Asus has come a long way since it launched its first ZenFone smartphone almost two years ago. ZenFone smartphones are known for its powerful features and good camera quality, which is one of the most sought after features required by the consumers nowadays thanks to explosion in social networking space. Asus has taken a steep step further by introducing ZenFone Zoom smartphone which is ideally suitable for mobile photographers and its DSLR like features will compell the users to use it for professional photography.
We have the opportunity to spend considerable time with Asus ZenFone Zoom during the launch event and give below our first impressions. We have already started testing the phone and shall come out shortly with our detailed review.
Design
As its name suggests, Asus ZenFone Zoom is photographic centric phone and from the back this gives the look of a point and shoot camera with leather texture on the plastic of the back panel. The rear camea has a circular bump which shows that you are not holding an ordinary camera phone. From the back, you can’t make out much that it is a phone also and when you turn it to front, this phone gives the appearance of a phone.
This phone is made of metal and plastic and metal gives it elegant look as well as provide solidity to this device. As mentioned earlier, the back panel is made of plastic with overlapping of leather texture on it which gives it extremely refined look. The back design of the phone provides good grip and it is easily managable with single hand. The back cover is removable for accessing SIM card slot and microSD card slot.
On the front, this phone has on-screen buttons and the Asus Hallmark Centric design on the black colored device can be found but not on the white colored device. The headphone jack has been given on the top and microUSB port is given at the bootom. The story this time is different on the right side of the phone. This phone has Volume rocker and power button on the right side plus dedicated camera shutter button and also a video recording button at the lower end of the right side.
Outstanding Camera
The outstanding feature of Asus ZenFone Zoom is its circular 13 MP rear camera with f/2.7 to f/4.8-aperture, 10-element lenses with 3X optical zoom, OIS (optical image stabilisation), laser auto-focus and dual-color Real Tone flash. The 10-element lens of Hoyo, Japan, also allows for 12x digital zoom. The ZenFone Zoom is capable of creating shots of up to 52MP with the help of super resolution mode and manual mode with professional level grade settings, instant adjustment of the shutter speed, exposure, white balance, ISO etc. With this camera, you can click close-ups as near as 5cm (2in) for shooting more detailed images. The major hightlight of this camera is that all the zooming is done internally and there is no physical movements on the outside.
This phone is claimed to work like DSLR cameras and going by its features, we are quite confident that this device will certainly will stand the claim of the company and we shall be able to comment further on this aspect in our detailed review.
It also houses a 5 MP front-facing camera with laser auto-focus to point and shoot with total clarity in just 0.03 seconds. In this smartphone also, Asus has incorporated PixelMaster cameras that capture every shot with stunning clarity, laser auto-focus that enhances image stabilization, or the industry-leading Low Light mode that increases light sensitivity by up to 400% for no-flash low-light shots.
Hardware Features :
Besides its camera prowess, ZenFone Zoom is packed with other powerful hardware features. The ZenFone Zoom has the same hardware features which were provided on high-end ZenFone 2 in the month of August last year. The ZenFone Zoom boasts of a 5.5 inch full-HD (1080×1920 pixels resolution and 403ppi pixel ) display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. Under the hood is 2.3GHz, 64-Bit Intel Atom Z3580 Quad Core Processor with PowerVR G6430 GPU. It has huge 4GB LPDDR3 RAM and massive 128GB of internal storage. The other plus point is that internal storage can be further extended by 128GB via microSD card.
With the few minutes of time spent on this phone, we found the display is quite sharp and switching between the apps is very smooth. As we have observed in earlier ZenFone 2 smartpones which performs very well, this phone will also give you trouble free performance for years to come. We can say with confidence becuse we have used different variants of ZenFone 2 phones and this phone being equipped with solid hardware, you need not worry about its performance.
On the back-up front, this phone is fuelled by a 3000mAh battery with Asus BoostMaster technology for turbo-speed charging that takes the battery from zero to 60% in just 39 minutes to solve the problem of frequent charging.
The Zenfone Zoom runs on Android 5.0.2 Lollipop OS with ASUS Zen UI on top of it. This phone comes with lot of new Zen UI features and pre-installed applications which can be drain on the battery and some users may not like this. But we shall discuss more about this in our detailed review.
To sum up, Asus ZenFone Zoom is a true photographic centric smartphone in a true sense of the word. This phone is priced Rs. 37,999 in India and will certainly give you best possible performance of a DLSR camera and a high-quality smartphone experience. You can explore your phogotraphic talent on this phone with its camera which has multitudes of features. It is certainly the world’s thinnest smartphone with 3x optical zoom as claimed by the company.
