Difference Between ZTE Orbit and ZTE Skate Acqua

ZTE Orbit vs ZTE Skate Acqua | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

ZTE has been one of the leading companies in the telecommunications industry since its inception in 1985. It is based in China and has research and development divisions in many countries. Their product portfolio used to include end-to-end solutions in the telecommunication industry including wireless terminals and professional terminals. Because they have expertise in these areas, the fact that they are trying to diversify makes sense. For instance, they are relatively new for the smartphone market, but they have a good understanding about the network infrastructure to design mobiles that would serve a common purpose. They have invested years in their research to establish reliable and efficient wireless communication lines, which they can readily use as a knowledge base in coming up with a feasible mobile design. That is why they find it easy to diversify.

We are going to look into two handsets they have come up with as the result of the diversification. Both of these are low end smartphones, and we reckon they would only serve the Chinese market, but we are not sure about the plans this telecommunications giant has for these two kids. We can affirm one thing, though they are trying to improve their share of the smartphone market and this time they are doing it aggressively. We saw them announcing a lot of new smartphone designs at the MWC 2012, which would challenge some products of the leading vendors in the market. This is not good in the perspective of those vendors, but as consumers, this is a good improvement. When the competition gets aggressive, the vendors innovate more, come up with better designs, and they are bound to reduce prices too. So even if we are not going to invest in any of these two ZTE devices, they would do us good in the long run.

ZTE Orbit

Orbit has a 4.0 inches TFT touchscreen featuring a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at a pixel density of 233ppi. It looks appealing although not necessarily expensive. The Black hulk has curved edges that make it easy to hold this handheld device. It is powered by 1GHz single core processor with 512MB of RAM and Orbit runs on Windows Mobile 7 Tango II. This version is better than the previous version of Windows Mobile, but Orbit doesn’t have the latest version of Windows Mobile 7.5 Mango. Comparing the two operating systems is not the intention of this article, so we’ll leave that to another time, but what you need to know is that, this OS is not as good as Mango. Even though that is the case, their choice in porting Orbit with Tango is sound because the hardware is somewhat mediocre for Mango. Orbit has an internal storage of 4GB without the option to expand using a microSD card and as you can deduct, the storage is going to be a problem.

ZTE has included a 5MP camera in Orbit with autofocus and LED flash and which can capture 720p videos @ 30 frames per second. It also supports geo tagging with the use of Assisted GPS. Unfortunately, Orbit doesn’t feature a secondary camera for video conferencing. The connectivity is defined by HSDPA that supports speeds up to 14.4Mbps. Orbit also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity. In terms of sensors, Orbit comes with an accelerometer and a proximity sensor.

ZTE Skate Acqua

This can be considered as the Android equivalent of ZTE Orbit. Skate also has 4.0 inches TFT capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at a pixel density of 233ppi. The screen is not that satisfactory though for it only features 56K colors, and the brightness is noticeably low. Skate is powered by 1GHz Cortex A5 processor on top of Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon chipset with Adreno 200 GPU and 512MB of RAM. It runs on Android OS v4.0 ICS which may be too much of an operating system to run on this hardware set. Nonetheless, we are hoping ZTE has done their job in tweaking the operating system to fit the hardware. In addition, the new UI of ZTE code named as Mifavor would run on this device, as well. It has 4GB of internal storage with the option to expand it using a microSD card up to 32GB.

Skate has 5MP camera that has autofocus, LED flash and geo tagging. It can also record 720p videos @ 30 frames per second. Unfortunately, Skate doesn’t seem to have a secondary camera either. ZTE is porting Skate with HSDPA connectivity supporting a speed of 7.2Mbps, in addition to the Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n connection. Fortunately, you can share your internet connection with your friends by setting up a wi-fi hotspot using Skate. The normal accelerometer and proximity sensors are available without any additional hardware. Like old days, Skate comes in either Black or White flavor and has 1600mAh of battery with which we assume it can last up to 6-7 hours of constant use.

Conclusion

There is a subtle distinction between Orbit and Skate Acqua, as they are featuring different operating systems. In fact, these are two competing OSs although reviewers normally don’t compare Android ICS with Windows Mobile 7 Tango II for apparent reasons. My point is that, Android ICS would be considered as better over Tango II. The question is, whether, Skate is better than Orbit just because their OSs supersedes. My answer is no for several reasons. The first reasoning I have is that the screen of the Skate Acqua is below average. It only features 56K colors, which would make it reproduce terrible images, although their resolution is the same. Other than this fact, both of the handsets seem similar. Perhaps Skate can even be considered as better because it supports more storage inherently and features the best Android OS. Thus, the final decision turns out to be based on your preference as an investor for you only can decide which flavor of the OS market you want to taste.