Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe is the first announced smartphone with Snapdragon 821

Asus has presented the first smartphone with Qualcomm Snapdragon 821-soc. It concerns the Zenfone 3 Deluxe, which the manufacturer announced last month at the Computex hardware fair. Then Asus said it had a Snapdragon 820 in it.

Although the specifications still mention the Snapdragon 820, Asus has changed the product page and it now shows that the Zenfone 3 Deluxe has a Snapdragon 821. Due to the minor differences between the two socs, it is obvious that manufacturers can equip a phone with Snapdragon 820 with an 821 without making further adjustments.

Compared to the 820, the Snapdragon 821 has two higher clocked Kryo processor cores and a higher clocked GPU. The two fastest cores run at 2.4 instead of 2.15 GHz and the Adreno 530 GPU does its job at 650 instead of 624 MHz. As far as is known, the socs are similar in all other respects.

Asus presented the Zenfone 3 Deluxe along with the Zenfone 3 and 3 Ultra at Computex last month. The device has a 5.7″ OLED screen with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. The camera on the back of the Deluxe version is an IMX318 from Sony. That is a 1/2.6″ large sensor of 22.5 megapixels, with pixels of 1 µm. It is a new sensor that can hardly be found in other smartphones yet. The camera has optical image stabilization over four axes. The camera can have both phase detection autofocus and laser autofocus. The device has a metal unibody design with invisible antenna lines according to Asus. That became apparent earlier when Asus showed pictures and details of its new smartphones.