ZTE Axon 40 Ultra: high-end smartphone without any bothersome notch or hole

The ZTE Axon 40 Ultra offers high-end specifications with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, a 6.8-inch AMOLED display capable of running at 120 Hz as well as up to 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256 GB of UFS 3.1 storage. However, there is something else truly exciting about this flagship phone: its unique camera setup.

Under-display selfie camera

The Axon 40 Ultra uses a 16MP selfie camera that is hidden underneath the 2,480 x 1,116 AMOLED display. When the camera is in use, the display pixels above the camera are switched off to allow light to pass through.

One major advantage of the under-display camera is that the phone no longer requires a punch-hole, such as the one on the predecessor Axon 30 Ultra, thus effectively increasing the usable screen area. That said, the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra's 20:9 display is already quite large considering that its long edges are curved to give the phone an excellent screen-to-body ratio of 93 per cent.

64MP telephoto camera with OIS and optical zoom

The next notable thing about the camera setup is located on the back cover, where you will find three 64MP cameras. The main camera (f/1.6) has an optical image stabiliser and is very well suited to portrait photography due to its equivalent focal length of 35 mm. The phone also has an ultra-wide camera (f/2.35, 16 mm) and a telephoto camera with 3.5x optical zoom, which, like the main camera, is also equipped with an optical image stabiliser. The phone can record videos at up to 8K and 30 fps. During our review, the triple-camera system managed to impress us with image quality that surpasses what many upper-tier smartphones are capable of.

Long battery life guaranteed

Many manufacturers are no longer including a charger in order to cut costs – but not ZTE. Included in the box is a 65-watt power adapter that can fully charge the phone in significantly less than an hour. During testing, the 5,000-mAh battery managed to keep the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra running for an exceptionally long time.

You can read our full review of the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra here.