 takes are decent and one could argue, great, when you consider how much the phone costs. I’m not that fussy about cameras and I would be okay with the daytime pictures the phone takes.

Video is disappointing though. It caps oout at 1080p which would have been okay if the output was good.

The stabilisation is disappointing, the footage looks grainy even in decent light. Do note though that the videos are comparable to other phones in this price range. So, I guess it’s par for the course.

The selfie camera does blow out highlights and so blue skies will look white. However, it’s not bad when it comes to faces. It tends to lighten the skin a bit, a trick that Itel and Tecno also employ, which dark skinned people like me here in Africa will love.

The selfie video was especially impressive to me. It shoots at 1080p from the front camera and so you get some pleasing videos, albeit with blown highlights.

Great value

Where does all the above leave us? Well, the ZTE Blade V50 Design is great value.

You get mind-blowing battery life and good performance packaged in a pleasing design. You get a decent camera system that can produce good images given the right conditions.

There likely won’t be any software updates but the phone ships with Android 13.

The model I tested had 256GB of storage and 4GB of RAM, expandable to 14GB.

All this comes for between $110 and $130 and if you look around you can even get it for cheaper. This is a great deal in every sense of the word. If the V50 cost $50 more, that wouldn’t be egregious and so the fact that you can get it for $110, makes it a really good deal.

Think of it this way, the Itel S23 costs about $129 and it comes with the same processor and storage. However, it runs Android 12 and has a much less sharper display (~267 ppi) as opposed to the V50’s ~400 ppi. That difference means you can see individual pixels on the S23 but you can’t see them on the V50,

The V50 also charges at a faster 22.5W whilst the S23 taps out at 10W. The only thing the S23 has over the V50 is that all the 256GB models come with 8GB RAM whilst the V50 has a 4GB and an 8GB option.

So yeah, the V50 is really great value. We shall be looking at the Itel S24 to see where it falls on this food chain.

Also read:

• Itel P55, P55+, P55 5G, the ultimate buyer’s review
• Itel S23+ vs GTeL Infinity 13. Which of these did a better job at making a decent, affordable smartphone for the Zimbabwean
• GTeL Infinity 13 review. Looks posh but is that enough to sell?