ZTE Blade V review

Battery life

Now we come to what we feel is probably the hardest part of the review to write, simply because what we feel is a decent battery life might be stellar to some, and diabolical to others. As with every device, how you use it will vary.

That said, we'd suggest that the ZTE Blade V battery life is pretty decent. We were a little worried that the extra cores were going to put a strain on the 1800mAh battery, but this doesn't seem to have been the case.

We easily managed to get the Blade V through a day out, and although we might not have been intensely messaging people, we were connected to the Wi-Fi for a couple of hours, and we took a lot of photographs.

The smaller screen might go some way to helping, as will the notification bar toggles that we have become accustomed to on other Android handsets, namely TouchWiz based de­­vices such as the Samsung Galaxy Fame.

Connectivity

There are no real surprises when it comes to the ZTE Blade V's array of connectivity options. For those that are expecting a 4G connection to sit alongside the four cores that are in the Blade V, you're going to be disappointed.

That said, it is possible to connect via 3G/HSDPA to 7.2Mbps and HSUPA at 5.76Mbps.

Wi-Fi connection is also possible, although those that read the Internet section will know that we found this to be rather lacking. We were sat no more than eight feet from our router, and the Blade V failed to register a full signal.

Bluetooth is supported to 4.0 standard, with A2DP, meaning that you can connect to all your accessories. GPS and A-GPS are also both supported.

NFC is omitted, however. This is by no means a deal breaker, but it is something that we are seeing on an increasing number of devices so we're a tiny bit disappointed. With Google Wallet seemingly on the UK horizon, it does mean that the Blade V might miss out on its full functionality.

Connecting to PC is easy enough, done via the supplied microUSB cable, that doubles up as the charger. You will manually have to select how you want to connect the Blade V, as the USB mass storage that we always plump for wasn't selected by default.