Asus Zenfone 8 Review – Report Door

After a few generations making phones with flip-out cameras and increasingly large displays, Asus has taken the ZenFone 8 in a completely different direction: small.

The flipping camera concept also resides on the new Zenfone 8 Flip, but it is not a standard feature in this year’s Zenform lineup. Instead, priced at € 599 (about $ 730), the ZenFone 8 lands in the upper-middle class with a conventional rear camera bump and a much smaller 5.9-inch display. As a side note, the final US pricing is TBD – Asus says somewhere between $ 599 and $ 799 – but it will arrive in North America, unlike last year’s model.

Instead of the attention-grabbing camera feature, the focus of this design has been on making a small phone that is comfortable to use in one hand, which Asus has done without skipping over processing power or higher-end features.

This is an Android iPhone Mini, and it is awesome.

Asus ZenFone 8 screen and design

The ZenFone 8 may be small, but that hasn’t kept it from offering the latest flagship processor: a Snapdragon 888 chipset, coupled with 6, 8 or 16GB of RAM (16GB is in my review unit). I did not find any decrease in performance of this phone. It feels responsive, animations and interactions are intuitive, and it keeps up with demand usage and rapid app switching. This is the performance fitting of the flagship device.

The display is a 5.9-inch 1080p OLED panel, with a fast 120Hz refresh rate, which makes routine interactions with the phone – swiping, scrolling, animations – more smooth than a standard 60Hz screen or even a 90Hz panel. Looks polished. By default, the phone will automatically switch between 120/90/60 Hz depending on the application to save battery life, but you can manually select any of those three refresh rates if you wish.

The 20: 9 aspect ratio of the display was carefully observed by Asus. The company says that it settled on this slightly narrower format, so the phone would fit more easily into a pocket, and it does. I can’t get it All The way into the back jeans pocket, but it fits mostly. More importantly, it fits well inside the pocket of a jacket and does not feel like it would not come out if I sat on the floor to tie my shoes. The ZenFone 8 is rated IP68 for dust protection and some submergence.

The front panel is protected by Gorilla Glass Victus and has an in-display fingerprint sensor, while the rear Gorilla Glass 3 is used with a frosty finish that is on the matte side of the matte / glossy spectrum. The front panel is flat, but the rear has a slight curve on the long edges for an easy fit in the hand. At 169 grams (5.9 ounces), it is heavy for its size, and feels surprisingly dense when you first lift it. The frame of the phone is aluminum, giving the entire package a high-end look and feel. It even has a headphone jack on the top edge as a treat.

The power button (an exciting shade of blue!) Is well positioned, so my right thumb naturally comes with the phone in my hand. Similar to the in-screen fingerprint sensor: The target seems to be located on the screen more than usual, but it actually puts it within comfortable reach of my thumb.

I admit in front that I have a personal bias towards small phones, but the Zenfone 8 feels great in my hand. I have spent a lot of time in the last six months using large devices, and I have gotten used to it. But the ZenFone 8 is the first device to feel like it was optimized to me, Not something I had to adapt to use.

Asus ZenFone 8 Battery & Software

The phone’s small size makes a small battery a necessity – 4,000mAh in this case, much smaller than the Zenfone 6 and 7’s 5,000mAh. I felt the difference between using this phone versus battery-for-days budget or midrange phones, but I had no problem with moderate usage throughout the day. I left Strava for 20 hours by accident, and the next morning still had some life in the battery. The ZenFone 8 supports 30W wired charging with the included power adapter, which takes up to 100 percent of an empty battery in a little over an hour. Wireless charging is not supported, which slightly excludes the ZenFone 8 in the flagship class.

Asus offers several options to help with day-to-day battery life as well as the overall lifetime of your battery. There are no less than five battery modes to optimize the phone’s performance or battery longevity on a daily basis, and various charging modes let you set a custom charging limit or stagger charge overnight so that your alarms for better battery health It reaches 100 percent around the time of. You won’t find class-leading battery capacity here, but assure comfort when you need to stretch the Zenfone 8’s battery, there are plenty of options.

Zenfone 8 ships with Android 11, and Asus says it will provide “at least” the two major OSs with security updates for the same timeframe. That’s at the bottom of what we want for a flagship phone, especially compared to Apple’s typical four or five-year support program. An important notice for US shoppers is that the ZenFone 8 will only work with AT & T and T-Mobile’s LTE and Sub-6GHz 5G networks; You cannot use this phone on Verizon, and there is no support for fast, but extremely limited, millimeter-wave 5G networks.

Asus ZenFone 8 Camera

There are only two cameras on the ZenFone 8’s rear camera bump, and they are both worth your time. Instead of cramping in depth sensors, macros, or some monochrome nonsense, Asus just went with OIS with a 64-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultrawide. He has taken loan from last year’s model, a telephoto camera and flipping mechanism.

As in the ZenFone 7 Pro, the 8’s main camera produces 16-megapixel images with plenty of detail in vibrant colors and good lighting. Images can tilt a little farther into the unnatural-looking area, and some high-contrast scenes look a bit too HDR-Y for my liking. But overall, this camera does just fine: it handles medium-low light conditions like a dim store interior, and night mode works fine in very low light, provided you can hold the phone for a few seconds and Your topic isn’t going on.

When you use portrait mode, the skin-smoothing beauty mode is turned on by default, and this is not good. The skin looks more smooth, unnaturally flat and shiny, as if your subject has a few layers of stage makeup. Turning it off improves things considerably.

Ultravide camera also turns into good performance. Asus has called it a “flagship” grade sensor, and while it may be true in 2018, it is at least a step up from the small, inexpensive sensors often found in UltraDroid cameras. Likewise, the front-facing 12-megapixel camera does just fine. When you switch on the selfie camera, the beauty mode is turned off, and thank goodness for that.

There is no telephoto camera here, just digital zoom. On the camera shooting screen, there is an icon for quick 2x 16-megapixel “lossless” digital zoom to crop, which works fine, but it’s not very accessible, and it just creates limitations of small sensors More clear lens.

Overall, the camera system is good but not great. The lack of a true optical zoom or telephoto camera is a disappointment, but you can’t have everything on such a small device, and I can personally take an ultravide before telephoto any day.

ZenFone 8 fills a void in the Android market for a fully-specified, smaller-sized device. The Google Pixel 4A is around the same size, but it is definitely a budget device with a step-down processor, plastic chassis, and less nuances like an IP rating or fast-refresh screen. Apart from the battery life, which is manageable, you give very little to the way the key features are used to achieve the ZenFone 8’s small form factor.

You’ll have to look at iOS for the most direct competition of this phone: the iPhone 12 Mini, which it matches to an IP rating almost imaginable-to-camera configuration. The 12 Mini is actually slightly smaller than the ZenFone 8, and when you factor in storage capacity, it is likely to be a more expensive option for 256GB at $ 829. However, when you consider that the 12 Mini will probably get a few years more OS and security support, it may be a better buy in the long run, if you are flexible in your choice of operating system.

I like the ZenFone 8 a lot, but I’m not sure it will get a large audience, at least in the US. Apple is having trouble selling the iPhone 12 Mini, and if there is one thing that Apple is good at, it is selling the phone to American customers. As much as I hate to entertain the idea, perhaps we have used giant phones. I like how the Zenfone 8 feels in my hand and in my pocket, but I notice how small the screen is and everything seems to be compared to the larger phones I’ve used recently.

There are also some important considerations, such as the lack of compatibility with Verizon and the phone’s relatively low support. If you need the best in Zenfone 8’s battery life, it can’t offer, and if you want a class-leading camera, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

All told, the ZenFone 8 would be the perfect fit for a specific type of person, and I can heartily recommend it to my fellow little phone fans. You will get major level of quality and performance in the palm of your hand.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Reporter Door