Last month when Asus unveiled its bunch of Zenfone 3 series of smartphones, a lot of eyebrows were raised regarding the pricing of these phones specially the Deluxe and Ultra variants.
Nonetheless, the Zenfone 3 Deluxe Snapdragon 821 variant is finally available for sale in Taiwan at TWD 24,990 which converts to roughly Rs 52,000. Also, the new Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe becomes the first smartphone to enter the market with Snapdragon 821 chipset.
Other detailed specifications are same as normal Snapdragon 820 variant and include, a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED full HD touchscreen, 3000 mAh battery with Quick Charge technology and dual hybrid SIM slot. Running on Android Marshmallow operating system, the smartphone also offers connectivity options such as MiMO WiFi, GPS (with AGPS, GLONASS and Beidou). In the camera department the ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe sports an 8 megapixel front camera and a 23 megapixel rear camera that has 6 element lens, f2.0 aperture, dual tone LED flash light and Sony sensor.
While the Glacier Silver variant will start selling from September 12, the Shimmer Gold variant will start shipping starting September 23.
The Snapdragon 821 chip is a slight improvement over the Snapdragon 820. It has a higher clock-speed for the CPU and GPU. Qualcomm puts the improvement in performance over the SD 820 at 10%.
Back in May when ASUS announced the Zenfone 3 series in the US, the company priced the Asus ZenFone 3 at $249, Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe at $499 and the Asus ZenFone 3 Ultra at $479.
Last month the company even released the Indian pricing of these smartphones. The ZenFone 3 (5.2 inch) was revealed at a price of Rs. 21,999, the ZenFone 3 (5.5 inch) at Rs. 27,999, the ZenFone 3 Ultra (6.8 inch) at Rs. 49,999, and ZenFone 3 Laser (5.5 inch variant) at 18,999. Interestingly, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe (5.7 inch) starts at Rs. 49,999 in India and the Snapdragon 821 model was unveiled at a price of Rs. 62,999 which is much higher than the price in Taiwan.