So what's the catch with the ZTE? Processor speed is boring. Is it the touch screen being unresponsive? Some software thing? Bad screen? Does it break easily?
ZTE has gotten VERY good at locking down their phones, the bootloader checks and undoes root and the kernel seems to detect attempts otherwise.
For me, non-root is a showstopper.
But holy crap that's a good theory. I'd be really interested in the actual demographics of who is buying which phones.
Then the follow-up, the ZTE Skate started their trend of fiendish difficulty to unlock.
I owned a ZTE device (a sub-$50 one at that) and aside from being a touch slower (relative to flagships) and having a terrible camera it was darn good.
To talk in particular about the Maven (per the article): 4.5" screen ("small"), 2100mAh battery (other similarly sized phones have 2500mAh), 1 GB of RAM (2 GM is typical in flagships), quad core 1.2GHz (flagships at that size have 2.5GHz quads), no wireless charging, no NFC, and the cameras are utterly terrible.
So there are some trade offs with the Maven and many ZTE phones in general. But the real question is: are they "good enough?" And to be frank, yes, they are. If someone cannot afford a $600 flagship, get a $60 ZTE and get 80% of the value for 10% of the price.
Between ZTE, Moto, and Nokia you can get a really nice phone for under $100 now.
For example, Galaxy S4 launched more than 2 years ago, like 2.3 years or w/e. It has half an inch bigger screen, higher screen-to-body ratio (smaller bezels), twice the pixel density (the ZTE's is about 30% less than the 5 year old iphone 4's density for example, it's not insignificant).
Then the S4 had the Snapdragon 600, the ZTE has a 400. (i.e. S4 has a faster CPU and faster GPU, with all the ramifications you can imagine).
S4 has double the ram. That isn't as significant when making android vs ios comparisons (as they handle everything differently), but android vs android, double the ram (1 to 2) is a big deal.
S4's camera has almost 3x as many MP on the back and autofocus, better front camera, too, and higher resolution images and video.
And then there's all the S4 stuff that is useful to some, not to others. Like more sensors (temperature, humidity, gestures, wireless charging etc).
And lastly, 2600 mAh battery vs 2100.
Pretty similar for the 2012 Galaxy S3, too. The S2 from 2011 seems to actually be considerably worse in some areas, or equal, than the ZTE.
Of course it's pretty insane we're even making comparisons between phones that cost 10% the price 2-3 years ago. That's the significance. But I wouldn't say they're similar to 2 year old flagships.