Initial Thoughts About the ZTE Score – A Brief Review
Initial ZTE Score Review
Yesterday, I bought a ZTE Score from Best Buy online for a whopping $89 dollars. This makes the ZTE Score the lowest priced Android on a no-contract plan in the market. The next closest in price is the LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile at $149.99.
I’ve had the ZTE Score for a few hours now, and I am letting it charge after my initial tinkering. While it charges, I figured I would let you know about some of my preliminary thoughts.
Specs They Do Not Tell You About
- Internal phone memory available (aka, that is free to fill up) is about 100MB and the total amount dedicated to internal storage space is about 140MB. This is pretty small. as the Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V, the Score’s closest competitor in price, has about 35MB more space on both ends.
- The Hotspot feature is present and can successfully turn on/off , and you reach the configure menu. You do have to use an app like Quicksettings or Superbox to access the Hotspot feature menu, however.
- The phone is very smooth and zippy – It can play the more advanced games like Need For Speed just fine.
- The 4GB microSD card only has 1GB of personal storage with 3GB partitioned off as “MUVE Music” storage. This is great if you intend to use the service….
- The phone’s body has the look and feel of an Iphone. The Iphone is just slightly longer and maybe slightly skinnier.
- The buttons have a different configuration order than most Android devices going (from left to right) Back, Menu, Home, Search instead of Menu, Home, Back, Search.
- Flash is not available for this phone.
Initial Things I Like:
- I am very surprised by how fast the phone is, especially with the animations off.
- I like that the hotspot feature exists and has not been “hidden” and/or turned off like Virgin Mobile has done with some of their phones
- I like that you can turn off the boot up/shutdown sound. A lot of phones do not allow this.
- The non physical buttons for home/menu/search/back are very responsive unlike my experience with Samsung phones.
- The phone supports DRM, which means that “in theory” (I have not tested this yet) the Android Movies in the market should work. The movies menu shows up when I load up the Market, so this is a cool new option.
- It connected to Wi-Fi super easy and stayed connected
- It connected to my computer (Windows 7 machine) effortlessly.
- I love the form factor – it is not too big and not too small, and the flat top screen is stellar.
Initial Things I Hate:
- I am not a fan of the partitioned microSD card, and if you want to use the MUVE Music service, you have to have one of their special microSD cards. This is probably due to the fact that this Android phone supports DRM.
- This Android 2.3 phone does not support flash.
- It does not tell you the charge level on the battery when the phone is off and it is connected to a charger – all you see is a battery filling up with green.
- When you scroll a menu and reach an end, there is a little screen distortion that happens where the edge of the phone turns a bit yellow and there are some “wave” lines. It sounds worse than it is, but it is definantly not “normal”. I may contact Best Buy/ Cricket and see if this is something that they expected to happen.
- The Score does have a plastic “ee” feel about the case that makes you think it is a cheaper phone (which it is).
The Sum of the Matter
The ZTE Score has promise. It is very clearly “budget”, but it offers nice speed and can handle some games similar phones cannot (like Need for Speed). App storage space is limited — very limited, but you will be able to take advantage of Apps2SD that moves part (not all) of an app to the microSD card.
I will continue to update ya’ll on my journey with this phone and hopefully (if I can get the blasted camera to work) post a video showing you its performance abilities.
Rock That Mobile — Signing Out!
Thank you for the review!! It was very helpful.
How is the battery life? (compared to Samsung Vitality if you’ve tried it…?)
I’m testing the battery life now, and I have not tried the Samsung Vitality. So far, the battery life seems about average for these entry level Android phones. I’ll know more in a few days of playing with it.
have you figured out how to root it yet i have had no luck with ginger break or superoneclick using gingerbreak exploit
No, I have not figured it out yet, but it looks like this forum http://www.cricketusers.com/cricket-zte-score/13882-zte-score-root-adb.html#axzz1aujQVJz8 post might be promising in the future. I looked on XDA and no one is talking about this….. You might try asking or starting a thread over there, and maybe you will get lucky with an expert hacker playing with it.
I also regularly visit Howard Forums for cell phone stuff – you might check them out as well. If you find something that works, let me know please!
Thanks!
I ended up taking the phone back to cricket after a week the radio is so weak in it it didnt seem to get a signal anywhere i went with the ascend 2 it is a much better phone in my opinion i dont think i will own any more zte products
Just got the phone couple of days ago. Tried putting in bigger micro sd cards (8 & 16gb) but phone will not recognize them. Tried formatting but will only get 2 gb. Have you experienced this problem?
Interesting – no, mine has an 8GB in it and I’ve had it work with the 16GB. If you’ve tried taking the battery out and restarting stuff etc, you can try resetting back to factory defaults for a clean start. If you are using the cricket provided microSD cards, they are partitioned, which means that only some of the storage is actually available to your phone for regular storage. The rest of the storage is set aside for Muve Music, and you cannot access that part of the microSD.
i put a different 4gb and it worked are you using the muve music with it?
But do you see 4gb of free space, or is it 1gb? I want to have more memory for non-muve use, but the partitions seem to be limiting it. Any way to remove the partition?
does this phone (zte score) have wifi 802.11b/g/n?tt
I got the ZTE about 1 month ago. The music is cool, but have no room for personal storage (Apps or anything). Can I get a higher Micro that will work with the MUVE MUSIC? Or do I have to change out when I want to listen to music?
I believe that Cricket sells one size up from the one that came with the phone.