As somebody who lives in the UK myself, it’s interesting to see the differing models that come to my shores – especially since I work for an American Android blog. I also often find myself suffering from “CDMA Envy”, phones on Sprint like the O.G EVO long made me jealous here in the UK and please, don’t get me started on LTE – it’s been too long already, OFCOM you listening?
The magicians at ZTE are one of the few manufacturers that the UK Carriers have in their pockets for instance, Orange will often have ZTE make exclusive handsets along with other carriers. It’s nice then, to see that they’ve got a competitively prices device ready for the market that seems to free of the carriers. Alongside this good news comes something very sweet – stock Ice Cream Sandwich.
The device itself – as you can see – seems to look a lot like the Nexus S nestled in its dock on my desk which to me doesn’t seem a bad thing but, it’d have been nice to ZTE to go an original route for the handset’s design. Under the hood you’re going to be getting a 4.3-inch screen at an OK qHD (960 x 540) resolution alongside an 0.3-MP front-facing and a 5-MP rear-facing camera. Powering the show is a Tegra 2 – presumably running at 1Ghz.
The Verge have got a test device and they seemed mighty impressed with the device’s performance, especially the device’s build of stock ICS which seems to outperform the Galaxy Nexus. Of course, helpings of butter will probably help both phones out. For now, pricing for the Virgin Media model has been revealed at £189.99 prepaid, so that’s the phone yours with no monthly fee, for a dual-core device that’s pretty good of course, the Orange San Diego powered by Intel is only a little more but, you only get Gingerbread and a terrible skin to boot. The phone will be available in Phones4U shops around the UK soon.