From the “Phones as DAPs” department, the new ZTE flagship smartphone, the “ZTE Axon 7” is available for pre-order for $400 (unlocked, USA warranty, no contract) at various sellers. As of the time of writing, a couple of sellers are sweetening the pie with free headphones.

At NewEgg you get the Monster N-Pulse Over-Ear DJ headphones for FREE. They have a selling price of $200 but various marketplace sellers have the white color for $100 at NewEgg, while a …car parts seller has it as low as $55 at amazon.com. To cut a long story short, this is not a $200 freebie, just the usual marketing value inflation gimmicks 🙂

At B&H Photo you get two freebies without the hype, a $25 B&H Photo Gift Card (to be used in future purchases, not towards this purchase), and the Samsung Level U solid-frame bluetooth earbuds.

This offer expired but this phone-as-DAP is frequently discounted, so if you missed it, chances are more offers will come for it in the future… From the “Phones as DAPs” department, the unlocked no-contract ZTE Axon PRO (the PRO part in the name is important as the non-PRO version is not as good) is on sale for $279 with free shipping at Amazon.com for Prime members in another “Add to Cart” promotion. The price before you add it to the shopping cart is $330.

From the ever-increasing in popularity “Phones as DAPs” department, the 64GB version of the ZTE Axon PRO smartphone (the PRO is important because there’s also a non-PRO with lesser specs), unlocked without contractual requirements, is on a special promotion at B&H Photo. You get the phone, a $75 B&H Photo Gift Card and a phone case, all together for $330 with free shipping. No coupons or rebates, just checkout and it’s all good while this promotion is running.

NOTE: the free items are shown in the main product page at B&H while the various promotions are running. IF you don’t see the free items mentioned over there, it means the promotion expired.

Some prefer to listen to music using dedicated Digital Audio Players, others prefer to use their smartphones, while other-others a combination of both. If you are interested in “Phones as DAPs”, for a limited time only, the Best Buy eBay store is offering new condition unlocked with no contract requirements 64GB ZTE Axon PRO smartphones for $300 with free shipping. They are available in three different colors.

When price checking and reading reviews, make sure you are looking at the “Axon PRO”, not the “Axon” (not PRO) model. It does not take microSD cards, so keep that in mind. But with 4GB RAM and a Snapdragon 810 processor it should be able to handle even the most demanding Android music and music streaming apps. Another benefit over dedicated DAPs is Bluetooth and NFC. NFC can be very handy if you mix and match different music sources with different headphones/outputs and you don’t like to turn bluetooth on/off all the time to prevent devices for “fighting” over a previously paired connection.

Since it’s an unlocked GSM phone with no contract requirement, you don’t have to use any of the telephone aspects to it, but in the future in case you need a phone or you are in-between phones or providers, it can serve that purpose too.

Some people prefer dedicated audio players, others prefer to use their smartphones as their portable audio players, some are somewhere in-between. One of the latest Android smartphones to get some audio-cred is the ZTE Axon PRO (the PRO is important, since there is also a ZTE Axon non-PRO model), and two good things happened to it in the last few days: 1) it is getting Android 6.0 and 2) its price is dropping…

… as of the time of writing, the 64GB Version is down to $324, while the 32GB Version goes for $300 in multiple colors. It has 4GB RAM which can keep up with almost all music apps. However, there’s no microSD slot, so consider that if you are deciding between 32GB and 64GB.

This is a factory-unlocked no-contract phone with a US warranty.