I recently dropped my phone. I never drop phones, which also means I never have cases or screen protectors on them, so it did not survive. It was a Nexus 6, a phone I am very, very fond of. It does a lot of things right, doesn't waste time trying to be shiny, "premium," or gimmicky. I had a Nexus 6 for two years and, despite its age and beginning-to-feel-dated featureset, I have not had any interest in replacing it. Newer phones simply haven't offered any compelling reason to give up on the Nexus 6's excellence--especially not for the cost of a high-end phone.
Well, with the Nexus 6 out of commission, I was faced with two choices: Spend $350 for a new-old-stock N6 from Amazon, or find a new phone that comes as close as possible to living up to the legacy of what I believe to be the best smartphone ever made. Not feeling great about dropping $350 on a two-year-old phone, I decided to go for the latter.

My poor Nexus 6:


I'm very picky with smartphones. There are some things I require, and some things I will not tolerate. There are lots of both, but the most critical are:

NEED:
Stock or near-stock Android experience with high levels of hackability and tweakability plus close adherence to Google's security patch schedule.
AMOLED display at least 5.5'' in size and with at least QHD resolution.
At least 3200mAh battery.
At least 64GB onboard storage.
Dual front-facing speakers
A good (e.g. not 810) Qualcomm processor

DO NOT WANT:
IPS display. I'm baffled that they're still used. Production cost differences are nonexistent vs AMOLED and IPS is worse at absolutely every single thing a screen does except visibility in bright sunlight. IPS also makes for poorer battery life in a direct apples-to-apples comparison.
Heavily skinned Android (Looking at you, Samsung, and also you, HTC).
Unnecessarily-difficult tweaking (lack of OEM bootloader unlock support, poor community development support, or obscure hardware with limited support like Samsung's stupid pointless Exynos chips).

Now, there are lots of phones that hit on many of these points (from both lists) in various combinations.
THERE ARE NO PHONES THAT GET THIS RIGHT. NONE. Except for the Nexus 6. Which is why I've been so uninterested in replacing it. The smartphone market plateaued after the N6 hit the market (same era as Galaxy S6, iPhone 6, etc. to show just how little meaningful change has happened since then).

So I was not excited to find a replacement.

Eventually, I narrowed it down to two options:

The LG V20. It has the biggest screen one can find on a phone that doesn't explode, not the most heavily-skinned Android ever, Android 7, and the bonus of a removable battery plus microSD slot. The V20 costs $800, which is a whole Hell of a lot of money for a phone that's no more high-end than my already-painfully-pricey $650 Nexus 6 was when it was new.

ZTE Axon 7.
It has nearly the same specs as the V20, but with a slightly smaller screen, no removable battery, and an optional second SIM slot. It runs Android 6.0.1. for now, with a 7.0 release a month or so out. The Axon 7 is available only direct from ZTE for $350 ($400 formerly, but now reduced).

Both of these phones have very similar specs, only diverging in some very critical areas. Those common specs are:
Snapdragon 820 processor
4GB RAM
64GB onboard memory
MicroSD support
USB C port (more than just charging; unlike MicroUSB's "OTG" support, USB C supports the full USB specification on both these phones, allowing for much broader peripheral support as well as a multitude of adapters already in existence for various other connector types).
Fingerprint scanner
3200+mAh battery with QuickCharge 3.0 support
High-megapixel-count cameras (something that I--unlike nearly every other smartphone user--couldn't care less about)
And, interestingly, both have dedicated onboard Audio DACs, though each uses a different chipset.

I had been eyeing the Axon 7 for a few weeks due to its dual SIM support (more on that later) but it had been out-of-stock for weeks in the color I wanted (not gold), with no solid re-stock date in sight. With that option off the table, I grabbed a V20 and hoped I wouldn't hate it.

Out of bizarre coincidence, the very next day, ZTE listed the Axon 7 back in stock for next-day shipping and at $50 less than before to boot. V20 already in hand, I ordered an Axon 7 and decided I'd spend a week with each (taking full advantage of T-Mobile's 14-day return policy on the V20 if needed).

My V20:


My week with the V20 was very good. There is a lot I like about the phone. It feels great in-hand. Its squared edges, size, thickness, weight, and metal finish all feel excellent. The fingerprint reader/power button is well positioned and easy to find. The bezels are small (an effect slightly exaggerated by the second screen at the top, though this is not really a cheat as the second screen does perform more useful duties than the swath of plastic that would have filled the same space). The OS is very lightly-skinned with some "stock android" options available and support for Google Now Launcher built in out of the box.
Android 7 brings some really nice usability improvements. The two that stand out most to me are the ability to further customize notifications per-app including allowing notifications but muting audio (something that shouldn't be needed, but which is instead highly valuable because app developers don't include native in-app support for disabling notification audio because they're terrible monsters who don't belong in the software business), and more robust in-line actionable notifications (such as granular in-line SMS replies per-text rather than consolidated SMS notifications for multiple texts). Multiwindow is nice, sure, but I already had that on Marshmallow with a single build.prop edit, so it didn't make much difference for me.
The V20's quad DAC comes with EQ customization options, but only works when connected via wired headphones. This makes sense, since the phone's iPhone-style bottom-firing speaker is the worst I've ever encountered on a smartphone. And I started in the smartphone game with the original HTC G1, so it had a very low bar to limbo under. The V20 also comes with some fairly unique audio RECORDING features, powered by a second DAC. It lets you record audio over an existing file, and also brags that it will record high quality audio with minimal noise. However, my experience was that recording audio with the V20 sounded exactly the same as recording audio on any of my other phones, whether in the V20-specific app with highly customizable settings, or in my usual voice recorder app of choice: HiQ MP3 Recorder (which I don't use in MP3 mode).
The V20's standout feature is its second screen. It's a 160x1040 rectangular display positioned at the top right of the main display. It's not the full width of the main display since the selfie camera and prox sensors sit to its left. It can display a series of functional or informational screens that can be scrolled horizontally. These include a set of up to 5 quick contacts (tap for options to dial or text), up to 5 user-specified app shortcuts, 5 most recently-used app shortcuts, up to 5 system quick-settings, media controls, and a "signature" that does nothing more than display user-customizable text that is defaulted to the phone owner's name and is the dumbest thing I've ever seen on a phone.
I did find the second screen useful, especially for texting my frequent SMS contacts. It also had dynamic functions like showing a call-in-progress display with hang-up option while in a call and not focused on the dialer app. But everything it does is basically a redundant feature that's already addressed elsewhere. And, having spent a lot of years using Android, I've already found an optimal homescreen and quick-toggle arrangement that solves most of these needs. So even where the second screen was slightly more convenient, I didn't have enough time with the phone to adapt to the new tool and make it truly beneficial.
By default, the second screen is always on, unless you're consuming fullscreen media (games, videos) or the prox sensor sees that it's in a pocket or purse. This includes when the phone is locked/asleep.
But the strangest thing about the second screen, and the main screen along with it, is the bizarre engineering decision to use an IPS panel rather than AMOLED. With an always-on screen comes an always-on backlight, and with an IPS display, that means lighting up the whole top right corner of both screens (with visible backlight bleed in low light conditions) ALL THE TIME. An AMOLED panel would have minimized the battery impact of this extra screen, especially since most of it is black even while it's on. It would also have looked vastly more attractive, since there would be none of the backlight bleed the crappy IPS panel demonstrates.


My Axon 7, demonstrating the ridiculous but useful functionality afforded by USB type C:

My week with the Axon 7 was also very good.
This phone is a little small for my tastes. Next to the V20, it does not feel nearly as nice in-hand. Yes, it's got a curvy aluminum unibody a-la HTC M8/M9, but I found the V20's chunky square straight lines and larger size a lot more comfortable for my hands (which are, admittedly, apelike).
Screen inch-for-inch is a little less uneven in practice, though. The V20 uses traditional on-screen software system buttons for home, back, and multitasking. The Axon 7 has capacitive buttons built into its bezel. Set side-by-side in an app with non-transparent system buttons on the V20, the usable screen real estate is less than a millimeter different. So the Axon 7 actually comes out ahead, because you get all 2560 vertical pixels dedicated to content rather than wasting some on nav buttons. I still like the idea of software buttons a lot, and don't know that I actually prefer one approach over the other, but this at least alleviates some of the drawback of the screen size difference between the two phones, while maintaining the dramatic total size difference between the two chassis (remember the V20 has another screen plus bezel and chassis above those).
Axon 7 is still running Android 6.0.1, but it's even less skinned than LG's implementation, and has even stronger "stock android" options that can be enabled. It still lacks Google's Dark Theme which is ideal for AMOLED screens since it uses lots of black, but it uses a lot less white than LG's theme.
Some of ZTE's tweaks to Android are even desirable, like some fantastic battery management that doesn't interfere with app functionality, a lot of customization options that I had to use build.prop edits or other root hacks to achieve on the Nexus 6, and some gesture support like phone-to-ear autoanswer and shake-for-flashlight.
BOTH manufacturers have, unfathomably, disabled the System UI Tuner that's normally accessible by long-pressing the quick-settings icon for several seconds. This tuner lets you disable persistent notification icons nobody ever wants to see like Bluetooth, NFC, and the language input selector. I really hate not having those options, especially since they're not a hack or root solution; they're a part of stock android and just hidden away slightly.
The Axon 7's AMOLED panel is gorgeous. It's much brighter than the Nexus 6's (which isn't hard; I believe the N6 actually has the dimmest display in AMOLED history) even at low settings, and scales upward to fight direct sunlight much more capably (though still nowhere near as bright as the V20's battery-sucking IPS panel). Even nicer, ZTE includes two sets of customization settings for the screen's color reproduction. You can adjust between three levels each of Color Saturation and Color Temperature. You can get Samsung-like oversaturated colors, or you can go totally neutral (which is my preference).
The Axon 7 monitors for battery hogs and reports any offenders to you, with a handful of options for correcting the issue if you aren't up for uninstalling the misbehaving app.
An interesting fact about the Axon 7: it has the quietest vibration motor I've heard on a phone since probably the age of flip phones. Most phones "vibrate" only in name, and most vibration motors are far more audible than tangible. The Nexus 6 is particularly bad this way: you can barely feel it, but the motor is almost louder than the phone's actual ringtone. The V20 isn't as bad, but still isn't great. But the Axon 7's motor is very strong and much higher-frequency, but also very quiet. I only really hear it when it's sitting on a table surface, at which point it sounds somewhat resonant, almost like humming into a balloon. The feel of the Axon 7's haptic motor reminds me a lot of the feel of the iPhone 7's motor. The higher frequency means shorter bursts feel more like "taps" than rumbles. In the same way the Apple "taptic" setup makes the home button feel like a real button, the fingerprint sensor on the Axon 7 almost feels like a button being pressed--though it has the disadvantage of being on the opposite end of the phone from the motor.
As I mentioned above, the Axon 7 has dual-SIM support. This is very common in Eastern and Middle Eastern regions for various reasons, but in the US it has not taken off yet. I have a need for both a work phone and personal phone and detest the idea of carrying two phones, so a dual-SIM phone is something I've wanted for a while now. There have been a few in the US, but they're always low-end models with limited carrier support. With the Axon 7, I'll be able to have my personal T-mobile SIM and a work Verizon SIM in the same phone. I'll report back on how well this works. While GSM carriers are fully supported by the Axon 7, CDMA carriers are only unofficially supported. The radios are compatible, but actual carrier feature compatibility is another matter. XDA's Axon 7 forums show examples running the gamut from flawless Verizon performance to none at all, so I am not sure what to expect with mine. If I can get it working, I'll be very pleased. If not, I'll pop one of the 128GB UHS microSD cards I have lying around into the spot instead (the second SIM slot comes at the expense of the microSD slot, so you have to choose).

The Axon 7 also has a 2-year warranty which INCLUDES drop and water damage protection PLUS free advance two-way shipping so you'll have a replacement in your hand before you have to send yours in. Even after that expires, they offer repair and support services at the cost of a scaling deductible.
They also offer an upgrade discount, letting Axon 7 owners upgrade to whatever its successor ends up being for $100 less if they trade in their old phone.


So, with all this stuff in mind, after a week with each, I came to a conclusion:
The Axon 7 is a very slightly better-specced phone than the V20 for less than half the price. So I returned the V20 and will be sticking with the Axon 7.


The Axon 7 could continue to gain traction against other phones if ZTE follows through with some possible future features:
They're looking at possibly releasing an optional pure/stock android ROM for the phone, complete with regular updates and support.
Early test versions of their 7.0 update include a BUILT-IN root AND unroot option, baked right into the factory OS. This is HUGE, and I'd almost be interested in buying a 2nd Axon 7 just to show my enormous support for this. If they did this, I'd never need to unlock my bootloader, which means I could keep rolling on OTAs rather than having to manually flash updates. And I could root, make a tweak, and unroot rather than having to leave the root vulnerability in place all the time.

MoD, do you still like your ZTE Axon 7 after the months of using it?

(My Nexus 6 is working, but acting up a bit and I want to be able to replace it in a hurry if necessary ...)

Z

Yes and no.

I love the hardware. LOVE it.

The software leaves some to be desired. ZTE is really stuck on patching in a mishmash of homebrew solutions to stuff that Android now implements by default, but IN PLACE OF the stock (and superior) google solutions. They have their own voice assistant, their own quick tiles, their own dialer, their own contacts app, their own SMS app, their own launcher/homescreen, and they're all really bad. Really bad. Like...Android 2.x era bad. Of course, you can install alternatives to most of these, but not all. And since many of these things are system-integrated, the replacements never fully replace the bad ZTE versions.
I have Pixel Launcher and Google Now installed, but without root (which I haven't done due to the outstanding warranty) I can't get Google Now access with a swipe-right like Google devices can.
I can't find a recent version of Google's dialer app, and the ones on the Play Store are all trash, so I'm stuck with ZTE's, and it's truly horrendous.
I have Google's SMS app installed and it works fine (even supports dual sim natively!) and fully replaces the ZTE implementation.
I can't do anything about the quick settings tiles, and there are a LOT of third party apps post 7.0 that support the Google standard, but ZTE's aren't compatible with that standard. And they suck; you can't remove tiles, you can only rearrange. Terrible.
I also don't care for the answer/hangup gesture on the touchscreen. Every other phone in the universe uses swipe up for answer and swipe down for reject. Axon 7 is down for answer, up for reject. I rejected SO MANY calls at first. This is a system feature and not configurable.
The phone also has some naggy "management" stuff that alerts you about battery hogs and such that I just find tedious and unhelpful (it doesn't distinguish between a movie app running for 3 hours vs a background app chugging down my battery; it just sees a blind battery usage rate per app).
System settings are all in the wrong places (why do Android OEMs feel a need to do this?!). There's no SystemUI Tuner (a hidden but hack-free tweak menu on all stock and most third-party Android distros).
The non-lit capacitive buttons are weird, and have both pros and cons.

BUT

The speakers sound superb.

The screen is top-quality.

The physical build quality is excellent.

The layout (speakers, bezels, buttons, biometric sensor, sim slot, headphone jack, charge port...all that) is PERFECT, and this is the only phone aside from the Nexus 6 to get it right. Ever. In the history of the phone.

Battery life is great.

QC3.0 means battery life doesn't matter anyway. 3.0 is a huge leap forward from 2.0 (which the N6 has) and a lot less destructive to your battery.

USB C is SO MUCH BETTER than MicroUSB or Lightning. Not only is the connector infinitely superior, but USB C supports the full USB standard, where micro only has very very limited OTG support. I can buy a USB C dock/hub meant for a MacBook and use it on my phone. And since pretty much everything I own except my Sony headphones uses USB C now, so I don't need a million cables. (Nintendo gets part of the credit here; I get to charge my console AND my phone from the same cord. THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED!!!!)

Performance is outstanding. Yes, there are slightly newer CPUs and phones with more RAM, but I think the 820 with 4GB is still damn solid. 6GB would be neat, but I've never found myself wishing for more RAM, especially since Android manages memory pretty well these days.

Dual SIM is huge. I LOVE having two numbers on one phone. I do rotating 24/7 oncall shifts for work, and I can keep that number in the phone with separate settings from my personal number, and always know what to answer and what not to without having to carry multiple phones or give out my personal number at work. I do occasionally accidentally text people from the wrong number, but that's always PEBKAC and also always amusing afterward.


My particular device has developed a sever volume and camera malfunction, but I seem to be the ONLY person this has ever affected. I'm looking at getting it replaced.

My sister and brother-in-law both bought Axon 7s on my recommendation and won't stop talking about how much they love them. They were both formerly hardcore Samsung people and haven't looked back with a few exceptions (They liked Sammy's quick settings tiles and SMS app better).

I do think the newly-de-bezeled Galaxy S8 presents a compelling case, but for more than double the price of the Axon 7, I would never make the switch. If it (the S8) ran stock Android I might. But Touchwiz vs MiFavor (ZTE's variant) is a battle with no heroes, so it's down to the hardware-per-dollar with that comparison, and ZTE wins handily in that department.

Really, what it comes down to for me is that, with some software limitations aside, the Axon 7 does everything the Nexus 6 did, better, and then adds some very significant additions (USB C, biometrics, dual SIM) on top of that. For way less than what I paid for my N6.

As a followup:

I contacted ZTE support about my camera issue. They were helpful, walked me through a couple troubleshooting steps I hadn't tried (which isn't something that has happened to me before with ANY tech support, to my knowledge...), and promptly arranged an advance replacement repair. Pretty pleased, assuming the new device is defect-free.

Thanks!!

Z

[Super Smash Bros. announcer voice]VERSUS

PIXEL 2 XL!!![/Super Smash Bros. announcer voice]

So...

I could not have been more disappointed with last year's (first-generation) Pixels. The bezels were huge, they looked like bad iPhone 4 knockoffs, and they had plenty of hardware quirks. They checked NONE of my boxes aside from having Google's Android implementation.
And before that, I found the Nexus 6p to be a botched attempt at a successor to the still-reigning (but potentially about to be dethroned) Greatest Smartphone of All Time (the Nexus 6). On paper, the 6p was great. In reality, it was a mess of poorly-sourced hardware, poorly implemented engineering, software glitches, and questionable design decisions. So, I've gone from a huge-screened QHD phone with front-facing speakers to...disappointment. Well...

This year, after seeing leaks for a small-bezelled Pixel 2 XL with front-facing speakers, my interest was piqued.

And now I have a Just Black 128GB Pixel 2 XL sitting in front of me on my desk.

I still love my Axon 7. But the big lesson the Axon has taught me is that SOFTWARE is what makes the difference in today's smartphone arena. Pretty much every damn phone out there has the same hardware: Snapdragon 835, 4GB RAM, some kind of OLED, 64+GB ROM, etc., etc.

My Axon 7 is still quite a formidable phone, hardware-wise, and is still my top recommendation for people looking to spend under $500 on a phone, or looking for the most bang for the buck.

But I'm a geek, and a power-user, and ZTE's software just doesn't cater to that enough to keep me happy.

So I decided I needed to go back to Google for a geek-friendly, tweak-friendly exprience.

The Pixel 2 XL has:
6.2 inch 18:9/2:1 aspect ratio display at 2880x1440 (basically 2560x1440 with more height). This display is one of LG's new pOLED displays, which are going to be running up against Samsung's ubiquitous and superb AMOLED displays. More on that in a bit.
Dual front-facing speakers
USB type C
3520 mAh battery
Snapdragon 835 with 4 GB RAM as noted above
64 or 128GB onboard storage with no removable media
No 3.5mm headphone jack (something I quite literally NEVER use, but the absence of which I do find a bit silly)
Bluetooth 5.0 with support for HQ audio codecs including Sony's LDAC (which my MDR-1000Xs conveniently support)
All the modern Wifis
nanoSIM AND eSIM, thogh eSIM is only for use on Project Fi at the moment. Tmobile is working on support, so maybe I'll get dual-SIM again after a fashion (Verizon in nanoSIM slot, Tmo on eSIM)?
Squeezable sides for Google Assistant summoning (sadly not re-bindable to other actions)
Fingerprint scanner
And a pair of decent cameras backed by a lot of world-class machine learning that supposedly equal the best pictures you can get on a smartphone. (Not a huge thing for me as I don't take lots of pictures, but that could be because I've always had phones with awful cameras, so we'll see how that changes).

So far, I am enjoying the usability and customization enhancements of Android Oreo (8.0).

I think the hardware is great. I love the feel of the (anodized?) textured aluminum, I think the sides are well-bevelled for comfort, and the screen is the perfect size. Buttons and fingerprint sensor are perfectly located. The speakers sound great (of course) because they're good speakers and because they point THE RIGHT FREAKING DIRECTION.

There has been a lot of worry about LG's pOLED screens (the same panel is used in the Pixel 2 XL and the LG V30) showing weird per-pixel brightness and color variances. You can see examples here: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker ... led-screen and here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/16/164 ... iew-design

I will admit, mine has some "sandiness" to very light colors at low brightnesses, but it's very subtle, and I likely would have overlooked it if I hadn't been looking for it. I put mine through a barrage of screen tests (in fullscreen mode, of course, without system bars hiding defects behind walls of black). I don't know if I got lucky, but I'm happy with mine.

I also hear complaints about the display's colors being "muted," but as someone who has been endlessly bemused by people's love for Samsung's over-saturated, color-inaccurate displays and tuning, I think it looks great. I tuned my Axon 7 to the more accurate color scheme, which is a close match for the Pixel 2 XL, out of preference. I prefer accurate color reproduction, not colors that are turned up to 11 to cover up for mediocre selfies (not that there's such a thing as good selfies...).

I'll be reporting back on long-term use, but so far, I feel that this phone was worth the wait (and money). Yes, I paid $949 for a phone and I don't feel silly. After all, last year I spend $350 on a phone only to find that that you get what you pay for, at least to a point. Where ZTE saved money on software development, Google are the best in the industry at it--that comes with a cost.

Not bad....

Thanks for the detailed review on the Pixel 2 XL - here and in the other post!

My Nexus 6 became fine since last April when I thought it was acting up, but now, after years, the battery situation has become quite bad. I cannot get a day of use anymore ... not really surprising since rechargeables do get this way after a while. And the battery is not replaceable on the Nexus 6, of course!

So, time to switch and I am strongly leaning towards the Pixel 2 XL at this point.

Z