Asus ZenFone 5: iPhone X Clone With a Few Camera Tricks

BARCELONA—Feature diffusion is a fast process in the telephone market place. The high pattern, hardware, and software features you see on flagship phones usually cease up on midrange devices within six months. The Asus ZenFone v and ZenFone 5 Lite, both announced at Mobile World Congress, are here to prove that bespeak. We went hands on with them earlier the launch.

All Most the Notch

The ZenFone 5 is the more premium of the ii, incorporating a distinctive, well-nigh edgeless 19:nine aspect ratio and an overall look that'due south more or less a carbon re-create of the Apple iPhone X (below, right), complete with notch cutout and photographic camera layout. The front is all glass, a band of metal wraps along the sides, and the back is a highly polished mirror finish (midnight blue or falling star silver) that's an absolute fingerprint magnet and a bit on the slippery side; you'll certainly desire to go along it in a case.

Asus ZenFone 5 and iPhone X

The unusual attribute ratio and the wraparound "wings" of the display brand the phone wait striking for still reasons every bit the iPhone X. In that location'southward a 6.2-inch 2,246-past-1,080 IPS brandish that can hit a solid 500 nits of brightness. Colors on the screen pop, with images seemingly pressed up against the glass. Viewing angles are great and generally it'south quite a nice screen to look at and use. Information technology won't lucifer the Quad HD panel on the Samsung Galaxy S9+ in sharpness, only it's nearly on par with the Sony Xperia XZ2 and technically the iPhone X if we're going past raw pixel count.

MWC Bug Art Asus claims the display has AI features, like automatic color temperature aligning, only that's misleading marketing at best since information technology's not using machine learning, simply responding to an input. Similarly, keeping the screen on when yous're looking at information technology is a characteristic we've on various Samsung phones and isn't AI.

A Smart Camera

Looks and dainty brandish aside, what Asus is really trying to sell you on here is the photographic camera capabilities. The main rear camera is a 12MP sensor with an 83-degree field of view paired with a 2nd viii-megapixel, 120-caste wide angle lens. The front end camera is another 8-megapixel, 83-caste field of view lens. Yous can have broad angle shots of form, capturing more of your environs with relatively minimal barrel distortion. There'due south also optical prototype stabilization, 4K video recording, and the broad variety of camera modes for which Asus is known.

Asus ZenFone 5

But what makes the sensors stand out is Intelligent Scene detection. Like the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, the ZenFone 5 can recognize sure settings and objects to observe the all-time adjustment for contrast, white balance, focus, and shutter speed. That includes people, food, animals, plants, flowers, sunsets, night scenes, text, snowfall, and other settings.

This is real AI since the phone is using machine learning to not only identify pictures, simply to make the adjustments co-ordinate to your preferences and what makes the photo look best. With each photo, you lot're asked for your approval, and the phone stores this information and updates its adjustments accordingly every bit information technology learns what you similar.

Asus ZenFone 5

In my testing in the demo area, Intelligent Scene detection seemed to work, simply was a petty hit or miss. Not only was it tedious, information technology frequently mistook a cactus for food, which is perhaps the final thing yous want to swallow. Still, this is conspicuously non-final software, so we'll reserve judgment until we get a unit in for review.

Solid Power

The Zenfone 5 is powered by a newer midrange processor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636, with configurations of 4GB RAM/64GB storage and 6GB RAM/64GB of storage. You can also aggrandize storage upward to 2TB with microSD card and dual SIMs are supported, with dual 4G and dual VoLTE enabled.

Under the hood is a iii,300mAh bombardment. The phone comes running Android 8.0 Oreo, Asus Zen UI 5.0 running on top. Information technology'southward fairly lightweight compared to previous devices. Asus removed stock apps that indistinguishable Google apps and eliminated other bloatware bated from Facebook, Instagram, and a few Asus features like its Audiowizard for tuning frequency response and AI Boost which pushes more power to better performance. That said, making any judgment on operation is premature at this betoken since we used an early model and encountered several app crashes and camera app freezes.

Asus ZenFone 5 Lite

The ZenFone 5 Calorie-free is the more affordable version of the ZenFone five. You get a more than standard 18:9 screen vi-inch 1080p screen that looks rather drab next to its flashier sibling. On the plus side, there'southward no notch.

The design is like otherwise; you get the same sleeky back, which is a fingerprint magnet, a back fingerprint sensor, and dual cameras. The ane difference is that the Lite has dual sensors for the selfie camera likewise and runs older versions of things like Audiowizard. Pricing and availability isn't known yet, but we expect it to fall into the midrange segment and compete with phones like the Honor 7X.