ZTE Unleashes Flagship Grand X Smartphone With Ice Cream Sandwich

We knew it was coming, and now it’s here: ZTE’s most powerful smartphone to date, the Grand X. Packing Ice Cream Sandwich and a powerful processor, this smartphone is the best to date from ZTE, but still retains the budget pricing ethos.

With a price of £189 SIM-Free and as low as £24 per month on contract, you can’t expect the dizzying heights of the new Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor. Nevertheless ZTE has packed in Nvidia’s second-gen Tegra processor which is dual-core, and still more powerful than most phones in this price bracket.

Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich is the operating system installed, although strangely the phone has the four touch buttons we’d associate with Android 2.3, located below the screen. The phone isn’t going to be bothering the likes of the Motorola RAZR in terms of skinniness, but it’s still a respectable 9.9mm thick and is pretty light for its size at 110g.

Also inside the Grand X is Dolby Mobile tech for a more premium sound, which is aimed at gaming more than music. The phone has 4GB of internal memory, although it has a micro SD card slot for expanding storage space by up to 32GB.

On the back of the phone is a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, and on the front you have a fairly low-quality 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera.

Both Phones 4u and Virgin Media have scored exclusive deals with the Grand X, and both will be offering it on pay as you go and contract from early August. Virgin will give you one for £24 per month, or £19 per month if you’re an existing Virgin Mobile customer.

Sound good to you? Let us know what you think of ZTE’s new top dog.

Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.