Asus, the brand who had released a phone for the price as high as 63,000 INR (Zenfone 3 Deluxe) has launched the Zenfone 5Z at less than half the price. Has Asus gained maturity and started taking the premium segment of the Indian market seriously by being aggressive? That’s what we are going to answer now, this is our full review of the Asus Zenfone 5Z.
The Zenfone 5Z has a 6.2-inch display with a resolution of 2246 x 1080, along with a notched display and corning gorilla glass for protection. The design is not something new and we have seen this in the smartphone industry for a while now. the display is an IPS LCD panel but has really good colours and the sunlight visibility is also quite good. the phone has an aluminium build with the fingerprint scanner to the back, it also has face unlock on board to offer. Well the face unlock was not the fastest amongst the devices that we have tested till now but nevertheless, it works and is functional 90% of the time. the build and looks are really good for this device and you definitely feel premium when you hold it in hand.
Looks wouldn’t have mattered if this phone had a midrange chip and there’s where Asus has provided the top of the line Snapdragon 845 processor, the industry-leading CPU that cannot be held back by any heavy usage. Gaming, video rendering via Adobe Clip app, heavy multi-tasking and what not, the Zenfone 5Z stood strong and delivered the best out of the 845 on board. It did all this keeping the temperatures well below control and did not heat up much. To power this beast, the 5Z has a 3300mAh battery with an 18W fast charger bundled in the box. The Zenfone 5Z also has High-resolution earphones within the box itself. Overall it has been a really sweet package till now.
The optics of this device are an 8MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture that can shoot 1080p videos at 30fps and the rear camera is a dual camera setup. The primary rear camera is a 12MP f/1.8 lens that has 4-axis optical image stabilization (OIS) with PDAF for faster focusing. The secondary camera is an 8MP with f/2.0 lens and fixed focus. The rear camera can shoot 4K videos at 30 fps, 1080p videos are 30 and 60fps with EIS and slow-motion videos with 1080p at 120fps and 720p at 240fps. Here are some camera samples for reference.
Pictures shot in daylight are vibrant and true to colours, they also have a good dynamic range and HDR also helps to bring out highlights from the shadows. The camera has also has portrait mode to the front and rear with good edge detection. The low light performance was surprisingly good and the 4-axis OIS did seem to help a lot. The videos shot were also sharp, good dynamic range and EIS made sure for stable videos. Slomo works fine too.
The sound output from the speakers was great, it has stereo speakers, one at the bottom and the earpiece doubles as the second speaker. the sound output was really good and the headphone jack is present with a DTX headphone x support to make sure the output from the jack is nothing else but excellent.
Battery life of this device was exceptionally well, it lasted us 1.5 days on each of the days we spent with it and gave 6-7 hours of screen on time. The software department of the device is handled by ZenUI 5.0 build on top of Android Oreo with Android P update expected pretty soon. The phone comes in at 6GB RAM+64 storage, 6+128 and 8+256GB storage variants available in two, Midnight blue and Meteor Silver colours. the pricing starts from INR 29,999 for the base variant and Asus has kept the price very aggressive this time around. The Zenfone 5Z for the price is a great device but faces competition from the Oneplus 6 which seems to be the market leader as of now and also, the recently launched Poco F1 which is priced 9,000 INR less than the 5Z. In our verdict, we say that the Zenfone 5Z is a great device with great build, solid performance and good optics at the price of 30,000 INR, and if you are interested in our comparisons with the OnePlus 6 and Poco F1, you can see them here. Adios.
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