The race to launch the biggest smartphone is well and truly on, and now ZTE has stormed in with the whopping 5.7-inch Grand Memo.
The name ‘Grand’ certainly fits the bill, with this huge phone almost falling into the ‘mini tablet’ category thanks to its 5.7-inch display. It’s not the sharpest display on the market with a resolution of 1280 x 720, but it seems from early hands-on reviews that the picture quality is decent.
To provide enough power for a phone of this stature ZTE has packed in a quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro chip from Qualcomm, with 1GB of RAM to suit. Under the hood there’s a hefty 3,200 mAh battery to cope with that huge and bright screen, though it remains to be seen whether it’s enough juice to get you through a full day with this beast.
ZTE has chosen to continue the ‘big’ theme with the rear camera, sitting a 13.1 megapixel sensor with LED flash on the back, capable of snapping high-res images and Full HD 1080p video.
Inside the Grand Memo is 16GB of storage and Android Jelly Bean as the operating system, along with the usual connectivity suspects in the form of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct and even Wi-Fi Display for wirelessly streaming the phone’s screen to a TV. Unfortunately ZTE hasn’t included 4G LTE connectivity, however.
The phone measures a fairly slender 8.5mm thin, but unfortunately ZTE hasn’t really designed the rest of the phone to make it manageable in the hand. The bezel around the screen is far from thin, and as such the phone is a fair bit bigger than the Galaxy Note II and other similarly large phones.
Pricing and availability is still to be revealed.