The CES 2017 witnessed the launch of quite a number of amazing handsets, one of them being the ASUS ZenFone 3 Zoom. In fact, it seemed that for one to be noticed, their phone had to come with a dual-lens camera on the back.
It happened with the ZTE Blade V8 Pro and so did the Huawei Honor 6X. When ASUS stepped on the podium, the story was the same as the ZenFone 3 Zoom got things going with two 12MP lenses on the main camera, with one of them working like the iPhone 7 Plus optical zoom lens.
The similarities with the Apple iPhone 7 Plus don’t end there. In fact, a look at the ASUS ZenFone 3 Zoom will bring images of the former into your mind. What ASUS has basically done is to take the iPhone 7 Plus design and give it new specs and features based on Android OS.
The main selling points of the ZenFone 3 Zoom are its camera and battery capacity or life for that matter, however, the phone is no flagship killer like many would have expected it to be. There are two Sony sensors mounted horizontally like with the iPhone 7 Plus. As noted earlier, both sensors have 12MP, but one has an aperture of f/1.7, same as the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge whereas the other comes in with up to 2.3x optical zoom. When you throw in a digital zoom, you end up with a whopping 12x zoom.
In case you didn’t know, the optical zoom on the iPhone 7 Plus is just 2x, meaning you get an extra 0.3x on the ZenFone 3 Zoom. While this might look insignificant on paper, it is not when it comes to the real world. To make the photos much better even when in poor lighting conditions, ASUS uses a technology known as SuperPixel. Other camera features include support for RAW files, double PDAF, 4K video recording, 4-8 axis OIS, 3-6 axis EIS, laser autofocus, as well manual mode. The selfie camera has an even better 13MP snapper that promises the best photo experiences ever.
As noted earlier, the ASUS ZenFone 3 Zoom has a design that resembles the iPhone 7 Plus. It is still very thin at 8mm, but imagining that this phone could carry a very huge 5000mAh battery unit in such a small package is just out of this world – but ASUS did it. According to the company, this battery will give the phone a life of up to 42 days when in standby mode.
Getting deeper into the phone will reveal not-so-mindboggling hardware specs. There is a Snapdragon 625 processor that is paired with a decent RAM of 4GB and 128GB of onboard storage. On the front face of the phone is a 5.5-inch AMOLED display screen that is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5 and has a 1080p resolution, but you get Android Marshmallow out of the box, which could be another low for the phone at a time when Android Nougat is the real deal.
As far as pricing and release is concerned, the ASUS ZenFone 3 Zoom is expected to be here during this Q1 2017 and it will be priced at CNY 3699, which is about $533.