ZTE’s new flagship Axon 9 Pro features a notch, of course

ZTE can’t resist its notch envy. The company introduced its newest flagship phone — the Axon 9 Pro — at IFA in Berlin today, and, of course, it features a notch along with a bezel at the bottom of the display. It also features vertically aligned dual, rear-facing cameras, a la the iPhone X. The phone looks like a 2018 flagship. Here’s the spec rundown:

• Snapdragon 845 processor
• 6.21-inch AMOLED display with 18.7:9 aspect ratio
• 4,000mAh battery
• 12-megapixel and 20-megapixel camera sensors in back and 20-megapixel camera sensor in front
• 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage
• Android 8.1 Oreo OS
• USB-C connector

This device is more of an update to the Axon 7 from 2016 as opposed to last year’s Axon M, which folded in half. It’s unclear if ZTE plans to return to the Axon M, or if that was just a random one-off experiment. This phone won’t be coming to the States, but it’ll cost €649 when it goes on sale in September in Europe.

As an aside, ZTE also announced its plans for 5G devices and how it plans to design the phones to account for antenna placement, additional power consumption, and new hardware. Right now, this doesn’t really mean anything for us other than to expect a 5G device from ZTE in the future, possibly in the second half of 2019, according to the company.