ZTE Blade S6 review

Storage

The Blade S6 comes with 16GB of storage, but only 7.7GB of this is actually available to the user. This isn’t too much of a problem, though, as the second SIM card slot doubles up as a microSD card slot and can take cards up to 64GB in size.

Camera

This will be important if you use your phone as your main camera, as the Blade S6 has a large 13-megapixel rear sensor. This gives images plenty of detail, and for the most part I was very pleased with the quality of my photos. However, I did notice that photos tended to appear very blue in cloudy weather, making images appear much cooler than those I took on the Moto G at the same time. Both cameras struggled to capture brighter areas of the sky, but the Moto G produced far more attractive and life-like images overall.

^ On the whole, outdoor images were good, but they sometimes came out overly blue-ish in tone

The Blade S6 struggled in our indoor photography test as well, as the objects in our still life arrangement didn’t look nearly as crisp as those I took on the Moto G. Colours were punchier on the Blade S6, but it also produced a greater amount of rainbow-speckled noise when I turned off our external lamp. This disappeared when we enabled the flash, but the trade-off was more blue-ish whites and a cooler-looking image.

^ The Blade S6 struggled indoors, as photos were overly noisy and lacking in focus

Conclusion

The ZTE Blade S6 may be faster than the 3rd Gen Moto G, but when Motorola’s handset is better made and has a superior camera and battery life, the money you save with the Blade S6 starts to feel like a false economy. There’s also the Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 to consider, which is arguably better value than both handsets as long as you don’t mind switching to Vodafone. The Blade S6 certainly hits hard in the budget smartphone arena, but it lacks the stamina to really go head-to-head with Android’s cut-price heavyweights. For other alternatives check out our Best smartphones and buying guide.