Asus Zenfone Zoom review – Aim for being a perfect smartphone
Asus being one amongst the great Pc manufacturer has also gained a lot with its zenfone line-up and Asus Zenfone Zoom is the one of the smartphones which aim elite and premium segment of the smartphone. We all need a smartphone which lasts a long, which performs well, which shoots good photos, no memory issues are the basic needs and these needs make the phone a perfect for the use of a daily driver. Again it’s a part where we need a smartphone to perform well at our social media, messaging and games. So Asus with Asus zenfone zoom aims to make a good smartphone for photography as well as closure to a perfect smartphone.
Asus Zenfone Zoom rear
Specification of Asus Zenfone Zoom
- 5.5 inch 1080p Display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3
- Intel Atom Z3580 2.3 Ghz Quad Core processor With PowerVR G6430 GPU
- 128GB inbuilt Memory and Expandable to 64GB via MicroSD card Slot
- 4GB RAM
- 13 MP rear F2.7 – 4.8 28-84mm (3X optical zoom) Hoya Lens Kit with Laser Auto Focus, Dual LED Flash. 1080p Video recording.
- 5MP front camera F/2.0
- 3000 mAh Battery
- 37,999rs Flipkart Price
Asus Zenfone Zoom Processor SOC details CPU-Z
Inbox Content of Asus Zenfone Zoom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Unit
- Hand strap
- In-ear Headphones
- Extra earbuds
- 2 Amp Travel adapter
- Micro USB to USB cable
- Quick Guide and other documentation
Asus Zenfone Zoom InBox Content
Build of the Asus zenfone zoom
Whenever I saw an Asus zenfone front from the front it looks and resembles like to all zenfone lineups but at the rear, it’s completely different. I remember the Nokia Lumia 1020 camera phone with the huge camera bump on its polycarbonate body. The Asus Zenfone Zoom resembles the same with huge circle bump at the rear. It’s the bit of Matt type of finish over to that circle. That Bump on the rear is not huge because of a huge battery inside. There’s particular circle because of the camera has a 3x optical and it’s one amongst in smartphone to come with Hoya lens. The back panel which is removable, but no removable battery has a special leather texture which feels good and premium in hands and it has Asus logo embossed inside below the circle and at top intel logo embossed in small due to Intel inside a processor. Side bands are made of metal which makes the device more sturdy and makes feels good in the hand. At the top, it has the headphone jack and noise-canceling mic, at the bottom it has micro USB charging with Hand hold strip opening. Over to left it had no buttons but at right at the top it had volume rocker or Zoom in Zoom out (W and T) button, power /wake button at the bottom it had a special dedicated camera button and a small video recording button. At the rear, there’s a huge opening bump of stitched leather which lets you hold the phone as a digital camera. Also below to that line there lies a speaker grill. The front completely reminded me of Asus zenfone 5 or any zenfone line up. If you talk about the size of the smartphone, it’s 5.5-inch display it’s huge for normal size whenever I Placed it in my jeans pocket it ended up bit open and made me realize they’re the huge phone and study phone in my pocket. Overall the design is one of the best in Asus zenfone line up I was seen, it’s premium and sturdy but the total choice depends upon you how you get the design for that particular budget. The front Has rectangle with circular edges which huge bottom bar likewise all the zenfone Line up I specified and Again the Back button, home button and Multi-Tasking button ain’t backlit for low-light or night use. The Top bezel had an Asus Logo Below the call receiver speaker and a front camera. The Side edges of the display are a bit thick not the smallest that adds a protection to it. The Gorilla Glass 3 protection is done amazingly I use always keep a pair of keys in my pocket with Asus Zenfone Zoom in my pocket and it always ended up without a scratch the each time I removed it from my pocket. Yet it doesn’t fit completely in my jeans front pocket and always made me feel something thick and heavy thing placed in my pocket. Whenever I removed it from my pocket my jeans felt a bit light, Its the Thinnest 3X optical zoom Phone but because of its Aim, it’s thick and heavy at the same time. It doesn’t have a removable battery but the back panel is still removable inside of it reveals dual micro SIM slot and the MicroSD card expansion slot. MicroSD card expansion did support only till 64GB. So as I said Build Completely depends on you.
- Asus Zenfone Zoom rear Intel Logo
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Top 3.5 mm headphone jack and noise cancelling mic
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Side Buttons
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Rear Camera Slight Bump
- Asus Zenfone Zoom rear line for Holding Grip while shooting pictures
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Bottom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom InBox Content
- Asus Zenfone Zoom rear
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Top
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Removed Back panel showing sim card slot and Micro SD card slot
- Asus Zenfone Zoom
Display Of Asus Zenfone Zoom
One of the important and most used parts inside a smartphone is its display. The Asus Zenfone Zoom comes with IPS Display of resolution 1920*1080, with Corning Gorilla glass protection. The display dims well not to the utmost sometimes it may strain your eyes at night time, So suggest you to use night mode or some screen filter apps. The Sun Light readability is also good, you need to increase the brightness to 60% or more if you are adjusting the brightness manually as an auto mode is also available. The Colour reproduction is good not the best and Viewing angles are good. The Panel is good Also Less PPI makes it ok. I Don’t want and High-Resolution display Likewise Asus selected good display.The colour reproduction was pretty and it was recognized by me when I captured a photo in the phone and compared it in PC. The photo looked better on the phone screen than that of my PC, but that didn’t mean photo was great. Overall I would say it was a good display.
Operating system and Software Experience of the Asus Zenfone Zoom
The Asus zenfone zoom comes with Android lollipop 5.1 out of the boxed with its own skin ZenUI. I personally didn’t like the ZenUI when I used the Zenfone 2, the first phone to come with 4GB ram due to its bugs and somewhere mismatched user experience, but this time over the update Asus has improved a lot their lots of changes in UI and now it feels stable and Polish UI which gives you an ultimate experience which you need fork the smartphone pitched at that budget. Most important it, as usual, comes with lots of bloatware like puffin browser, TripAdvisor, etc and most important those apps can be easily uninstalled as any other app! Good move Asus that makes more vroom for else but The OS itself when you first boot the OS it Gives about 112GB of storage of those 128GB claimed which is more than Enough, I Don’t think I need an external SD card, though, still they have provided one option for the same. I tested USB OTG well it supports well that’s again a plus point. So there’re lots of potentials this phone can do. Mainly there are so many options due to its camera and video oriented smartphone. One more thing over the span of time I was using the phone this phone had pushed two small updates for bug fixes and Company confirmed that it will be getting marshmallow update soon.Sometime over random the phone whenever to use to be in pocket gets unlocked easily, and gets open some random time and which even heated the phone in the pocket itself. That heat reminded me that phone has been unlocked in the pocket itself. The only thing I had to do is simply disabling double tap to wake. Would be a minor bug I think Asus would definitely fix it. So over to the software update with Custom ZenUI its again gaining lots of point of add into. Also, that makes Asus Zenfone Zoom few reasons to be picked.
- Asus Zenfone Zoom ZenUI Lock Screen
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Internal storage out of the box
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Android Version and other details
Performance of Asus Zenfone Zoom
It does comes with Intel Soc and PowerVR GPU, overall for normal usage and transitions were buttery smooth. When it comes to gaming it’s not the very best performance at that high-end level. Whenever I ran an OpenGL test or 3D test on Antutu the Animation or Graphics were able to see easily a frame drop. Still somehow Antutu Manged to get an Impressive score of 61703 Slight lower to LG G4. While the GeekBench for Single core it Scored 955 while for Multi-Core it scored 2910. We even Ran 3DMark Benchmark Icestorm one, and It showed impressive frame rate of 50-60 fps while on a play and scored an impressive score of 13237 on Ice Strom Unlimited. During the 3D mark test, the Phone’s temperature remains the same throughout the test and battery did drop by a single percent. We will definitely talk about the battery in detail below. Talking about the games it played casual games perfectly with no issues like the subway surfs and many more. When It comes to AAA level games or more high-end graphics intended games like Asphalt, Nova 3 etc. It showed some amount of frame drop when it use to be a high level of usage of graphics. Still the games ran more smooth at medium graphics. The device tends to get over heatup during the play time long hours and it uses to be an unbearable heat.
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Ice Storm Unlimited Score graph
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Ice Storm Unlimited Score
- Asus Zenfone Zoom GeekBench Score
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Antutu Benchmark Score
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Processor SOC details CPU-Z
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Scrren, RAM and storage details CPU-Z
Camera of Asus Zenfone Zoom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Interface
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Interface Modes
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Interface Modes
The most important part of this phone and most to be used part when someone grabs this phone. So we saw in the specification that it is a 13MP sensor and adding 3x zoom does make the image look different than all the other smartphone. So I will start from Camera app it is a decent and clean UI the right corner had a mode button which showed tile UI for choosing different modes. It had a lot of different modes to try out. Also, more importantly, right corner sometimes showed Night/HDR mode to be chosen for capturing the best image according to live image in the viewfinder. The App actually showed a slight shutter lag when it came to capturing images, also, each image processing took some time. I Personally think that the camera app specially for shutter lag could be made better specifically for this phone. If you talk about the buttons specifically for image and video placed well and worked perfectly. Talking about the Image quality, It had an impressive colour reproduction and white balance selection at auto was good. You did get to use manual mode which has an ability to shoot long exposure image. Again auto mode even at daylight shooter well, sometimes it even managed well in low light but not in all the possible cases of the low light. In low light, with the help of night mode which boosted a bit ISO worked well for some cases but still in some cases it couldn’t suggest the best setting. Overall the 3X zoom worked well you can actually see the moving lens on the rear part of the camera. Talking about the laser auto-focus it was not the fastest I have seen. The LG has really fast laser auto-focus compare to this but it was fast compared to phones without laser autofocus. If you managed to edit the image well in lightroom the slight touchup could result in better images. Unlucky to that it isn’t capable of producing RAW images at current, It would be possibly the great inclusion of adding RAW support to this camera phone. The images produced are well still DSLR can produce the best possible image and Asus Zenfone Zoom is not Close to that level. The sharpness of the image is slight ok I would say.The inclusion of the Hand strap made it completely recognized the phone is focused on photography and it did remind me that it’s a more of Digital camera than a smartphone. The images you can easily point out where captured from the phone itself and those are unedited, I would suggest apps like aviary or lightroom for post process of the image. Talking about the video, it did capture 1080p video, not 4K. Not an issue as the 1080p was amongst the best 1080p video I seen in a smartphone. It was as possible as neutral to colours and rendered well to the playback. Adding a dedicated small video recording button did save time to capture a quick video of the moment and same with the photo too. That was one amongst the best move did by Asus.
Talking to the prospect of the front camera then The 8MP F2.0 Shooter does shoot great selfies and It performs well in low light as compared to other selfie phones, The beautify is definite addition and level to set beautify will help you to capture perfect selfies. Also, Asus has added panorama for the huge group shot. Over to camera, I would say I will definitely give a complete pick for the device.
Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample at 3X Zoom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample without Zoom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample at 3X Zoom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample without night mode
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample with night mode on
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample HDR
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample at 3X zoom
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample HDR
- Asus Zenfone Zoom Camera Sample with 3X Zoom
Battery of Asus Zenfone Zoom
3000 Huge Mah Battery, which is non-removable one and, more importantly, it does last well for the usage. Over in our test we ran a 1-hour video clip when The battery was at 95% which dropped down to 75% with Wifi on and normal screen brightness. So which means it Could attain to the level of 5 to 5 and half hours of on-screen time which is normal for the phones. It had a 3000 mah battery and it did included the 2 amp travel adapter which didn’t support actually quick charging, but due to 2 amp output, it charged the phone within 2 hours from the lowest point to 100. It definitely lasted whole day over to my usage and ended a day with 20 percent of the battery remaining.
Asus Zenfone Zoom GeekBench Battery Score
Verdict
The Asus has improved a lot from its predecessors flagship phone and done impressive improvements in the device which makes it close to the perfect phone. Again coming to point it will be the most expensive phone of the zen series of the line-up and people may think twice to invest in this brand at this price point. I would say if you want the camera phone or camera is the main thing you use the most than that of any other thing then this phone should be in your priority at that budget. Overall its worth to go for this phone again its competitors are well pitched in the same budget. So close competition and anyone would choose Asus Zenfone Zoom because of its 128 GB internal option which other competitors lacks.One more point is Asus should give this phone as long term update support so as it deserves and mainly the cost. Long term in a sense for more than 3 years and stable updates are a must for a phone which is aimed at this price so they don’t need to handle it at support or service center for one or the other software issue.