ZTE Blade


The ZTE V880 is a smartphone manufactured by ZTE Corporation for the Android platform. Unveiled by Orange UK as San Francisco, it went on sale on 21 September 2010, with a white variant released later. By 2011, more than 8 million Blade handsets have been sold in more than 50 countries worldwide.
The Blade II was released in March 2012 with Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7227A 1 GHz processor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
The Blade III was released in September 2012 with a 4 in screen, 4 GB storage, a 1600 mAh Li-Ion battery and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
The Blade brand has since been applied to successor models such as Blade C and Blade L.

Variants

In some countries, the ZTE Blade is available in customized versions with different cameras and touchscreen displays and often bears a different brand name:
Reviews of the ZTE Blade have been positive due to the number of features offered while maintaining a low price. The screen in particular received praise, while the camera/camcorder quality was identified as one of the few downsides to the device.

Community reception

In the annual handset opinion survey of The Best non-htc Device of 2010, organised by xda-developers forum, the ZTE Blade won a total of 24.66% votes, placing it first among the 32 handsets including Samsung Galaxy S and Google's flagship phone Nexus S, placing them on the second and third position right behind ZTE Blade, as judged by forum users.
Various websites, mainly MoDaCo and xda-developers, have created a very large modifications scene around the Blade. Offering various custom ROMs which remove all software that phone companies put on the device like applications and games, etc., or upgraded software versions which do not come on the device in its stock configuration. Users who flash custom ROMs void their warranty and take risks in doing so, however it is possible to restore the original stock ROM.
At first, because of the lack of essential components such as OpenMAX libraries for ARMv6, Blade running Android 4.0+ lacks hardware video acceleration. However, the fix has been found and the current Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean ROMs can be considered as fairly stable ROM for daily use, as all the major features have worked and been fixed.