ZTE Zmax Pro offers a fingerprint sensor and 13-megapixel camera for $99
Smartphone pricing has become oddly disjointed: You still have to dish out more than $700 for a flagship coming from a top brand, such as Apple and Samsung, but you can also buy a Chinese phone with solid (and often comparable) specs for a lot less.
In this particular case, seven times less, as the Chinese phone maker ZTE announced the ZTE Zmax Pro, a 6-inch smartphone with a 13-megapixel camera, for just $99.
The phone will become available at MetroPCS on August 1, and the price is after an instant rebate. For the money, you get a full HD display, a 1.5GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage (expandable via memory cards). The phone also has a 5-megapixel selfie cam, a fingerprint sensor, and a 3,400mAh battery.
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Design-wise, the Zmax Pro appears no different than your typical Android smartphone these days, with capacitive Android buttons on the front and a round fingerprint scanner on the back. The blue back cover, however, gives the phone a distinct look that sets it apart from the hundred shades of gold that are currently in fashion.
While those specs won't win any competitions, it's still a lot of phone for under $100. The competition among cheap phones from China these days is fierce; for example, you can get a Xiaomi Mi Max, which packs considerably better hardware, for $231 in China.
But that's still more than twice the price of ZTE's new offering, and I could not find anything similar on the market that comes close in terms of price.
The ZTE Zmax Pro is available for pre-order now from the MetroPCS website.
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
