ZTE has begun rolling out the Blade L2 smartphone across Europe, with Spain and Greece among the first to get their hands on the new budget handset.
The newest entry in ZTE's range of affordable Blade smartphones, which was last joined by the Blade V , the Blade L2 is a big-screen phone for people on a budget. Powered by a quad-core CPU running at 1.3GHz, paired with 1GB of RAM, the Blade L2 has a 5in, 854x480 resolution LCD display set into a "narrow frame design" with minimal screen bezels, which gives the phone a sleek look for a budget handset. At 8.9mm thick, it should slip easily into a pocket.
There's a 5-megapixel rear camera on the back of the handset, which is paired with an LED flash for low-light shooting. The camera app supports continuous and panorama shooting, and there's also a 0.3-megapixel webcam on the front for video calls and selfie shots.
However, with only 4GB of on-board storage, and no mention of a microSD card slot for adding extra capacity, this may not be the phone for anyone with a big music collection, or for someone that takes a lot of photos.
The phone will launch with dual SIM-card slots in Spain and Greece, but it's unclear whether it will be arriving in the UK as a dual-SIM or single SIM handset; typically dual-SIM phones sell better on the continent than in Britain.
It will also be stuck on the older Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system, rather than the newer 4.4 KitKat , but will at least come with several pre-installed apps including Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook and Twitter for easy content sharing.
“We’ve had huge success with our Blade series to date in Europe, and we’re excited to introduce the latest edition," A O Wen, ZTE's European general manager of handset operations, said of the launch. "We’re confident that the ZTE Blade L2 will offer our ever-more discerning customers across Europe a stylish and high performance device at the right price.”
ZTE has yet to announce an official UK price or release date, but the Blade 2 is expected to go on sale later this year both here and across Europe.
