Though not a household name, we have found Chinese manufacturer ZTE to have some solid value offerings on Sprint through carrier branded devices like the Flash, Force and Fury. The Sprint Vital breaks with the f naming convention, offering a minor refresh to their previous flagship, the Flash. While much of the internals remain the same, the Vital bumps to a 5” display and Jelly Bean. In a crowded and competitive Sprint lineup can the $100 Vital prove worthy? Read on to find out.
Design
Viewed from the front, the Vital is your cookie-cutter black slab smartphone, but don’t confuse boring with unattractive. The dark chrome trim ring adds a nice, but familiar touch. ZTE foregoes the standard on-screen navigation keys of the Flash for capacitive ones, and also swaps the app switcher button for menu. The grey plastic middle housing has your standard buttons and ports, and includes a physical shutter button. All of the buttons are generously raised off the housing and offer fantastic feedback.
The Vital finally shows a bit of personality when you flip it over and you find the blue, soft touch backing. Like the Flash there is a large camera hump, although less pronounced this time around. Save the tiny speaker the back is void of any other design, including branding.
The phone is large and relatively thick by today’s standards, but not wholly uncomfortable to hold and use. It is not as svelte as the S4, but won’t be too obtrusive in a guy’s pocket by itself. At $100 it passes the design test, showing the build quality of a Samsung device though not on par with HTC or LG’s top offerings.
Display
The largest bullet point on the Vital’s spec sheet is the 5” display, which makes the phone considerably bigger than the outgoing Flash. While the IPS display is bright, vibrant and generally pleasant to use, unfortunately ZTE kept the same 720x1280 resolution as the 4.5” Flash, thus dropping the density from a respectable 326ppi to an average 294ppi. Still, for a budget-conscious phone the display is very good and handles all lighting conditions perfectly.
Sprint Vital 360-Degrees View:
Drag the picture or use the keyboard arrows to rotate the phone. Double click or press keyboard
Space to zoom in/out.
Drag the picture in the desired orientation to rotate the phone.
Interface
As we’ve seen with previous ZTE devices on Sprint, the Vital runs a nearly stock version of Android. The Vital has the 4.1.2 variety of Jelly Bean, so it is current but not completely up to date. Pre-loaded apps are light and mostly un-installable, but more of the core apps are replaced this time around, such as the Browser, Calculator and Camera among others. As in the past ZTE has reworked the lock screen to allow unlocking into the camera or to toggle vibrate mode, but instead of sliding the targets you have to hold them. The Vital supports SprintID as well in case you feel the urge to download an ID pack, but we have a feeling you’ll resist.
Processor and Memory
The Vital runs smoothly thanks in large part to the dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Plus processor, the same MSM8960 found in the Flash and still pared with 1GB of RAM. It has 8GB of internal memory, expandable via microSD. Benchmarks backed up the smooth performance, comparing favorably to similar spec’d devices though falling well short of recent processors with more memory.
Quadrant Standard
AnTuTu
GLBenchmark 2.5 (Egypt HD)
Vellamo (HTML5 / Metal)
Sprint Vital
6048
11446
2437
2116 / 600
HTC One
12481
23308
3551 / 31 fps
2395 / 781
Samsung Galaxy S4
12078
24701
4437 / 39 fps
1702/704
Connectivity and Browser
The ZTE Vital is a 4G LTE device with support for all of Sprint’s networks and bands, including the 800MHz band that will be deployed with the iDEN network shutdown. Other radios include Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi b/g/n, GPS, NFC and DLNA.
As mentioned the stock browser looks to be a reworked version of the stock Android browser, and performance was quite smooth and snappy. Still, we prefer using Chrome which is pre-loaded in part because of the great sync features it offers.
Camera
The camera has been slightly bumped from 12.6MP on the Flash to 13 on the Vital. Unfortunately we never got a Flash to test so we can’t compare, but the Vital performed respectably. Autofocus time as well as shutter speed was both quite quick, though not on par with something like the HTC One. On device and at typical sharing resolutions images displayed realistic colors and lighting, though there is noticeable grain in our indoor samples. As you blow images up to full resolution details become muddled and the grain gets worse as depth increases, even with strong natural light. The 1080p viedos produced similar results; suitable for sharing but with weaknesses if you’re looking.
ZTE has included its own multimedia players, but as with the browser we prefer the included Google options.
Call Quality
Callers were unimpressed with the Vital’s call quality, saying at best we sounded a bit distant and faint, but as soon as the mic strayed even slightly from the sweet spot quality dramatically dropped and they had to ask us to repeat ourselves frequently. They rated us a 7.75/10 when good, and a 6/10 at the worst. Things were better on our end, with generally clear audio that was plenty loud.
Battery
The 2500mAh claims 15h talk time, but we’re skeptical since it drained fairly quickly in our testing. You should be able to get through a typical day, but if you’re planning to use the big display for multimedia then have a charger handy.
Conclusion
ZTE continues to make solid handsets for the budget minded, but their problem is that they just can’t stack up with the big boys. The display, system performance and build quality are all good, but not great, and the Vital takes a serious hit in the phone performance categories. Despite being aging, previous flagships like the HTC EVO 4G LTE and LG Optimus G remain more compelling offerings at the same price point.
Android 4.1.2 SW: N9810V1.0B06 HW: c9zB
Sprint Vital Video Review:
Pros
Display is vibrant but natural and works well in all lighting conditions
Mostly stock build of Android
Good fit and finish
Cons
Poor phone performance and questionable battery life
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