Chinese telecoms company ZTE may have been a more familiar name to phone buyers a decade ago, but thanks to a mess of political and economic issues, it is rarer to see in the news these days. That said, we've been reviewing the company's Axon phones year after year to partial acclaim and we can't fault its persistence. For 2022, ZTE is "playing the hits," so to speak, with the new Axon 40 Ultra.

The industrial design features curved edges to the left and right sides and some edge trimming that makes the phone appear "frameless" as the company is inclined to call it.

ZTE continues to heavily promote its under-display selfie camera engineering with a 16MP shooter — capable of aggregating its cell sites to 2.24µm — underneath a 400 ppi display. Compared with last year's Axon 30 Ultra and Axon 30 5G, the panel sizes out right in between the two at 6.8" compared to 6.67" and 6.92", respectively. Weirdly, last year's mainstream model got the UDC last time and not the Ultra. The new device rectifies this exclusion.

The other weighty priority here is the triple threat camera system on the back, comprising solely of 64MP sensors. Two of them, the all-purpose and telephoto units, are equipped with optical image stabilization, but the whole lot should produce sharp images in plenty of situations if given a fair chance and with a little help from ZTE's improved AI aids.

Both of these big talking points have become familiar to Axon series followers, but refinement in this business is admittedly underrated, so hopefully we see mistakes of old fixed up this time.

The phone is coming out first in China — it'll have faster 80W wired charging to the rest of the world's 65W and come in way more memory configurations there while other members will only get 8 or 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage — but, according to the company, should be available for pre-order globally starting June 8.