Asus Zenfone Selfie first impressions: Powerpacked smartphone that lacks camera goodness

Asus has added the camera-centric Zenfone Selfie smartphone to its portfolio of devices. The newbie in the Zenfone series is a mid-range device that, as its name suggests, has been targeted at the audience which is camera enthusiasts and love to click photos or selfies with smartphone. The phone brings dual 13-megapixel cameras, placed on front as well as rear, with additional software features for enhanced user experience.

The company launched the Asus Zenfone Selfie smartphone at its ongoing Zenfone Festival global event happening in Delhi, India. While the phone is mainly here to cater to selfie lovers, here we take a look at how good it works, when it comes to other specifications. Read on our first impressions:

PROS

• good processor
• smooth interface

CONS

• camera clicks noisy photos

Camera

Considering that cameras are the USP of this smartphone, we begin with the camera. The Asus Zenfone Selfie features dual 13-megapixel cameras, both of which have 5P Largan lens, Toshiba sensors, and dual-LED flash.

The camera on the rear panel boasts f2.0 aperture and laser autofocus, which essentially fastens the camera focus and worked fine for us. The front camera gets 88-degree wide-angle lens, f/2.2 aperture, and the PixelMaster imaging technology by Asus, and feature several modes to enhance the camera-experience.

In terms of performance, we found that the photos taken by cameras lacked sharpness to meet a 13-megapixel camera's capability. The photos were noisy, and the camera failed to reproduce colours well enough. Though, the rear camera worked still better than the front camera.

Overall, the cameras worked fine but we did not find it impressive enough, during our hands-on of the phone.

Design and display

The Asus Zenfone Selfie gets design cues from the Zenfone 2, and looks and feels the same - nice but bulky! It gets a similar plastic chassis, curved rear panel, and key placement including back-key set-up. So you get a power key on the top panel, and volume rocker on the back. The only noticeable differences in the design are the massive front-camera set up and the laser autofocus on the rear.

The back panel gets the camera with laser focus and dual-LED flash, metal volume keys, Asus and Zenfone branding, and a speaker grill. The back panel can be removed to expose the SIM sots, microSD card slot and removable 3000mAh battery.

On the front, you get a 13-megapixel camera placed between the dual LED flash and call-receiver speaker, followed by the screen, and three capacitive keys, which sadly are not back lit, just like the Zenfone 2.

As for display, it features a 5.5-inch Full HD display with 1080x1920 pixels resolution, and Gorilla Glass 4 on top. The display looks good and offers good viewing angles..

Processor and storage

Asus this time has ditched Intel chipset to go for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor with 64-bit architecture, clocking at 1.7GHz. The chipset is supported by 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 128GB on microSD card.

During the hands-on, the phone worked performed well and ran heavy games smoothly. We will give more details in the review of the Zenfone Selfie phone.

Software

Asus Zenfone Selfie brings the company's ZenUI software topped on Android Lollipop 5.0.2 version. The UI is the same as Zenfone 2, and brings a bucket of preloaded apps, which cannot be uninstalled, has gesture controls and other features. The user experience is smooth and worked well.

Conclusion

Asus Zenfone Selfie seems like a good phone in the mid-range segment, but does not really get an edgy feature to compete with its heavily loaded rival smartphones. The camera, is supposed to be the phone's key feature, is not very fascinating. Though, on the brighter side, the smartphone supports looks promising in terms of performance. Additionally, it supports 4G network on both SIMs, which is still not a very common feature in most smartphones.