Asus Zenfone 3 Zoom!

The power of Zen?!

Asus is on a roll at CES, this year! Other than the awesome Zenfone AR, they've released another phone. It's kind of a follow up to the original Zenfone zoom, which wasn't very good by the way. They've gotten rid of the bulky sensor and adopted a much more sexy design. Let's take a first look at the Zenfone 3 zoom.

Dual sensors

The phone employs the same camera tactic as Apple has done with the 7 plus. The Zenfone 3 zoom has two cameras at the back, one standard sensor and the other one is a 2.3x optically zoomed one.
Resolution wise, the rear camera boasts an impressive 23 mp at an awesome f/1.7 aperture, with the secondary telephoto sensor at 12 mp. The front camera is also a pretty large sensor, coming in at 13 mp.

A 7+ copy?

The camera software is somewhat similar to what we've already seen from the fruity company. There's a button labeled '2.3x' which is used to toggle between the two sensors within the camera app. There's also digital zoom into 12x supported. I did see quite a bit of choppyness with the camera interface. Zooming in and out wasn't as smooth as expected and shutter was often a bit laggy. Maybe it's because of the pre release software. We'll have to see how a retail unit performs, like down this year.

Other specs include:

• A questionable Snapdragon 625 octacore CPU clocked at 2 GHz 樂
• 4 GB of DDR4 RAM 
• Adreno 506 GPU
• 128 GB of expandable storage 
• A 5.5 inch 1080p AMOLED display
• A mammoth 5000 mAh power cell.

The CPU might have something to do with the occasional stutters in the UI. I don't know why Asus went with a midrange CPU for such an awesome device. Speaking of UI, the phone runs on Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, with ZenUI on top.  Again, I'm not a big fan of that UI, yet. But it isn't slow as something as Samsung's TouchWiz on a midrange device. 

Fantastic low light(probably)

The cameras on this thing are fantastic, as expected. I just wish the zoom would be a bit more fluid. Probably just a software update away from being fixed, since we've all seen how much software affects a camera's performance. Asus definitely has an awesome phone to offer here and I can't wait to look at a retail unit.

I'll be sure to post more of such dope CES goodies. So make sure you check back soon! Follow me on twitter of you want, @thehopelessgeek.

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