Asus Zenfone Zoom Review: Worth for money?

Asus Zenfone has been a brand to reckon with value for money, feature rich, and technologically advanced PC peripherals, smartphones, laptops, and hybrid devices on the market which makes Android-powered mobile phones. Asus Zenfone Zoom is the latest brand and in the real sense the first “true zoom” phone. This brand has always offered “value for money” and superior technology, and the Zenfone Zoom lives up to that name and surprises on all counts.
Now the question that comes the mind is what is this “true-zoom” phrase. To better understand it the software/hardware design needs to be understood. The phone has been launched in the Indian market recently with an event in the city of Taj – Agra and priced @Rs. Rs.37,999/-.

Significant Aspects of Asus Zenfone Zoom

The significant aspect and plus point would be to term it as the company officials state it to be “a smartphone with a camera on it rather than a camera with a phone in it”. The price tag is a bit too high though the optical zoom feature is indeed unique. A price tag of less than 30,000 would have made this phone a big hit!

Design
Zenfone is a sleek in design and a perfect fit to use as a handy phone, unlike the other bulk phones. This feature makes the phone the slimmest smartphone in the market. The zoom lens has been fitted in a very innovative manner inside the phone at a 90-degree angle and efficiently moves sideways instead of moving outwards. The phone comes with a faux leather back panel, the volume and power buttons are on the side of the device.
Camera takes a good amount of area on the back panel and is situated slightly above than the middle of the phone. The device does feel a bit heavy but it won’t hurt your hands even though if you use the device for a long time. The faux leather, color tones and the metallic rim, all these things add up to give a really premium look to the device. Asus Zenfone Zoom even comes with a dedicated camera button along with a video recording button.

Camera
In most phones the images are just cropped and then the cropped image is blown up. The optical lenses required to zoom images are usually too big and bulky to use on mobile phones. The uniqueness of the Zenfone Zoom is the 3x optical lenses. The best feature of this phone is it’s 13 MP rear camera with 3x optical zoom and optical image stabilization. Optical zoom help you to take clearer and sharper photos of far away distance unlike digital zoom (which most camera phones offer).
The camera does a decent job. Even in optical zoom we were able to get some good shots, thanks to the OIS as it allows the phone to take proper images even if the hand is shaking. Another great feature of the camera is the laser auto-focus, it is able to focus at an amazing speed. When the auto-focus is used in a landscape, the device goes back to traditional contrast based focus. Overall it is a pretty good camera and is worth checking out.

Performance
This phone is powered by 2.5 GHz quad-core Intel Atom processor. The RAM of 4GB along with 128GB internal storage makes it a powerful performer for various tasks. It can be even expanded up to 128 GB. Asus Zenfone Zoom runs on the Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system. The device has a surprisingly amazing performance, even though on a quad core processor, it manages to go through multi-tasking really easily. Heavy games such as GTA San Andreas, Modern Combat 5, NFS Most Wanted etc. are able to run without any lag.

Display
The device comes with an HD 5.5 inch display. Again the colors look a bit on the warmer side to me but you can easily manage that with an in-built application. Viewing angles of the device are not really that great, the colors tend to fade a bit while watching it from a tilted angle. Display’s performance in bright sunlight is pretty good though.

Battery
The phone comes with a 3000mAh battery which is supposed to give a good battery life. Sadly it fails to do so. The device barely lasts for a whole day on a single charge and if you are a heavy user or a heavy gamer then you may probably need a second charge by the end of the afternoon. If you can play with the different battery modes then you may be able to run the device for whole day on a single charge.
Conclusion
Zenfone Zoom is a really good device when it comes to the camera but if you look at other aspects and then look at the price tag then it will surely look over priced. The phone does give some good and high-end performance but when it comes to battery, Zoom fails to impress. If you are someone who is an average user and wants to have a camera-oriented phone then you can check some other options as Rs. 38,000 is just too high for this device.
You can consider this device if you are someone who really wants an optical zoom on their smartphone.