Asus Zenfone 5 Review: Hands-on at CES 2014
What is the Asus Zenfone 5?
The Asus Zenfone 5 is a low-cost Android phone with a large
screen. It may not be all that phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 are, but it
certainly seems to get you a lot for your money.
UK prices for the Zenfone 5 haven't yet been announced, but
as it's set to sell for $200 without a contract in the US, this should prove to
be one of the cheapest ways to get a 5-inch screen phone.
Asus Zenfone 5 – Design
As a relative newcomer to phones, it's not surprising that
Asus has kept the design of its new Zenfone mobiles pretty simple. The Zenfone
5 is a plastic phone with a single-piece plastic battery cover that comes in
five different colours.
The one piece of Asus visual stamping is the texture of
concentric circles that you'll see under the screen. It feels a little light
and basic compared with something like the HTC One, but the Zenfone 5 should
sell for around half the price of our 2013 phone of the year.
It weighs 144g and is 10.3mm thick. It's light enough, but
it's not super slim. But again, superlatives are really not what the Asus
Zenfone 5 is all about.
Asus Zenfone 5 – Screen and Specs
The screen too lives in a comfortable middle ground. It's
five inches across and the resolution is 720p, where other high-end phones this
size use 1080p displays. However, given the phone's expected price we're more
than happy to live with 720p.
It's sharp and the IPS panel provides respectable image
quality. Colour reproduction wasn't quite spot-on, but the phone may ship with
Asus Splendid, an app that lets you fine-tune the colour temperature and
saturation to your own tastes. Our demo model wasn't loaded with the final
software so we can't be sure though.
The Asus Zenfone 5 is a mobile that has sprung from the
strong relationship between Intel and Asus. It uses an Intel Atom processor,
the dual-core 2GHz Z2580. It's a very capable processor for a budget phone like
this.
Asus boasted during the launch of the phone that it could
outperform virtually every mobile processor seen in an Android phone. Our
experience has been Intel Atom chips are often a little poorer with tasks in
which power matters – mostly gaming – due to relative
lack of optimisation on
the developers' side. However, things like the Zenfone range are out to change
that. And the raw power you're getting means the Zenfone 5 is a bit of a
bargain.
Asus says the phone will have 4GB, 8GB or 16GB, but this
will depend on the demands of the market in question. An 8GB or 16GB model
seems likely for the UK.
Asus Zenfone 5 – Cameras
The Zenfone 5 does pretty well in the camera department too.
It has an 8-megapixel main camera with a fast f/2.0 lens. This is a great
start, but when camera performance relies so much on things like shutter lag
and the software image engine, we're not going to praise the phone too much
yet. We'll wait for the final review unit.
The main camera does have a LED flash, though, and there's a
2-megapixel front camera for selfies and video chat.
Asus Zenfone 5 – Software
One thing that could trip this phone up is software. We saw
the phone running a largely vanilla version of Android 4.3, but it'll launch
with a new custom ZenUI. Although it promises plenty of extra features,
including a rather interesting camera one that groups sensor pixels in low
light to improve performance (i.e. it reduces resolution), it could result in a
phone with more lag than we'd hope.
Few custom UIs get their navigation completely right too,
and Asus hardly has the most experience in the market in this field.
Early Impressions
If the ZenUI is a moderate success and we get a fair
translation of the US selling price, the Asus Zenfone 5 could offer a pretty
good larger-screen alternative to the Motorola Moto G.
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