ZTE Blade A530 with Android Oreo receives Wi-Fi Certification

Mobile World Congress 2018 is fast approaching, and it is certain that many new phones that have been leaked for months will be launched at the trade show. The stars of the show, of course, will be the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the S9+, but they will be accompanied by many other new devices. Most prominent Android OEMs have decided to attend MWC, and we expect new budget, mid-range, and flagship smartphones to see the light of day for the first time at the event.

One company of note in the Android smartphone market is ZTE. The company sells its Axon flagship phones and Blade low-end and mid-range phones. The Axon 7 proved to be a popular affordable flagship in 2016, and the company has confirmed that its successor, the Axon 9, will be released this year. Last year, the company released the quirky Axon M, a dual-screen device. We have also seen the ZTE Blade V9 receive FCC certification. And now, another ZTE Blade device, the ZTE Blade A530, has received Wi-Fi certification.

At this point, details about the ZTE Blade A530 are scarce. The model number implies that it may be the successor to last year’s Blade A520, which was a low-end smartphone with a 5-inch HD display and MediaTek’s MT6737 system-on-chip. Sure enough, the Wi-Fi certification mentions the presence of the MediaTek MT6739, which is the successor to the MT6737 as it now becomes MediaTek’s entry-level SoC.

The MediaTek MT6739 still competes with the Snapdragon 425 and not higher-end chips like the Snapdragon 435 or the Snapdragon 450, as it still has only a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 cluster which is clocked at up to 1.5GHz. The SoC has Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR GE8100 clocked at up to 570MHz. It supports 18:9 displays with a maximum resolution of HD+ (1440×720), and it has a LTE Cat. 4 modem. The maximum RAM supported is 3GB LPDDR3 RAM. The SoC supports a maximum camera resolution of 13MP, and it can record video up to 1080p resolution at 30 FPS. Finally, it supports eMMC 5.1 and Bluetooth 4.2.

The other things disclosed by the Wi-Fi certification are that the phone will launch with Android Oreo, which is a plus for an entry-level device as that means it will be able to run an AOSP Generic System Image (GSI) thanks to Project Treble support. It also has 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, but given the lack of Wi-Fi 802.11ac support in the MediaTek MT6739 SoC, that’s not really a surprise.

As of now, the launch time frame of the ZTE Blade A530 is unknown. It’s possible that ZTE will launch the phone at MWC this month. We expect to learn more in the coming weeks.

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