[Hands On] Asus Zenfone 5 Review

There are news that very soon Asus is going to launch new smartphone under its Zenfone series in India, these phones were unrelieved by Taiwanese company back in CES this year. Asus has already changed market and capture a good amount of share with its voice calling tablet Fonepad. Asus has confirmed that they will launch ZenFone 4, ZenFone 5 and ZenFone 6.

We got a chance to play with AsusZenfone 5, let see what it can do and does it give a good competition to Moto G and others.

In Box contents of Asus Zenforne 5 :-

When you open box, you will get :-

• Zenfone 5
• Battery
• Charger
• USB cable,
• Inear headphone
• Extra buds
• Warranty card and some other manuals

Build and Design of Asus ZenFone 5 :-

Design is the USP of Asus ZenFone 5, when we open box and took phone in our hand we were impressed from very first minute. ZenFone 5 has 5 inch screen, you can use it by one hand and its very much comfortable too, in our test we had used it with one hand we were able to reach every corner of screen. Phone is not very bulky, instead its light and if we compare it with its competitor its slim too.

At front you will find a 5 inch IPS HD display screen with screen resolution of 1280×720 pixels with pixel density of 294 ppi which is quite sharp and in our test screen responded very well, we were able to read webpage contents without zooming in. Screen is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and Asus has introduced TruVivid technology which produce great colors and contents.

Below screen you will find three touch sensitive Android buttons and below buttons there is a metallic strip featuring concentric semi-circles adds points to its design. We had noticed that around screen it has large bezel which makes device big.

At top you will find a 3.5 mm Audio jack, there is nothing at left, at bottom you have a microphone and a Micro USB for charging or data sync, at right it has volume rocker with metallic finish which gives premium look. It has curved edges which makes easy to hold. At back you will find 8 MP camera and flash just below it, there is a Asus branding at mid of back and at bottom you will find Intel branding and beneath it you have speaker grill. Its back is curvy too and smooth, due to curve you will find it easy to grab and work on it.

Hardware Of Asus ZenFone 5 :-

Asus ZenFone 5 has a 5 inches  HD (1280×720) IPS display screen with Capacitive Multi touch panel and it is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3, display do support GloveTouch input, under the hood its powered by Intel Atom Z2560 dual-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz, Asus is saying that it features Intel Hyper-Threading Technology which means it can act like quad-core CPU if too many apps are running, it is supported by 2 GB of RAM and has 8 GB of internal storage which can be expandable up to 64 GB via microSD card. Asus is also providing 5 GB of free lifetime storage on ASUS WebStorage.

Read :- [Hands On] Asus ZenFone 6

At back it has a 8 megapixel camera with LED flash, F2.0 Aperture and PixelMaster, it can shot full HD videos at 1080p, it has a front facing camera of  2 Mega-Pixel with f2.4 aperture. For connectivity it has WLAN 802.11 b/g/n , USB 2.0, Bluetooth V4.0+EDR +A2DP, GPS/AGPS. It houses a battery of 2110 mAh which can provide standby Time of 353 hours(3G) and talk time of 18.5 hours(3G). If we talk about software then it runs on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean wrapped with Asus ZenUI and will receive KitKat update.

Software And User Interface of Asus ZenFone 5 :-

Nowadays almost every manufacturer tries to add there own custom UI on top of stock Android to make UI friendly, but not everyone succeed in it. Asus ZenFone 5 runs on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean wrapped with ZenUI, Asus has said that KitKat update is on there list.

Asus is not a big fish in smartphone market but they had built a good UI, Asus claims that they had made over 200 changes to the core Android 4.3. Asus has created a neat UI, tried a lot to make its UI look different from other Android UI. UI layer is not just limited to icons or launcher, if you open apps like calculator, gallery and camera you will see neat UI there too.

Asus ZenFone 5 comes with some pre-installed apps like What’s Next, an app for managing apps, Do It Later, app to manage your to do list, Share Link, Party Link, PC Link, and Remote Link,  Asus WebStorage, company’s cloud storage app  which gives 5 GB free storage for lifetime, and Omlet Chat, free instant messaging app.

Camera of Asus ZenFone 5 :-

Asus ZenFone 5 comes with a 8 mega pixel camera at back with LED flash, and F2.0 Aperture, Asus is saying it has PixelMaster technology which combines software, hardware and optical design to produce good quality images.

we spend sometime with Asus ZenFone 5 camera and captured images and videos with it. Images captured with it has great colors. It performed well in almost every lighting conditions. Camera comes with some nice modes like time rewinds which starts recording video two seconds before and one second after pressing button, you can capture images while shooting videos, it has HDR, panorama, night, low-light, selfie (here it detects faces within the frame automatically) and few other modes.

Performance of Asus ZenFone 5 :-

Asus ZenFone 5 runs on dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2560 processor and features Hyper-Threading technology which allows it to act like quad core as when process is too much each core can execute two instructions at a time. It has 2 GB of RAM and in our test it performed very well. Here are few bench marking test we run on it :-

Final Verdict :-

This phone comes with nice UI and good design, its an impressive phone in mid-range, price could be a main point here, if Asus price it around INR 15k then it will be a value for money.