A ZTE Axon 7s with slightly lower specs found on TENAA

It seems that ZTE is prepping a lower cost version of the Axon 7s or perhaps a regional version of it. You can see the new speaker grills on the front and dual camera on the back, those are straight from the 7s. The internals, however, are closer to the original Axon 7.

The new phone - known as ZTE A2018 for now - gets to keep some of the highlights of the Axon, including the 5.5” OLED screen of QHD resolution, the stereo speakers and yes, the new dual camera. Plus, the storage options goes up even higher than the 7s - you can choose between 256GB, 128GB and 64GB.

But then there’s the chipset. It has a quad-core processor at 2.15GHz, the Snapdragon 820/821AB are the only possibilities we can think of. And you get “only” 4GB of RAM, while the 7s has the faster Snapdragon 821 and 6GB of RAM.

ZTE A2018 (Photos by TENAA)

There’s one inexplicable downgrade here - 1080p video recording. It’s possible that TENAA’s table isn’t entirely accurate, but 4K 2160p was to be expected. And the battery capacity went down a hair - 3,320mAh (that’s between the original Axon 7 and the 7s). It is thinner than both, though, 7.7mm vs. 7.9mm.

So, not quite Axon 7s, not quite Axon 7 either. Definitely not the Axon 8. What is this device? For now, our bet is on a regional Chinese version, perhaps tied to one of the carriers.

Source (in Chinese) | Via