Newsletter 
Smartphone displays have been getting larger over the years, and gone are the days when most people thought anything with over a 5-inch screen is unwieldy. With the increasing popularity of large-screen devices, more and more manufacturers are believed to be working on smartphones that are seriously pushing the 6-inch barrier that was once thought to be too large to ever gain mainstream acceptance. That being the case, Chinese telecom and electronics giant, ZTE, is now thought to be working on an upcoming mid-range smartphone that will sport a 6-inch screen and have fairly decent hardware on offer, especially when compared to the company’s current mid-range phablet, the Zmax 2.
The upcoming phablet from ZTE is expected to be marketed as the Zmax Pro, and reports indicate that it will feature a 1080p display panel, which should give the 6-inch screen more sharpness than the 720p 5.7-inch panels found on the company’s first and second-generation Zmax phablets. The device is also said to be powered by the Snapdragon 617 SoC, which comes with an integrated 64-bit octa-core CPU clocked at a max frequency of 1.5 GHz. Reports also suggest that T-Mobile will offer the Zmax Pro to its customers, although there’s no official word on that front from the carrier. Meanwhile, even as the built-in storage in the Zmax Pro is set to increase to 32 GB from the 16 GB found in the ZTE Zmax 2, the amount of RAM is believed to stay put at just 2 GB.
What’s interesting is that apart from the processing chipset, the rest of the hardware on the upcoming device is apparently extremely similar to another ZTE phablet called the Imperial Max, which is powered by the Snapdragon 615 SoC and is currently sold by U.S. Cellular on its network. Meanwhile, the upcoming Zmax Pro is expected to sport a fingerprint scanner and run Android Marshmallow out of the box. The device is also expected to have a 13-megapixel primary camera on the back and a 5-megapixel secondary camera on the front. Meanwhile, ZTE is yet to say anything officially about its upcoming phablet, so availability and pricing details are still unknown.