T-Mobile is always ‘busy’ at bringing out new and affordable devices, as well has the high-end smartphones. Today they are announcing one that falls into the former grouping – the new ZTE Obsidian will officially be available August 13 and packing Android 5.1 with a price tag of only $99.99 outright with no contract or $0 down and $4.17 per month for 24 months. This adds to their growing arsenal of affordable phones such as the HTC Desire 626s, Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, Samsung Galaxy Core Prime and the Kyocera Hydro Wave.
ZTE is a large Chinese company that is slowly making its way to the US and a name for itself by offering affordable smartphones that are ideal for first time smartphone buyers or if your child is getting to that age when they are ready for a device to carry with them to and from school. At this price, it is not a burden to hand each child a ZTE Obsidian. Being a low-cost smartphone, most of the specs reflect that, but a nice feature not found on many low-cost smartphones is that the Obsidian is running the latest Android Lollipop 5.1 out-of-the-box…not 4.4 KitKat or even 5.0.
The ZTE Obsidian comes with a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 854 x 480, which is a great size for viewing pictures, playing games and watching videos. The display is small enough for one-handed use, yet large enough to enjoy looking at pictures. Speaking of pictures, the ZTE Obsidian will be packing a 5MP main camera with LED flash to capture those special moments and for social selfies and video chatting, they threw in a 2MP front-facing camera (FFC). Providing the processing power is a MediaTek MT6735 quad-core processor clocked at 1GHz. It comes with 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, but also provides expansion of up to 32GB via a microSD slot. For power, ZTE has provided an 1800mAh battery.
The ZTE Obsidian supports 4G LTE speeds, Wi-Fi calling, T-Mobile TV, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS navigation. The device measures 5.41 x 2.7 x .04 inches and weighs in at 4.65 ounces. For the budget and price-conscious buyer, the ZTE Obsidian, hooked up to the T-Mobile network may be exactly what you are looking for in your next smartphone purchase.