ZTE announces Force Touch-equipped version of its Axon 7

A few days after OnePlus announced a souped-up verson its flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 3T, ZTE is following suit with the Axon 7.

The limited edition phone is available starting today for $499.98 direct from ZTE's website.

The upgraded Axon 7 is the first ZTE device available in the US with a pressure sensitive display, ZTE calls Force Touch. If that name sounds familiar, that's because it's the same name Apple uses for similar technology on the Apple Watch and its Mac trackpads. The same tech is used in the iPhone with the name 3D Touch.

Through Force Touch users gain the ability to press on the screen to trigger various actions. If you press on an app icon it will bring up a shortcut to launch to a specific task within the app. For example, you could Force Touch on the messaging app to display a shortcut to create a new conversation or select an existing conversation.

Also included for the $100 premium over the standard Axon 7 is 6 gigabytes of memory, and 128 gigabytes of storage.

The new Axon 7 model will use the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, microSD card support, 20-megapixel rear camera, 8-megapixel front camera, 3,250 milliamp-hour battery, and 5.5-inch display.

Android Lollipop Benchmarked: Faster Than 4.4

Call it the state of the ART. With two Google Nexus 5 phones at PCMag, we were finally able to benchmark an Android 4.4 device with the older Dalvik runtime against Android 5.0 Lollipop's new ART runtime, and we found a bit of a difference.

Android 4.4 introduced ART, but it was hidden behind a panel of developer settings. Lollipop makes it mandatory. As Jason Snell (not that Jason Snell) recounts at New Relic, the ART runtime compiles applications when they're installed, as opposed to on each run. That makes execution dramatically faster. Snell found application performance sometimes tripled. We didn't find results that dramatic on our various benchmark tests, but we did see a bit of a performance boost:

Google has done a good job of filtering Material Design and new features down to Android 4.4; the new calendar, maps, and Chrome 39 are all available to earlier versions of Android. So browser improvements in Chrome 39, as you can see from the Browsermark score above, carry over to both 4.4 and 5.0 devices.

RAM, graphics, and database I/O scores all stayed almost exactly the same from Android 4.4 to Android 5.0. But apps will probably launch more quickly and run more smoothly because of that boosted compilation speed.

This all comes at a cost, though. Adobe confirmed that its Air software isn't yet compatible with Android 5.0, affecting a slew of third-party apps built with Air. The site AndroidPit has a list of other current Lollipop bugs.

We still think Lollipop is a huge step forward for Android users, and you should look forward to when it arrives on your device. Read our full review for more details.