Hands-On Review: the ZTE Axon 10 Pro

It has been a wild year for ZTE. In August, the company released the Axon 10 Pro, its first flagship smartphone to hit American shores since last year’s temporary ban. That ban represented a period of uncertainty for U.S. customers, one that left many of us wondering when and if we’d ever get our hands on a new ZTE device. Luckily, all was resolved, the ban was short-lived, and ZTE’s latest premium handset, the Axon 10 Pro, has officially arrived. We took this phone for a test drive to see how it would fare.

ZTE Axon 10 Pro

The hallmark of ZTE’s Axon series has long been value without compromise. In fact, you could argue that Axon devices offer some of the best dollar-for-dollar value on the market. The Axon 10 Pro is no exception. Go down the list and you’ll see that many of its specs match those found in the best phones on the market. Start with the hardware. The Axon 10 Pro uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 CPU. That’s the same chipset as the Galaxy Note10. For memory, it comes with up to 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM—that’s more than the iPhone 11. Want the extended battery life or pure Android experience of, say, the Google Pixel 3? The Axon 10 Pro’s 4000mAh battery easily delivers all-day usage and its near-stock OS is indistinguishable from a Google phone. The list goes on, but the underlying point is that with the Axon 10 Pro, you get many of the same specs and features as a flagship, but at nearly half the price.