 So I'm in China courtesy of ZTE. Z-T-E. Can never keep track of what the Canadian way is. Check out this hotel room. Not much privacy in the bathroom, but fortunately Brandon and I are not sharing a room. It's huge. And it gets better. Check this out. View's incredible. Hold on. But why would ZTE sponsor us all the way to China to make a video? I mean, how many kilometers is that? I guess we'll never know. And what exactly is it that goes on at an event like this? Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to show you guys firsthand what it's like to attend a press launch event as Linus from Linus Tech Tips. So we're on our way in to get briefed on the phone. Let's see how long it takes Brandon to hate on my selfie stick. It starts with the totally above board early access to the event venue. You can tell in this shot that they weren't quite ready for me because the red carpet still has the protective plastic covering on it, which Brandon of course trampled on. Next, it's time for the VIP room. This is where most of the learning actually takes place. And it was where I saw the Axon 7 for the first time. These briefings are great because they give me a chance not only to run through the specs of the device, but to probe about the rationale behind the various design choices. So the philosophy then behind the Axon 7 is influenced heavily by trying to answer the question, what makes a phone quote unquote flagship? Well, first and foremost is spec. So the Axon 7 sports a quad core Snapdragon 820 with Adreno 530 graphics, 4 gigs of LPDDR4 RAM, a 3140 milliamp hour non removable battery with quick charge 3.0 support over its USB type C connector, and a 5.5 inch AMOLED 1440p display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4. But the other big thing at work here was apparently figuring out common use cases and then addressing them one by one. So a lot of work was put into audio with a dual standalone chip amp and DAC solution from AKM with Dolby Atmos software running on the back end and dual front facing speakers, something that I wish was much more common. This was done for a variety of reasons, to improve call quality on conference calls for business minded folks and to help music lovers avoid carrying around a Bluetooth speaker with solid headphone sound quality as another great bonus. Another use case specific feature is that the Axon 7 has hardware support for pretty much every wireless band known to man, along with a second slot next to the primary SIM slot that can be used either as micro SD expansion for the 64 gigs of storage that comes standard, which shouldn't be overlooked by the way as something that to me defines flagship. As I've said before, it is laughable to me that some other companies are trying to sell 600 plus dollar phones with 16 gigs of storage or it can be used for a second SIM slot for frequent travelers or people who find a better deal on data from one carrier and voice from another. Next, it's pretty common for me to cause some kind of a disturbance at the event until I get a device of my own to tool around with. All right, so we just got out of our briefing and people are trying to have a conversation and I went and turned this thing on and now they're like, what are we going to do with this guy? He's just talking on his little camera over there. So I've got the phone in my bag already, managed to secure that at this point, but we're trying to find me a VR headset. Apparently they don't have them out yet, but I'm never afraid to ask for special treatment. At which time we'll sometimes wander around and try to get early access to people or areas of the event that again, normally wouldn't be available until later. Hopefully the burly security guard lets me through. Yep. It's all about just walking around like you own the place. So at my second briefing, I got a lot more information about the camera. It's a 20 megapixel still 4K video affair with an f1.8 lens and both electronic and optical image stabilization to help with low light performance and stability while shooting video with a redesigned simpler app with auto-magical mode selection and voice controlled capture, as well as the fingerprint scanner that's positioned between two grooves on the back for easy access without looking and the Dete is claiming and it looks like there may well be some validity to this, is one of the fastest available on the market. And then finally, perhaps most importantly if you're into that sort of thing, their upcoming VR headset that combined with the Axon 7 will be one of the first Google Daydream compliant solutions with significantly lower latency and hopefully pretty solid image quality thanks to the 1440p screen. From there out of politeness, I sometimes attend the keynote, usually if there's still an important piece of information that I'm waiting for. Fashion show too. I thought I was going to do a fashion cake here. It's like I'm in a state of... Sometimes these keynotes are weirder and more awkward than other times, but in this case, it turned out to be totally worth it since I managed to ask someone what the characters next to the numbers meant on one of the slides and I found out the Axon 7 will be launching at $449 in the US. Not too freaking shabby considering everything we've seen. Then finally, when all of that's done, I lie in my room with my boxers on writing up a video much like this one. But I won't subject you to that part of the experience. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was good, get subscribed, hit that like button and maybe even consider supporting us. You can buy a cool t-shirt like... Not this one. Normally I wear our shirts, but I was traveling today and these are really comfortable anyway. And you can also join our forum where you can ask questions, answer questions, and generally just chat with the Linus Tech Tips community. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, gee, what should I watch next? Well, maybe check out that video suggestion we've got for you right up there in the right hand corner. I'll see you guys when I'm back in Canada. I'm very far away right now. been sick