In a price segment that has seen the dominance of OnePlus, Asus has gone and thrown in the gauntlet with its Zenfone 5Z. Making no bones about whom it’s going after, Asus has looked at everything the OnePlus 6 has and had a go at giving the user something more. Specially an unbeatable price. But price is not all it takes to compete with the ‘flagship killer’ which has caught the fancy of young people and built up a community of users that are loyal to the brand they identity with strongly. This by no means happened overnight. But meanwhile, Asus believes it’s up to the challenge with its newest phone.

If Asus has learnt something the hard way it’s that right-pricing a gadget is a make or break issue in India. After out-pricing themselves with a Deluxe phone, they’ve now turned the tables and undercut the OnePlus 6 on the pricing front. The Zenfone 5Z in its three variants costs ₹29,999, ₹32,999 and ₹36,999 which is less than the OnePlus 6’s ₹39,999.

The Zenfone 5Z is an almost corporate shade of blue. They call it Midnight Blue but it’s a sort of grey-blue that looks professional and conservative. It’s quite in contrast to the racy heart-stopping red OnePlus has used on its latest OnePlus 6 variant.

There’s also a ‘meteor silver’ version that also looks distinctive. The 5Z is, like all flagships right now, all glass with metal strengthening. It’s a 6.2-inch device and doesn’t look or feel overly large. The phone has very rounded edges making sure that it isn’t uncomfortable to hold. Glass is slippery, but it’s also pretty and versatile so glass it has to be but you’ll need a case. A back cover is provided in the box for immediate use.

Of course the Zenfone 5Z the 19:9 aspect ratio that allows it to have barely-there bezels. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking the presence of the notch on the screen makes the Zenfone 5Z an iPhone X look-alike. About every Android phone now has a notch and none of them, try hard as they might, capture the magic of Apple. The notch, for better or worse, is just there now because it’s one way to maximise the screen space.

The notch can be disguised as a regular bezel and on this device I preferred to do just that. The Full-HD screen is nice and sharp and has a number of colour adjustment features. One of these is that it adapts colour temperature to the ambient light. Another is that the screen stays on when one is looking at it — a feature that seemed to work fine in a lit room.

Not just smart?

An Asus exec described the Zenfone 5Z as being not just a smart phone but an intelligent phone. While smartphone has become a generic term for non-basic devices, an intelligent phone would be one that deploys artificial intelligence or AI and Asus has tried to put in various ‘learning’ and adaptive features on their phone and club them under an AI category. Whether one would consider these true AI is another matter, but there are features that watch your preferences and present those upfront for your use again.

Asus even uses AI for battery charging with the phone detecting the user’s pattern of charging and adjusting its rate of charge to prolong the life of the battery. Even nthe ringtone volume is based on AI, adjusting to louder in noisier environments. AI is also used to preduct which apps you use and when — based on your usage pattern — and put those specific apps upfront. How well these work and how useful they turn out to be can only be evident after long-term usage of the phone. Many of these features have already appeared on other phones, just to be clear.

We Heart photo

Right from the packaging it’s clear that Asus places a big premium on photography. One place where Asus has definitely made a push for AI is with its cameras. The primary cameras on this phone have a dual setup with the main one being a 12-megapixel camera and the secondary an 8-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens. The primary camera has an f/1.8 aperture and dual-pixel technology for PDAF.

The front camera is an 8MP. How AI is used here is that the phone recognises scenes and objects and adjusts the camera accordingly, adjusting several photography parameters such as white balance or filters. Say, flowers, or landscapes for example. I could only see it brightening and saturating for certain scenes however and would rather do without.

AI is also used when a photo is in the Gallery and the user edits it whereupon the phone will remember these preferences and apply them to similar photos. As someone who loves phone photography, I would really much rather be left to my own editing of photos or indeed whether to edit them at all but one must allow for those who are happy to have their photo editing done to whatever specs the technology decides is right.

My experience with the Zenfone 5Z’s cameras wasn’t great. I found photos indoors inevitably fuzzy, specially so if the Depth Mode was left turned on. There’s an improvement when it’s off but even so, objects look blurred around the edges and it’s not that easy, say, reading text on something in the distance. Colours are not quite true to real life and objects with light on them tend to white-out a lot. In comparison I did find the OnePlus 6’s camera resulting in clearer and crisper photos, specially in low light. With the claims ASU’s makes, a more prolonged and detailed look at the camera is definitely needed.

Meanwhile, the Zenfone 5Z has pretty good sound, comes with an included set of earphones that support hi-res audio and is clear and loud on phone calls. It comes with a dual-SIM slot but can also take a memory card in lieu of one of the SIMs. We looked at the 6GB RAM version and it was every bit as quick and snappy as the OnePlus though with a somewhat different ‘feel’. It’s a phone that is safe to game with as Asus knows all about gaming and its requirements. Battery life is decent.

It’s doubtful whether someone who has used a OnePlus would switch loyalties. Everything from the logo to accessories, from the marketing messages to the Never Settle tagline and the aura created around what is a proven good product has worked well for OnePlus. But for someone who has never experienced OnePlus or even if someone doesn’t have the budget for a OnePlus, the Zenfone 5Z with its great specs is compelling at the price.

Price: ₹29,999 to ₹36,999

Pros: Good looking with good ergonomics, top-end specs

Cons: Many me-too features; Camera not quite up to expectations

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