Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe: Hands on

Asus has finally announced its upcoming premium phone, the Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe. Asus is noted for its aggressive pricing and so we are little skeptical about the price of Asus Zenphone 3 deluxe. The phone will be officially released in the market in August 2016 and there will be several variants of this phone varying in terms of storage capacity from 64 GB to 256 GB.




Design

Asus has now deviated from the use of plastic in its Zenfone variants and Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe is made of metallic unibody which looks premium. The back of the cover is little slippery but still is very good enough to handle. The phone has the regular power button and volume rocker on right side. The audio jack along with secondary noise cancellation mic is located on the top. The bottom of the phone has the USB Type C port for data syncing and charging along with primary microphone and speaker grill.

The back side of the phone has 23 megapixel camera with dual LED flash along with IR focus, phase detection mode and finger print sensor in the middle. The secondary camera is a 8 megapixel camera which can record in Full HD.

The Asus Zenfone 3 Delluxe is 7.5 mm thick and weighs 170 grams. Though the phone is slim it weighs little more than anticipated because of it's metallic body and big battery.

Features:

Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe comes with beasty features like 2.15 GHz, Quad Core, Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 processor accompanied by whopping 6 GB RAM. On paper the mobile should handle almost all activities without any glitches along with heavy gaming and multimedia usage.

The display of the phone is a 5.7 inch large Super AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. The display is supported by Asus TruVid Technology which has a resolution of 1080 X 1920 pixels at the rate of 386 pixels per inch. The resolution in terms of pixels per inch may not sound good on paper but it has very decent color reproduction and excellent viewing angles, thanks to AMOLED display. The capacitive touch screen is protected with Oleophobic coating to prevent fingerprint and smudges. It also supports glove touch. The bottom of the screen has back lit capacitive touch buttons for regular use.

Sensors include ambient light sensor, fingerprint sensor, accelerometer, light sensor, proximity sensor, gyroscope, IR sensor and RGB sensor.

The main camera of the phone is a 23 megapixel shooter which has many features like 4 axis optical image stabilization, 6 P Largan lens, laser auto focus, phase detection, super resolution mode, beautification mode, GIF animation mode, slow motion and many more. The company uses Sony IMX318 sensor which has the ability to auto focus in 0.03 seconds. That is pretty fast. You can also shoot videos in 4K resolution.

The secondary camera is 8 megapixel camera with F/2.0 aperture (Similar to primary camera) and can record in Full HD. The secondary camera also has several modes of image capture like PixelMaster camera mode, low light mode, beautification mode, panorama mode, GIF animation mode. 

Sadly Asus has opted for hybrid sim card slot. So you can use one slot either for a sim card or a micro sd card only. The phone has a very good battery, 3000 mAh, which will last for a full day on a single charge. The phone supports fast charging as well. 

Early Verdict:

The Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe is an excellent phone for those who are looking alternatives for Samsung S7 and similar phones with similar features. It is very similar to Vivo Xplay 5 Elite but the former has better camera, storage capacity and build quality while latter has better processor, display and battery capacity.