ASUS Zenfone 5 (ZE620KL) Review
- erictung1999
- Dec 29, 2018
- 4 min read
If the ASUS ZenFone 5 sounds familiar, it probably should - ASUS released a phone called the ZenFone 5 way back in 2014. Unsurprisingly, this latest version has had a few upgrades - not least a very familiar notch.
ASUS first announced the phone at Mobile World Congress 2018, but has unusually decided to wait until July to actually release the phone. We've spent some time putting the phone through its paces, and here's what we think of ASUS's latest attempt to crack the smartphone market.
Specs:
Dimensions: 153 x 75.7 x 7.7 mm (6.02 x 2.98 x 0.30 in)
Weight: 165 g
Build: Front glass, aluminum body
Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 (14nm architecture)
CPU: Octa-core Kryo 260
GPU: Adreno 509
Operating System: ASUS ZenUI 5, Based on Android 8
Memory: 4/6GB RAM
Storage: 64GB ROM
Expandable storage: microSD, up to 512 GB (uses SIM 2 slot)
Display type: IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Display size: 6.2 inches, 96.9 cm2 (~83.6% screen-to-body ratio)
Screen resolution: 1080 x 2246 pixels, 18.7:9 ratio (~402 ppi density)
Mobile network support: GSM / HSPA / LTE
Wi-Fi support: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, WiFi Direct, hotspot
Bluetooth support: v5.0, A2DP, LE
GPS support: Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO
USB: 2.0, Type-C 1.0 reversible connector
Rear camera:
a. 12 MP, f/1.8, 24mm (wide), 1/2.55", 1.4µm, PDAF, 4-axis OIS
b. 8 MP, f/2.0, 12mm, 1/4", 1.12µm, no AF
Front camera : 8 MP, f/2.0, 24mm (wide), 1/4", 1.12µm
Battery : Non-removable Li-Ion 3300 mAh battery
Color : Midnight Blue, Meteor Silver
The design of this phone is quite premium, it is a really nice phone in hand, it feels good, it looks good, it has the glass on the back. Of course, the downside of this phone is it's gonna to be very slippery, and if you accidentally drop it, it would be more easier to break the back glass.
So this phone has two cameras on the back, one is wide angle sensor, and another one is a 12 MP sensor with optical image stabilization. The picture quality produced by the wide angle sensor is very muddy, not really good, but at least the picture taken by the 12 MP sensor is decent, it's not bad at all and considering this apparently has quite a high DXO rating (or the same rating as the Google Pixel), so i expect a lot from this smartphone.
Around the outside we have some antenna lines, we have a microphone at the top for noise cancellation and voice calls. We have an earpiece at the top, which also acts as the secondary loudspeaker. It also has an LED indicator, ambient sensor, proximity sensor and a front facing 8 MP camera at the top there. Now you know why the notch is so wide, because they've included so many sensors at the top. Of course not everyone likes the notch, so they have an option to hide the notch, which is good.
The display panel they use, is an IPS panel, 6.2 inches, 18:9 aspect ratio and has a resolution of 1080p. It can produce up to 630 lux of brightness, which is really good and you can see what's in the screen even at outdoors. The color reproduction is also good, and you can also tweak the color setting using the Splendid application built in.
The 3.5mm headphone jack outputs really good audio quality. It's clean, clear and the loudness is acceptable but not the loudest I've heard. But I have an issue with the call quality on this unit: I couldn't hear the other end a couple of times, and i thought there's an issue with the operator but turns out it is not. Luckily they released an update/patch which fixed the issue.
For the front facing camera performance, it's a 8 MP sensor, it can only shoot up to 1080p of video, but it does have good EIS. For the rear camera, it does support up to 4k 30fps of video recording, and I noticed that the focus is stable, no focus hunting issue like some of the other phones did. The recorded audio quality is also good as well. It does support Optical image stabilization but they've disabled EIS on rear camera.
This phone comes with Android 8.0 Oreo, not quite the latest version but it does have the recent Android security patch level. What's special is that their ZenUI has their own custom skin, so the icons displayed in the launcher is quite different, but it does look quite Samsung style. The speed and responsiveness of the UI is quite fast, really smooth, no complaints with the multitasking performance. The Antutu score is very high with this particular chipset, which a score of almost 140000 with AI booster mode enabled. This means with the AI booster mode on, you can play games with improved performance but it can also reduce your battery life a little bit.
Take a look at the internal storage, it's using eMMC type of storage. Of course the speed won't be as fast as the UFS 2.1 storage, but it is still quite decent. We can get around 290 MB/s of sequential read and 210 MB/s of sequential write. For the 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS, all working perfectly fine, no issues here. For the battery life, we managed to squeeze out 7 hours of battery life from the 3300mAh battery, with heavy usage like few hours of gaming, browsing using Chrome and watch YouTube videos. Should be able to use it as a 2-day phone. But for the charging part, I did run into some problems with my unit, because it won't charge up to 100% but stuck at 84% or somewhere else, and I hope ASUS can address this problem via software update.
Gaming wise, ya the performance is really smooth, it's playable, but don't expect the performance of a SD 845 on this phone since it only uses SD 636. For the face unlocking and fingerprint unlocking, it is really fast. It can unlock your phone with face under seconds, and it straights unlock your phone when your finger touches the fingerprint reader.
Pros:
a. Great build quality and fast OTA updates
b. Bright screen with great colours
c. Very quick UI performance and gaming
d. OIS on the rear camera and EIS on the front
e. Good loudspeakers and 3.5mm output
Cons:
a. Somewhat overpriced for the spec
b. Very poor 8MP wide-angle lens and sensor
c. Cameras not as good as the DXOMark rating would imply
d. My unit often stops charging and is slower than expected
e. AI camera scene detection can't be turned off
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