Asus brought its new Asus Zenfone 5Z in the market at an aggressive starting price of Rs 29,990 only. This makes it the cheapest smartphone to offers Snapdragon 845 chipset after OnePlus 6. There are three variants of Asus Zenfone 5Z 6GB+64GB which are priced at Rs 29,990, 6GB+128GB which is priced at Rs 32,990 and the highest with 8GB+256GB which comes at Rs 36,990. We got the one with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Let’s see how the smartphone performs in our review period.
Design and Build:
The Asus Zenfone 5Z comes with glass back body with curved edges. Asus moved from its cuboidal mainframe to the curvey and smooth edged body with Asus Zenfone 5Z. It’s slim and very smaller in size. It has 2.5D curved glass at the front and a glass panel at the rear which makes it very slippery to hold on and it also captures a lot of fingerprint smudges.
The 3.5mm aux port, Single Speaker, and the Type-C port all are placed at the bottom side of the edge. The SIM card tray is stapled on the top while the Volume Rocker keys and the Power button is placed on the right side of the edge.
The design surely looks premium with the glass back but the device doesn’t seem sturdy. You’ll have to keep it a case to protect the glass from scratches and smudges. And Asus also thought about it and offered a plastic case along with the smartphone. Overall the small size and premium finish makes is a pretty stylish smartphone.
Display:
Asus Zenfone 5Z comes with Super IPS+ display over the 6.2-inch canvas with Corning Gorilla Glass protection. It has FullHD+ display i.e. 1080×2246 pixels resolution, 19:9 aspect ratio and about 90% screen to body ratio. The specification surely seems good but the output is not up to the mark. They may have gone with AMOLED display but the price cost may differ then. When you look at the smartphone screen you’ll notice brightness factor is missing. The display seems dull even with full brightness and it’s not good for the flagship.
Specifications:
Asus Zenfone 5Z houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, coupled with Adreno 630 GPU but also the 6GB LPDDR4X RAM. It has 64GB of onboard storage and it cant be increased further. It also supports 4G VoLTE on both the SIM card slots. Other connectivity options are Dual-Band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS and Type-C OTG.
On the software front, it runs on Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box with its custom UI ZenUI 5.0 on the top of it. The UI is clean and clear and offers tons of AI features on the smartphone. The UI is quick and handy and the best part is it doesn’t come with the dozens of bloatware apps we’ve seen in the predecessor
Performance:
The Snapdragon 845 SoC paired with the 6GB of RAM offers blazing fast performance. the touch response is very quick and has awesome multitasking ability. We ran several apps and games in the bottom and we’re able to swap between them very quickly without any lag.
The gaming section of the Asus Zenfone 5Z is great. The UI provides additional gaming modes which block the notification while playing and focus mainly on the gaming part. We played PUBG and Asphalt 8 on the smartphone and the response was very fast. However, there was little heating when the gameplay is longer than of 30 minutes.
The AI enhancements on the Asus Zenfone 5Z is great. Asus has added it almost everywhere, starting from the sound, display, gaming, usage and even is camera too. The AI helps the users to control their usage and to provide better facilities to them.
The smartphone also scores well in the benchmark performance. The AnTuTu Score was 266712 which is great. the Geekbench score was 2463 in Single Core and 2463 in Multi-Core. The scores were comparable to the Smartphone killer OnePlus 6.
The Face Unlock and Fingerprint Sensor work great on this smartphone. The face Unlock the smartphone very quickly even in the low light. And if didn’t work out the fingerprint is on the go. Both offer a secure environment for the smartphone.
The 4G VoLTE connectivity works great on this smartphone. We used Airtel as our testing SIM and we didn’t find any type of lag or distortions in our usage. The Audio and Video performance of this smartphone is great. It also comes with a toggle bar which changes the output as per requirement.
Battery:
Asus Zenfone 5Z is backed by 3300mAh of battery and it supports fast charging tech with the company’s own ASUS BoostMaster technology. The battery life we got with our moderate usage is of about 8 hours. Minimal users will get around 12+ hours of battery life on it. We also tested the battery life with our loop video test it lasted for 7 hours with the highest resolution. The battery could be more but we’re happy as it got the fast charging.
Camera:
Asus Zenfone 5Z boasts a dual camera smartphone of 12MP+8MP. The primary camera consists of a 12MP dual-pixel image sensor powered by Sony IMX363, low aperture, 1/2.55″ large sensor size, 1.4um pixel size and dual-tone LED flash. The secondary camera in the smartphone has an 8MP sensor wherein it clicks images in 4:3 aspect ratio. The camera behaves as a 6MP option with 16:9 aspect ratio and 5MP with 18:9 aspect ratio among others.
The camera captures good images but not as great as the Pixel 2 or onePlus 6. There are certain factors Asus needs to improve certain like the sensors ability to take Portrait Images and Colour compositions. It also offers several modes coupled with Ai functions to take photos as you want.
Selfie lovers also get an 8MP camera that is placed alongside the speaker grilled in the notch. The camera claims to have an 84-degree field of view and it captures great selfies.. the color one seems accurate and the in-depth details are good too.
Gizmo Verdict:
At a price point of Rs 29,990, Asus Zenfone 5Z offers a great smartphone. It has 6GB of RAM and Snapdragon 845 chipset at the lowest price. It offers tough competition to OnePlus 6. Its better than OnePlus with the AI facilities but lacks behind in the display, camera, and overall performance. If you want, you can definitely go for Asus Zenfone 6 but OnePlus 6 is also there if you can spend a bit more.
