Asus finally brought its Zenfone 4 lineup to the Indian market. Although only the Zenfone 4 Selfie series made into the country, other smartphones in the lineup will soon make their way to India, at least, this is what Asus claims.
The Taiwanese brand launched three smartphones- the premium Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro, mid-range Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie (Dual Camera), and the budget Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie. The last two models compete with the likes of Oppo F3 and Vivo V5s, but the Zenfones are more affordable than its competitors.
The Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro is the smartphone to watch out for because it features a massive 24MP selfie camera. Vivo recently launched its V7+ smartphone, which also has a 24MP front-facing camera. However, what makes the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro special is the dual front-facing camera setup. Yes, paired with the 24MP camera is a 5MP wide-angle camera.
At the launch event in Delhi, we spent some time with the premium Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro smartphone, which is priced at Rs. 23,999. Here's what we think of the Asus first dual selfie camera smartphone for the Indian market.
Starting off with the design, all the three Zenfone 4 Selfie smartphones look identical with a metal body design. However, what separates this Zenfone is its weight and thickness. The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro weighs just 147grams and has a thickness of 6.85mm. The device felt extremely light and easy to use at first glance. In addition, Asus is offering the smartphone in three colour options- Rouge Red, Sunlight Gold, Deepsea Black. The Rouge Red colour option looked extremely good in particular.
The handset has a 5.5-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. In our brief time with the smartphone, the viewing angles were fine. However, we did not test the display in outdoor conditions.
Let' speak about the highlight aspect of this smartphone. The device has a primary 24MP selfie camera which is a Sony IMX362 sensor. This sensor has a f/1.8 aperture, Asus SuperPixel Engine image processor. The selfie camera looks extremely powerful on paper, and Asus also tweaked the camera application to take full control of the dual cameras. The 24MP primary camera is paired with a secondary 8MP sensor, which captures wide-angle selfies with a 120-degree field-of-view.
Another highlight with this selfie camera is it can record 4K UHD videos. There's a soft LED flash as well to help the images in low-light situations. Coming to the rear camera, the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro has a 16MP Sony sensor with an aperture size of f/2.2. The rear camera also comes with Asus SuperPixel Engine image processor and PDAF support. The rear camera also records up to 4K videos.
The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro has a home button, which also houses the fingerprint sensor. The sensor is quick in unlocking the smartphone, not the best in the business though. The smartphone accepts two nano SIM cards, and there's a dedicated microSD card slot as well for storage expansion up to 2TB.
At the heart of the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro is a 2.0GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Another aspect where the entire Zenfone 4 lineup excels is on the software side because they boot a completely revamped version of the Zen UI, dubbed Zen UI 4.0 based on Android 7.0 Nougat. Asus also promised Android 8.0 Oreo update for the entire Zenfone 4 and the previous Zenfone 3 lineup.
The interface is quick and snappy in our short time with the smartphone and the smartphone now has less bloat, as compared to previous Zenfones. This is something Asus has taken into consideration this year because several customers criticised the company for loading its smartphones with a lot of bloatware. Lastly, this entire package is backed by a 3000mAh battery, which should easily last for a single day because the device is powered by the energy efficient Snapdragon 625.
Concluding, the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro has decent specifications on paper. And at a price of Rs. 23,999, it battles for the best selfie smartphone with the likes of Vivo V7+, Oppo F3 Plus, and Vivo V5 Plus. Overall, a decently priced Selfie smartphone from Asus.
