Alternatively you can pay a little extra and grab the ZTE Blade S6 from Amazon for £ 169.99. Both models sold SIM-free and network-unlocked.
The name might lead you to expect the blade S6 to be a copy of the Samsung Galaxy S6, but much more iPhone 6 design. The clean white face with circular button in the house, rounded corners and edges bend screen is very reminiscent of Apple's flagship smartphone. Even the SIM and microSD slot very iPhone-like, not that there is much scope for differentiating there. And the absence of an app tray MiFavor Apple UI is just everywhere.
For a budget- to mid-range phone ZTE Blade S6 is handsome, at least from the front with slim bezels and sleek design. But it unibody phone is built from a very subtle white and silver plastic, and compared them with larger, lower-resolution screen and iPhone 6 5in slightly larger and chunkier - but still commendably thin for the price - 7.7mm chassis. The weight is the same though, with both phones come in at 129g.
The home button can be circular, but as soon as you put the phone on charge or get a new notification has cool blue glow. That constant glow can be irritating when charging the phone overnight, and you should note no fingerprint sensor built in this button either. On both sides sit back and operated interactive Multitasking key, and you can switch around if you'd rather have the Back button on the right than the default left.
5in screen is a usefully bright IPS panel offers realistic colors and excellent viewing angles. The ZTE Blade S6 may only have one (720x1280) HD resolution, 293ppi pixel density but it is not far behind 326ppi the iPhone 6, and it is quite acceptable for the price.
A small speaker is reflected back. If you are left handed or put up the phone screen you will find it easy to modulate the sound, but otherwise is an acceptable job. There is also a headphone jack up top, which lets you take advantage of FM radio blade.
Fitted with a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 64-bit octa-core (quad-core 1.7GHz Cortex-A53, quad-core 1GHz Cortex-A53) processor, Adreno 405 graphics and 2GB of RAM, performance is very decent For a mid-range phone. The ZTE Blade S6 also feels nippy in operation, with no sign of lag when launching the app or switching between home screens and menus. The use of real-life we could not fault it.
We ran our usual trio of synthetic benchmarks, recording 658 points in Geekbench 3 single-core and multi-core 2420. Overall performance is therefore more iPhone 5S (2556 points) in the iPhone 6 (2794), and almost on par with the flagship LG G3 last year (2465).
We also operated GFXBench 3.0 graphics test, with ZTE Blade S6 to the 25fps to 11fps and T-Rex in Manhattan, matching the performance of Samsung Galaxy Note Edge and HTC Desire Eye.