The Asus Zenfone 3 is the destination of the company s pursuit of superior function combined with a love for design and craftsmanship. Lofty goals for sure, but this isn't t your typical flagship or mid-range phone.
The Zenfone is a photography buff, it adores music and puts visuals on a pedestal. Really, there are pages of features of the PixelMaster. that drives the MP camera loaded with OIS and a ton of focus assistants, the SonicMaster. that pushes -bit Hi-Res audio to the dual speakers and DTS sound to headphones, then there s VisualMaster. that drives the High Gamut screen.
Before were pulled into three directions at once, let s try to summarize and not miss the potential Achilles heel of the Zenfone - the Snapdragon chipset. We d love to see it ace the battery test its the first -series chipset built on an nm process, but neither the CPU nor the GPU is as good as the Snapdragon, for example.
Asus Zenfone ZEKL key features Metal frame, Gorilla Glass front and back
- Dual-SIM, Dual Standby capability, VoLTE
- inch Super IPS+ capacitive touchscreen with p resolution and PPI density, Gorilla Glass protection
- Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset; octa-core GHz Cortex-A nm CPU; Adreno GPU
- GB of RAM and GB of storage or GB RAM and GB storage; a microSD slot uses SIM slot
- MP main camera with f. lens, OIS, laser and phase autofocus, dual-LED dual-tone flash, PFPS video recording
- MP front camera with f. lens °, fps video recording
- Android .. Marshmallow with Asus ZenUI. overlay
- LTE Cat. Mbps, Wi-Fi . Signac; Bluetooth; GPS with A-GPS; GLONASS; USB Type-C
- mAh battery, fast charging
- Fingerprint reader
- bit Hi-Res audio, NXP smart amp
- Main shortcomings Mid-range chipset with a high price tag
- Non-removable batter
- Keys below the screen lack backlighting
- Hybrid DualSIMmicroSD card slot limits options
- Asus tends to preinstall lots of third-party software on its phone
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If you need something more powerful, the Zenfone Deluxe offers Snapdragon even, but this ZEKL model has to make do with a mid-range chipset. That said, the Snapdragon handles p video capture, it offers a fast LTE modem and comes paired with up to GB of RAM too. With that in mind, it feels unfair to knock the chipset.
The camera has a laundry list of features - we alluded to some, but it has rare things like a color correction sensor and a triple autofocus system that can get a lock-in as little as .s. The image sensor is built to limit light bleeding and along with the dedicated hardware offers goodies like x Super Resolution and long exposures up to s.
Asus Zenfone ZEKL official images
The . Super IPS+ screen boasts a TruLife+ processor that borrows tech from K TVs. The Zenfone is made for high contrast scenes - both being in them the screen snits of brightness promise great visibility and showing them intelligent contrast control delivers real-time HDR imagery on screen. The screen is as colorful as it is bright too with % NTSC color coverage % wider than sRGB.
The Asus Zenfone ZTEKL has a five magnet speaker hooked up to the smart amp. Overall they promise to be louder without distorting sound and thumping low frequencies too.
The Zenfone has been available in Europe and Asia for quite a while now, but it was very expensive. However, Asus is launching it in the US soon and the base model GBGB will cost $ - a killer price for this screen and camera.
You can see there s plenty of tech under the hood to be excited about, so don t let hangups about the chipset hold you back - the Zenfone promises to be an audio-visual experience of the highest order.
