Asus has today announced its latest Zenfone 4 series with the launch of Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro and Zenfone 4 Selfie in India. The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro is priced at Rs 23,999, the Zenfone 4 Selfie (dual front cameras) for Rs 14,999 and Zenfone 4 Selfie with single front camera setup comes with a price tag of Rs 9,999. The brand is banking high on the selfie-obsessed crowd and to make it even more interesting deal, the company has two front cameras.
Both the devices come loaded with some interesting specs, but it is Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro, which offers better selfie camera. The smartphone features a pretty sleek profile and comes loaded with specifications which are now becoming a standard, especially, at this price range. So, does dual selfie cameras will make it be the ‘wannabe’ phone? We used the device for a brief time and here are our first impressions.
Design and Display
Asus has been known for making some good looking devices in the past and this one is no different. The First thing you will notice about the device is the sleek design coupled with a metallic unibody, which makes it beautiful. The phone is just 6.85mm thick and weighs 147 grams, which makes it one of the slimmest and lightest smartphones available in the market right now. The smartphone has a gentle curve around the corners, which gives a pretty good look and the shiny dual chamfered edges make it look even more appealing.
The front sports a 5.5-inch display with minimal side bezels and the at the top houses front flash, earpiece and dual selfie cameras aligned in a symmetry, while at the base, you will find a home button, which also houses fingerprint sensor flanked between the back and recent menu button. On the right, there is volume controls and power on/off button, while the left houses hybrid Dual-SIM slot. The back is flat and you will find primary camera situated at the top-center position, which is accompanied by a LED flash. The top of the device is bare, while at the base, you will see a Headphone jack, Micro USB port, and a speaker grille. Overall, the smartphone does give distinct looks and it surely is lightweight when you hold it.
On the display front, the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro sports a 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED Display with a screen Resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels along. The display is protected with 2.5D curved glass and features a 500nits brightness. During our initial testing, we found out the display offers vivid colours output and text looks sharp enough. The phone offers some good viewing angles, though we found out that the display tint is on the warmer side. However, one can set a cooler tone from the display setting. interestingly, it comes with an Always-On display as well, which is a pretty neat addition.
Hardware and Software
On the hardware front, the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Processor along with Adreno 506 GPU. The phone is backed by a 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 2TB via microSD card slot. That said, the device offers pretty much standard specs as we have seen in other devices. The advantage of using the Snapdragon 625 processor is that it maintains a balance between power and battery efficiency. It would be interesting to see how well does it performs during our testing period.
On the software front, the device runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat with company’s custom ZenUI running on top of it. Frankly speaking, the ZenUI is not one of our favourite user interfaces. This is primarily because the company adds way too many bloatware in the phone, which at the end of the day, hinders the overall performance of the device. However, this time the company has cut down on bloatware, which is a welcome move. We will talk about it in our review. So, stay tuned with us.
Camera
Let’s now talk about its main highlight – the dual selfie cameras. The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro can take 24-megapixel selfies by using a 12-megapixel Sony IMX362 sensor. There is a 5-megapixel secondary camera for Wide-Angle selfies, which the company calls “welfies”. On the rear panel, there is a 16-megapixel rear camera with dual-tone LED flash and PDAF. During our testing period, we found out the selfie taken from the front cameras came out to be decent and one can also take wide angle shots or group selfies by turning on the secondary camera.
However, while using the wide angle lens, we found out that image quality goes low. The rear camera also did a decent job in our initial testing. We will talk at length about the selfie cameras during in our review.
Battery and connectivity
The Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro packs 3000mAh battery and carries a fingerprint sensor on the front. On the connectivity front, both the devices support 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and dual-SIM slot. The 3000mAh battery could be a concern for some here, at least on papers.