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Asus Zenfone 6 – Review

The Asus Zenfone 6 is a 6 inch phablet which is priced sensibly. When I first laid my hands on it, my reaction was “Woah, such a big phone”. But when I started using it, I got used to the size and for a brief moment, my daily driver Oneplus one appeared small in my hands. The Asus zenfone 6 has dual sim card support and it runs on Jelly bean with Zen UI on top of it.

Box contents 

  • Asus Zenphone 6
  • 1.65 A Wall Charger with Datacable
  • In-Ear headphone with extra ear plugs

Video Review

 

Design 

The Zenfone 6 is a large device and is targeted at an audience who prefer phablets. The device weighs 196 grams and is 9.9 mm thick . Zenfone is also available in smaller sizes and they are the Zenfone 4 and 5. The Zenfone 6 has a large 6 inch IPS display. It has the 2 MP front facing camera, earpiece, sensors and notification LED on the front. The front also has the android navigation buttons. The buttons are place off screen and they are not backlit. The placement of the back button is at the left and that make it difficult to reach for right handed people. Also the non-backlit buttons make it difficult to use the phone in dark conditions. The bottom chin has a metallic finish and the base has the micro USB port and mic. The right side has the power and volume buttons. The button placement is too high on the device. You either need to have a large hand with long thumb or better be ready to stretch that thumb everytime you need to access these buttons.

On the top you have the 3.5 mm audio jack and a noise cancelling mic. The left has nothing except a small grove to remove the back panel. At the back you find the 13 MP camera with a single LED flash and speaker grills. The back panel is removable and underneath it, there are 2 micro SIM card slot and a SD card slot. The slot are placed inconveniently and removing the cards from them is really tricky. The 3300 mAh Li-Po battery is visible, but not user replaceable.  You can also see the mono speakers at the bottom. The speaker is so tiny and weak. A large device like this must really have loud and quality speakers, so you get a better multimedia experience. The back panel is plastic and it does feel cheap yet not flimsy. Overall the build quality and design is not among the best and fails to impress. But this device does feel solid though the build quality is not premium.

Display 

The display is a large 6 inch display as the model name indicates. It is a 720 p display and this results in a 245 ppi capable display. It would have been great if ASUS had been generous and rolled out a 1080 p display in the Zenfone 6. But nevertheless the display is pretty decent. The screen has corning gorilla glass 3 protection. The screen is finger print magnet and reflects a lot of glare. When the edges are pressed, the liquid display warps a bit. However it has decent viewing angles and direct sunlight visibility is good.  The Zen UI offers a feature to turn on reading mode. When the readability mode is on, the screen turn a but warm with yellow tinge and this helps easy reading as the contrast ratio is better.

Performance 

The Zenfone 6 is powered by Intel Atom Dual core processor clocked at 2 Ghz. Like many of the ASUS devices, it is also powered by Intel. It has 2 GB of RAm and 16 GB internal storage out of which 12 GB is available to user. The memory can be expanded with a micro SD card. We ran the usual benchmark test and found that the Zenfone 6 scores very less in the test results. But in reality the phone performs really good. Games like Asphalt was really smooth, fast and responsive. It is noteworthy to mention that this device does not heat up even after intense gaming or app usage. The zenfone runs on the Zen UI skinned on top of Android 4.3. The UI does not lag at all. I found no lag, frame jump or frame freeze while using the phone. The Zen UI is very light on resource and it is buttery smooth.

Software 

The Zen UI has minimal UI changes on the stock android interface. The lock screen has nothing innovative, but is is very intuitive. The screen can be unlocked by swiping in any direction. It has short cut icons to camera, dialler and messenger. It also has a cool timeline view to show the calendar schedule for the day. It has a few preloaded apps which are not very useful. The messenger app is also very basic. The dialer lets you record incoming and outgoing calls and you can also take notes while on calls. The app drawer also has minimal skinning changes, apart from the smart grouping feature. The notification bar is where you will see a lot of customization. There are two notification zones: the System notifications and the Quick settings. The quick settings has large rounded icons. The first row of icons has some utility apps like notes, torch, etc. The rest of the rows are shortcut to setting that are frequently used. You can also edits the items that you like to be or not be on the quick settings. Though I would have been happy to see pure android on the Asus Zenfone 6, the Zen UI is very minimal. It is light on resources and doesn’t tamper too much with the native android user experience. One point that the Zen UI does not offer is the customization like what we get in MIUI or Cyanogen mod, with the themes.

Camera 

The Zenfone 6 has a 13 MP Panasonic sensor with 5 element lens and wide f2.0 aperture. It does not have optical image stabilization. There is approximately 2 second delay time between shots. But you also have a trubo mode which shoots 5 shots per second as much lower resolution.  But it has an algorithm which Asus calls as Pixel master. It is a combination of software and hardware to give better image results. The camera UI is really interesting. It has loads of interesting modes and inbuilt filters. Apart from the usual HDR, panaroma and low light modes, there are a few fun to try modes. The miniature mode ass a miniature effect to the shot. The time mode takes a couple of shots before and after the moment and you can choose the best. For selfie shots the rear 13 Mp camera can be used in selfie mode. In the selfie mode once it detects the face it clicks 3 shots and you can choose the best. My favorite mode is the GIF animation creator. Do check out the samples here. The night mode takes high resolution shots at low light, but the owl or the low light mode detects the ambient light conditions and brightens up the image, and takes the shot at 3 MP. Overall the image quality from the front camera is quite good. The colors are natural and not over saturated. The edges are bit jagged, but within the acceptable level to say that it’s a good shot. Do check out the sample images shot from the camera. The front camera is a 2 MP camera and it is a good for video calls.

Battery 

The device is powered by a 3300 mAh Li-Po battery. It provides no wireless charging. From 100% to 20%, the device lasted for one whole day under normal usage conditions. Normal usage includes 3G data always on, a few minutes of gaming, 20-25 minutes on calls and a few minutes of browsing and occasional use of camera. The power saver mode is very effective and it extended the battery life by almost 50%. The battery takes 2-3 hours to charge. I had some issues with the battery calibration and my battery drained from 100 to 0% in 4 hours. But then I charged it with power off and after one full cycle of discharge, the battery was back to normal.

Final Verdict

The Asus Zenfone 6 has an impressive battery, interesting UI and a decent performance. But it is a gigantic device. It is big even for user like me who use 5.5 inch phones as their daily drivers. I guess this is ceiling limit for mobile device size. Anything larger than this is totally unusable. The intel processor inside offers solid performance.  A larger device like this would have been a charm, if it had a full HD display. The 720p display is decent, but that is the only reason that is keeping me from giving a strong recommendation for this device. That being said, if you really need a 6 inch phone  and intend to use it for reading, browsing or watching movies, you can go ahead and buy it. It is a good value for money and retailing at Rs 17000 approximately.

 

Amarendra

Co-Founder of GadgetDetail, gadget lover, addicted to American TV shows, fan of Ferrari and Federer, Bengalurian, FOOD LOVER, multiplex hater.

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