Asus Zenfone 3 Review – Sleek middle class full of smooth software
The Asus Zenfone 3 is a luxurious looking smartphone with glass back and metal frame. It is a bit slippery and prone to finger smearing, but that is the consequence of the material used. The soc is a nice creature, because the performance is quite reasonable for a mid-range chip. He is also frugal; partly because of this, the battery lasts a long time and that is nice for everyone. Not everyone likes that the software is crammed with so much functionality that you can no longer see the wood for the trees, although there are useful functions. The amount of bloatware is not fun for anyone, and the shutter lag of the camera in less good lighting conditions and the somewhat inconsistent results are not pleasant either. Still, there are no serious drawbacks that plague the Zenfone 3 and the device has a nice screen,
Pros
- Sleek design
- Good battery life
- Good camera specs and photos in good light
- Fine lcd
- Lots of working and storage memory
- Smooth operation
Cons
- Full software with lots of bloatware
- Shutter lag and erratic camera
After much insistence from the Asus department at the head office in Taiwan, smartphones of the brand. The Zenfone 3 reviewed here is one of the devices that were shown at the Zenvolution event in early June 2016, just before the Computex trade show, and we wrote a preview about it back then. The device is therefore not brand new. The versions that are released here are the budget devices Zenfone 3 Go and Zenfone 3 Max, and the mid-range Zenfone 3. We discuss the latter here.
The Zenfone 3 compares best in terms of specs and price to the modular Moto Z Play, which we reviewed a few months ago . There are two versions of the Zenfone 3. The cheaper version has a 5.2 “screen, 32GB storage, 3GB RAM and a battery capacity of 2,650mAh. We have tested the more expensive version, with a 5.5” screen, 64GB storage, 4GB RAM and a battery capacity of 3,000mAh. The two versions are available in white and blue and both have dual SIM functionality.
Casing
The fairly thin device looks neat with its glossy, glass back, metal frame and chamfered edges. The solid-feeling buttons are made of metal and if you shine light on the back of the device at a certain angle, you can see the concentric circle pattern, which Asus often uses, with the fingerprint scanner as the center: a nice effect. However, the smooth back is quite contagious, because you can easily see finger smudges on glass. An advantage of the glass is that the back does not have to be interrupted with antenna stripes and that looks sleek.
A bit of a shame is the excellent camera, although that does not detract much from the design. It has sapphire glass, according to Asus, and during our testing period the glass didn’t scratch, even though we placed it on every table with the camera bump at the bottom. Next to the camera are the laser autofocus and the dual LED flash. Below it you will find the signature, elongated fingerprint scanner. In practice, this works quickly and accurately. The mono speaker is located at the bottom of the device and sounds reasonable for this class. Below the screen you will also find the hardware Android navigation buttons. These are not illuminated, which is a bit of a shame. In practice, though, we had no trouble finding the buttons in the dark.
The sturdiness of the device is sufficient, although it bends more easily than many devices that are made entirely of metal. It feels quite light for a device with a 5.5″ screen, but fortunately not so light that it feels like a toy. The edge between the screen and the frame is, just like we saw with the P8 Lite 2017 , quite soft and unfortunately it can even be damaged with a nail All in all, Asus has clearly done its best to create a mid-range device with a premium look and it comes pretty close to that.
Screen
The Zenfone 3’s 5.5-inch display has a 1080p resolution, bringing the pixel density to a common 401 pixels per inch. You could see it as a disadvantage against competitors like the Moto Z Play and the One Plus 3T. see that it is an LCD and not an OLED screen Fortunately, we see in the results below and also in practice that it is a fairly high-contrast LCD, so we only slightly missed the enormously high contrast of an OLED screen.
The maximum brightness that can be set is also high enough. In practice, we could read our screen on a sunny day without any problem. However, there was occasionally something strange going on when setting the brightness. The setting was successful, but as soon as we left the screen where the brightness can be set, the device switched to a different brightness. After a reboot, everything worked properly again and it didn’t happen often, but it’s one of the software problems we ran into.
To return to the screen: the colors do not deviate too much from the ideal. In addition, the Splendid app allows you to adjust the color temperature and saturation to your liking. You can also apply a blue light filter in the app, so that you can simply sleep after cleaning the Zenfone 3. Unfortunately, you can’t schedule the filter to come on as soon as it gets dark or at a specific time.
Battery life
With 3,000mAh, the Zenfone 3 does not have an excessive battery capacity. Nevertheless, we have already seen that the Snapdragon 625 is a pretty economical soc and that is also apparent when we look at the results of the battery test.
Although there are a few battery life bangers in this list that beat the Zenfone 3, the battery life of this smartphone is more than fine. In the browsing test, we let devices browse local web pages at a constant brightness. In this test, the soc is more heavily loaded than when watching video and the Zenfone only fails after about nine hours. In the video test, the Zenfone 3 lasts a little less than other devices, because it benefits less from its economical soc and because devices with an OLED screen have a significant advantage in this test.
Charging the Asus Zenfone 3 completely is not overly fast with the supplied charger, but you can still charge it to 33 percent in half an hour. So you can at least continue for a while if you plug the Zenfone 3 into the socket just before you leave. The supplied charger is not a Quick Charge 3.0 charger, but the Snapdragon 625 does support that charging technology.
Software
Here’s where it gets interesting. We’ve reviewed some Asus tablets, of course, but it’s been a long time since we reviewed an Asus phone . The software is something where manufacturers can still differentiate themselves quite a bit and Asus’ idea about this is clear when you look at the ZenUI 3.0 Android skin. It is mainly about many setting options and a lot of functionality. We tend to say: too much, but that is of course personal.
Especially if you have just set up the phone, tutorials are jumping everywhere, explaining so much that it is difficult to remember it all right away. If you are used to your own apps and Android settings, you will certainly spend some time configuring everything to your liking. The settings screen has many different parts and the rest of the interface is also cluttered. It would be nicer if, like with Cyanogen OS, a lot could be set without losing the overview.
Unfortunately, that crammed nature also applies to bloatware. There are a lot of apps on the Zenfone 3 that should be useful and apps that Asus gets paid for when it includes them on the devices. Many of those apps cannot be uninstalled. You can disable some so that you no longer see them in your app drawer, but unfortunately they still take up space on your device. The operating system with all the supplied items takes up a total of about 8.5 GB.
A notable iOS-like feature is that you can swipe down from anywhere on the home screen to see frequently used apps and contacts, or search for an app or search engine. The menu appears a bit faltering, but it can be quite useful. Also useful is that you get 100GB of Google Drive storage for free with the Zenfone 3 for two years.
Although we encountered a few bugs, as we wrote above about the automatic screen brightness, ZenUI 3.0 is quite stable and also smooth. Although it is packed with functionality and a wealth of information, the software feels nice and smooth. A temporary drawback of the Zenfone 3’s software is that the device still runs on Android 6. Asus is not known for the smoothest update policy, but according to the company, the Android 7 update will be rolled out for the Zenfone 3 from March 1.
Hardware and performance
We already saw that the Snapdragon 625 -soc, roasted at 14nm, with its double set of four A53 cores running at a maximum of 2.0GHz, is relatively energy-efficient. In previous reviews we also saw that it is a pretty fast soc. What does this mean for the Zenfone 3’s place in the field in terms of raw processing power?
The speed of a single core is nothing special when you compare it with the speed of last year’s high-end smartphones, such as the LG G5 and the Huawei P9. In processes that put more cores to work, the Zenfone 3 can compete with those devices.
PCMark 2.0 is more hands-on and lets smartphones perform day-to-day operations such as image, video and photo editing. In this list with almost only high-end devices from last year, the Zenfone 3 comes along nicely and that is in line with the experience we have with the device in practice. It’s nice and smooth.
We also take a look at the performance of the nand memory, because how fast a device can write and read data is important for the practical experience. Thus, it is a factor in launching apps. The Zenfone 3 has emmc memory and not the faster ufs storage.
It is striking that the speed of writing data randomly leaves something to be desired, while it is the fastest of the set of data to be written sequentially. It is certainly not a uniform picture that this test brings forward, but in practice we have not yet observed any strange delays in our test period with the device.
The graphic performance of a midrange SoC like the Snapdragon 625 with its Adreno 506 GPU shows a slightly larger performance difference compared to the high-end devices. Manufacturers therefore often save more on the GPU than on the CPU in this segment. It’s certainly not that you can’t play relatively graphically heavy games on the Asus Zenfone 3, but you’ll notice that the resolution or the number of frames per second scales back on some games.
Camera
According to Asus, the camera is an important USP of the Zenfone 3 and the subtitle is even ‘built for photography’. The camera on the back has a sixteen-megapixel Sony IMX298 sensor, an aperture of f/2.0 and both optical and electronic image stabilization. The pixels on the sensor are 1.12 microns in size and the sensor has a total size of 1/2.8″. We previously saw it in the Oneplus 3 and 3T, the Xiaomi Mi5 and the Huawei Mate 8. The photos of those devices were very nice in practice, but it is of course largely about what the software does with the sensor data.
Practice shows that the camera focuses very quickly with its laser autofocus for objects close by and phase detection for objects that are further away. Printing is also very fast in good lighting conditions, but unfortunately the camera has a huge shutter lag when less light is available. This is by far the biggest irritation with this camera, because when the shutter sound sounds, you often have to hold the camera still for a while. If you don’t, chances are you’ve taken a failed, shaky photo.
With the photos above, we’ve put the cameras of the OnePlus 3T and the Asus Zenfone 3, which have the same sensor, side by side. The OnePlus 3T shows a higher dynamic range in these photos. Although both photos were automatically taken in HDR mode, you can see that the Zenfone 3 estimates the situation less well. Mr. Diablo is a bit too dark against the light background to make out details. The OnePlus 3T chooses a faster shutter speed with a slightly higher ISO value. To the right of this, however, you see the same situation with the HDR Pro mode on the Zenfone 3 and it turns out that the camera can also shoot a great picture in these circumstances. If only he had done that automatically.
And you can also see in the photo with the Anne Frank street art that the Zenfone 3 has an overexposed sky in automatic HDR mode, while the dark parts are just a bit too dark. The wall appears darker than in the OnePlus 3T photo, while the sky is not overexposed. In any case, the OnePlus has a better standard HDR mode than the Zenfone 3. Nevertheless, the Zenfone 3 takes quite reasonable photos for its price range, as evidenced by the images below.
The camera performs best in fair to good lighting conditions. It then estimates the white balance correctly, focuses quickly and prints quickly. In dim daylight and in artificial light, the camera does less well. Sometimes he resorts to high iso values, resulting in a lot of noise, and sometimes the result is underexposed, such as with the photo of the food. In general, however, there is quite a lot of detail in the photos, provided you manage to keep the camera steady.
Just like in the rest of the software, the camera software also contains a lot of functions. In addition to the HDR Pro mode, there’s a Beautify mode, a low-exposure mode, one for shooting kids, a mode that automatically prints when you show a big smile, and a depth-of-field mode, which tries to create DSLR-like bokeh effects and often fails. However, good camera software recognizes the situation itself and of course certain modes are useful to have, but just give us a decent manual mode.
Fortunately, it is also on it, although it does not have raw mode. All in all, the Zenfone 3 camera has the potential to take great photos, but we are left with mixed feelings. It is a great camera with ditto specs and it can also record 4k video, for example, which is nice for a mid-range device, but especially the shutter delay and here and there less good results in automatic mode give a mediocre camera experience.
Conclusion
In our opinion, the consideration that you should first make in the case of the Asus Zenfone 3 is whether you find the software an insurmountable problem. It is bursting with bloatware and is overflowing with functionality, which in our opinion is at the expense of the overview. The software does work smoothly and you can disable part of the bloatware.
The camera is also something to think about. It has great features, such as the ability to record 4k video, optical image stabilization and an excellent sensor, which you usually use to shoot beautiful pictures. Still, the results are somewhat inconsistent in poor lighting conditions and there is an annoying shutter lag.
The rest of the device is fine, because the LCD is beautiful, it has a reasonable amount of memory compared to price peers and the performance in other areas is excellent. If you’re zen with the aforementioned drawbacks, this mid-range model from Asus is a very good smartphone.