ZTE Mimosa X Hands-on Review

ZTE has almost made a name for itself this year, announcing some pretty well-spec'd Android smartphones, along with its plans to bring some of its best products to the US. This was probably enough of a reason to spawn quite some interest in the company at this year's MWC 2012 expo. We were also intrigued by the relatively new brand (as far as handsets go), so we were really looking forward to meeting these supposedly exciting handsets at the trade show.

Probably one of the most interesting products announced prior to the beginning of the event was the ZTE Mimosa X Android smartphone – a very powerful handset that could make for a nice first entry in the US market. Of course, we got a chance to play with the Mimosa X at ZTE's booth here and, how should we put it... the manufacturer still has a lot of work ahead of itself, before it's ready to compete with the big names in the industry. It's not that the Mimosa X is a bad phone, it's just not something that can excite us. Yeah, it does have a big 4.3" qHD display, which we're fine with, and it also has the dual-core Tegra 2 processor inside, as well as a 5MP camera, but the design of this thing – it's pretty much your random Android phone (in the bad sense).


The ZTE Mimosa X is a typical black-plastic handset with no stand-out as far as appearance goes. As we said, it has a decent hardware, but even on this front it's not good enough in order to differentiate from the mid- to high-end crowd out there.


The software running on this smartphone is Android 2.3 Gingerbread, although an update to ICS should also become available at some point. When this happens, ZTE will probably pre-install some custom UI, judging by what we saw with the prototype we tested at MWC. Right now, the ZTE Mimosa X is bound for a Q2 release. And, of course, if you'd like to learn more about this handset, please head this way for the full Mimosa X specs.