[ZTE Axon 7 Guides, News, & Discussion] Choose an username...:
There are lots of people wondering whether to buy the Axon 7 or go for a competing phone with similar price point and features *cough op3T*. This usually ends up on different QnA threads asking for the same thing: is it worth buying? And the result is a myriad of answers with different, opposing views. So here are the facts. If a fact isn't too factual, feel free to comment about that.

So, let's cover the basics:

CAMERA: 20MP Samsung with OIS. Good at high lighting conditions. Films at 720p@240FPS and supposedly 480p@300FPS (Motorola Camera seems to be able to record at that speed). Rather bad at low light. Has improved quite a bit on Nougat anyways. I suggest you search for comparisons to draw your own conclusions. No idea about the front 8MP shooter, but I'd say it's not too good. Has RAW support. The camera app has its fair share of manual control sliders (I personally love the white balance slider, no "Cloudy" nonsense). Seems to have a high amount of postprocessing on the image though, so again, look at comparisons.

RAM: As of now I'm using less than 2GB, only XDA open, some apps like Whatsapp on the background. It's more than enough to drive anything, probably for the next couple of years or so. And usually people don't need 20 apps at the same time...

BATTERY: Your mileage may vary. There are lots of comments about it on the real life review thread, but it really depends on your usage. It's not spontaneously explosive, so that's a bonus

SCREEN: Samsung AMOLED 1440P panel. enables Daydream, which is good. No always-on support, possible to do through an app but you might have battery drain. One thing that is important to mention is that games work worse than on a 1080P screen. And not by a small margin. With root you can use wm size 1080x1920 to get more FPS on games, but you have to root.

NOTIF LIGHT: Not the end of the world, but ZTE decided to save some cents by using only red and green. so no blue for us...

SPEAKERS & SOUND: The speakers are really well mounted, they fire the sound at you and not the wall beside you. They are pretty good. Especially with Dolby Atmos. Pretty loud, but as someone said, a dollar store Bluetooth speaker will be louder than any phone's ½ cm²'s speakers.

The sound is really good when you use the AKM DAC. The problem with it is that it only works on some apps. For example the only player capable to use it that I know of is the totally BS stock music player. Supposedly the DAC works with every music player, but it's only at 48KHz at the moment (the stock app does 24@192KHz). Some say that the DAC is truncated to 16 bit of the 32 that it should support. And when you use the Snapdragon DAC the sound is different, but it's not bad anyways. Dolby Atmos helps on YouTube for example, and on movies, since it has the dynamic equalizer thingy you can adjust your headphones' output as you like. Also adds Surround Virtualizer which is awesome

CAPACITIVE BUTTONS: Best description: Too close together, lacking backlight. They're pretty doe :p They're reversible as well (back on the right, Recents on the left

BUILD: You may or may not like the design, that's your own taste. But the build quality is good. In theory the phone's screen should resist corner hits since the screen is separated from the borders. ZTE offers you one free screen change though, so as long as you can claim the warranty it won't be a problem. No water protection. It's only open on the headphone jack and the USB C. the speakers have small holes and a very thin cloth covering the hole.

FINGERPRINT SCANNER: It's a good placement. No wasted area on the front. Front mounted ones are more comfortable but you get used to it.

PERFORMANCE: Considering 1440P it's flawless. The SD820 chips are likely to be cheap binning processors though. They are still very nice

UI: Maybe too obtrusive on international version. Considering this is a flagship it should have some more updates. That's not necessarily good since they add a pair of things, fix one or two bugs and break another pair of things... (like Whatsapp and Play store). Everything gets fixed eventually. The update to N was fast. Too fast on the US version where they had a ton of bugs...

Consider custom ROMs too.

DEVELOPMENT: there's a fair share of ROMs for every version. Unlocking the device is a little risky and tedious though. TBH doing what we do here on the Axon is very limited by ZTE, they even removed fastboot on Nougat. But our cozy community fixed those things

SERVICEABILITY: Hopefully you won't need to... But be aware, it's really hard to find replacement parts. It's easier to get another broken Axon and "Frankenstein the parts that work" until you get something useable. Disassembling it is not hard and not risky. The only part which is hard to take out is the battery, but it can be extracted with care. ZTE offers a pretty massive warranty for phones other than the chinese one too.

So again: I'm probably not right on everything. Some things may be influenced by using this thing. But it's the best I could do, and it's definitely better than picking between the opinions of those who think that 1440p is useless and those who think that 1080p is uglier.