[Smartphones] | An Android phone with a Notch? | Asus Zenfone 5

Asus is literally stepping it up a "notch"

If you have been around the mobile market for long enough, you will know all about it it isn't that Apple faced for the notch on its iPhone X. In my fair opinion, Apple deserves all that criticism.

Being such a huge company, they should have found a better way to include the true depth array sensor without that hideous notch up top. But no matter how hideous Apple's designs turn out to be, leave it to the China phones to make it and make it popular in Asia.

Boo to the notch, Yay for the jack!

Asus, who manufacture decent smartphones, decided to take a piece of the Apple pie by making an iPhone X look alike. I am of course talking about the Zenfone 5 family. That's right, there are more than one devices with that hideous notch. Asus will tell you that it's about 20% smaller than Apple's, but that doesn't make it any less ugly.

To be honest the smartphones are pretty good in terms of features and functionality. It's just that the looks are that of a cheap iPhone clone. Chinese companies have always said that they follow their own ideas and not just copy Apple, but it's hard to believe it when they pull up tricks like this one.

But after hours of ranting, if you somehow decide to overlook the obvious design inspirations, you will see just how good is Zenfone 5 actually is.

Three new handsets

There are 3 phones in this notch family. The Zenfone 5, Zenfone 5 Lite, and the Zenfone 5Z. The 5Z is the flagship among the three, packing the Snapdragon 845. The five has the newer Snapdragon 636 CPU, also found on the Redmi Note 5 Pro. The Zenfone 5 Lite runs on the Snapdragon 430 CPU. Asus plans to compete in the OnePlus 5T territory by setting the price tag of the 5Z as 499 USD. The prices of the remaining two have not been unveiled as of press time.

Dazzling looks

The Zenfone 5 family has a few things going for them though, like the new Android Oreo 8.0 update and that striking finish on the back panel. It is somewhat similar to what we saw on the Honor 8 and Honor 9 Lite smartphones. The light reflection spirals along the fingerprint sensor located at the back. That fingerprint is moderately fast, but definitely not fastest we have ever experienced.

The pointless notch [Credit: The Verge]

The notch does not have any dedicated gestures on either of its sides like the iPhone X does. Swipe down from the left to get the regular notifications and swipe down from the right to get the expanded menu. It saves you a two finger swipe down gesture, which wasn't a pain to get around in the first place.

This imposter notch does not have any additional hardware either. It just houses a front camera and a couple of common sensors. That said, the Zenfone 5 does support support Face Unlock. But it is nowhere near as secure and sophisticated as Apple's face ID.

Great camera setup: Standard + Wide angle

The rear camera is where I am most interested in about this phone. Not only is it in a slightly different layout than the original iPhone X which it is trying to copy, but the secondary camera gives you a wide angle lens instead of the standard telephoto zoom lens.

This is something that I've always praised about LG smartphones, because in my opinion, a wide angle lense is the most practical solution if you are considering a dual camera setup at all. Also, the camera app looks slightly different than iOS for a change. That's refreshing!

A physical overview

Interesting how the Zenfone 5 is thinner than the iPhone X, but still has room for a headphone jack in it. Anyway, let's not try to derive common sense out of half-eaten fruit, and move on.

Display on the string is an LCD panel, but manages to be very bright. This weird 2246x1080 resolution along with that 90% screen to body ratio will not disappoint you. Zenfone 5 Lite uses a slightly more traditional 1080x2160 display resolution.

The battery on board is a 3300 mAh unit across all the three devices. The RAM starts from 4GB on the Zenfone 5 Lite, goes up to 6 on the Zenfone 5, and is 8 gigs on the Zenfone 5Z.

"AI Boost"

Also, the Zenfone 5 features and an AI functionality and it calls it as AI boost. Enabling it will apparently improve the devices performance using artificial intelligence based optimization algorithms. We'll just have to wait and see how effective it actually is.

And I am not even gonna bother specifying anything about this ZeniMoji thing. I've ha it with these emoji machines of 2018.

No more... please!

So what do you think about the Asus Zenfone (notch) 5? Let me know what you think in the comments down below. You can also hit me up on Twitter and Facebook, and make sure you are around when I reach 10k followers on my Instagram page, which is going to happen very soon.

Make sure you share this post with someone would love to own a sub $500 iPhone X from China.

Cheers!