ZTE is back! After a long and stressful year for the company, it finally looks as though ZTE is ready to get back to business by announcing the new ZTE Axon 9.
Unlike most other smartphone launches, all we know at this point is that there will be a ZTE Axon 9 — and that it’ll be announced in full at an event on Thursday, August 30. We also know that, unfortunately, the ZTE Axon 9 will not be coming to the U.S. at any point in the near future.
It’s not known what we can expect from the ZTE Axon 9 just yet, but we can speculate. At launch, the ZTE Axon 7 feature flagship specs — so we expect the Axon 9 to boast a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, at least 4GB of RAM, and plenty of storage. The jury’s out on design — but we certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see an edge-to-edge display with a notch for facial recognition tech.
The Axon 9 comes a full two years after the Axon 7 — and as reports earlier this year noted, ZTE opted to skip the ZTE Axon 8. We’re not quite sure why ZTE chose to skip the Axon 8 name. In between the Axon 7 and Axon 9, however, we were treated to the Axon M, ZTE’s foldable phone that largely failed to live up to expectations considering the fact that it was basically just two phone displays with a hinge in between them.
Smartphones aside, ZTE has had a rough year on the business side of things. Troubles began in 2017 when ZTE was fined $892 million for violating laws prohibiting sales of American tech to Iran and North Korea. On top of the fine, the company was forced to let go of four of its senior employees and reprimand other employees, but it did not disclose that while it did let go of the four executives, it also gave staff bonuses rather than letters of reprimand. ZTE was then banned from selling devices in the U.S., which almost led to the company being shut down. Eventually, the ban was lifted and the company was allowed to start selling its devices in the U.S. again.
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