ZTE Axon 7 review: The brightest sound

Gallery

The image gallery is also pretty straightforward. You get a Photos tab with a timeline of all your shots and a Gallery one, for organizing things. The gallery has some fun editing options that allow you to create collages from multiple images or apply filters, stickers and more.

Simple gallery • Editing options

Hidden behind the three-dot menu on the top right is a GIF and Collage maker. The former is pretty straightforward and allows you to make custom GIF animations from up to 50 photos.

GIF Maker

Music player

The Music player app offers the basic functionality and lacks features like automatic lyrics fetching or album art downloading. Nevertheless, its neatly designed user interface allows for easy navigation.

Music player app

The player's setting's menu offers a sleep timer and a shortcut to the phone's Dolby Atmos settings menu. There, you have different profiles for different occasions - music, gaming, video and voice. There are also two custom profiles for you to fine tune.

Dolby Atmos settings

Video player

The video player is quite basic. It doesn't offer a lot of options except cropping a video and enabling the playback of the next one upon finishing the last. Nevertheless, it gets the job done and if you need more functionality, you could always download a third-party alternative.

The video player is quite basic

Audio starts off bright, gets mediocre with headphones

The ZTE Axon 7 delivered perfect clarity with an active external amplifier. The ZTE flagship has no weak points to its performance and had an output among the loudest around.

Unfortunately, degradation with headphones was quite pronounced with stereo crosstalk spiking, volume levels dropping to just above average and some intermodulation distortion creeping in. Frequency response got a little shaky too, so it’s really not a performance worth writing home about.

And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
ZTE Axon 7	+0.06, -0.10	-92.4	92.3	0.0015	0.0093	-80.9
ZTE Axon 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.11	-92.3	92.3	0.0011	0.012	-77.0
Apple iPhone 7 Plus	+0.10, -0.04	-93.1	93.1	0.0015	0.0098	-80.5
Apple iPhone 7 Plus (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.03	-93.1	93.0	0.0013	0.015	-76.8
LG V20	+0.01, -0.03	-93.0	93.1	0.0036	0.0075	-93.7
LG V20 (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.09	-92.4	92.4	0.051	0.105	-57.5
Huawei Mate 8	+0.01, -0.03	-97.8	99.1	0.0054	0.0087	-97.3
Huawei Mate 8 (headphones attached)	+0.02, -0.09	-97.3	97.9	0.015	0.078	-81.3

ZTE Axon 7 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.