ZTE Grand S - thin in size, thin on quality

With Huawei announcing the world's biggest smartphone, Chinese handset rival ZTE has come up with the somewhat niche title of the - deep breath - world's thinnest 5in quad-core full HD smartphone. Hardly the boldest claim we've ever heard.

The ZTE Grand S - we're not sure what the S stands for - has a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and is compatible with 4G mobile broadband networks. There's also a 13 megapixel camera that can shoot video in 1080P HD, 2GB of memory and 16GB of internal storage.

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At its thinnest point the ZTE Grand S measures just 0.69cm thick, about as wide as a few slices of cheese. But thinness alone may not be enough for it to boast about.

ZTE hinted at more to come, hailing 2013 as the year it ushers in "a new era in smartphone design". To briefly offer opinion, these claims seem a tad wide of the mark.

While the Grand S runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, you wouldn't guess it. ZTE has messed around with the operating system to add its own touches and tweaks - in doing so it has succeeded in breaking something that didn't need fixing. 

Despite impressive hardware specifications the phone felt laggy, possibly a result of poor software coding.

Thus far the phone has only been confirmed in China, but expect it to crop up in the UK sometime soon. Either that or ZTE's UK press office is being a big tease.