Asus Zenfone Live review: A budget smartphone for selfie lovers
Design
We'll start by talking about the design. Although the smartphone's design is something we have already seen in a lot of other phones in the same price range, we would still say that the phone is good to look at. The Zenfone Live is available in three colour variants -- Navy Black, Rose Pink and Shimmer Gold -- and our review unit was the one with White/Shimmer Gold combination.
The front panel is dominated by a 5-inch HD display of 720x1280 pixel resolution, covered with 2.5D curved glass design. Below the screen are three capacitive navigation keys. Above it, there’s the earpiece, front-facing camera and soft LED.Flip the device and you'll see the non-removable back cover, which has Asus branding. The primary camera and LED flash on top left.
The right edge has the volume rocker and power button, while the left edge has the SIM tray. The 3.5mm jack is placed on the top, while the speaker grille along with the microUSB port is on the bottom.
Overall, we think that the design of the device is a little repetitive, but still good for the price.
Speaking of the display, we found it to be good. Colours are bright and vibrant, and images produced are clear as well. Viewing angles could have been better and sunlight readability was only decent. The display comes with Bluelight filter and Asus’ ‘TruVivid’ technology, which ensure that the users’ eyes don’t get strained.To sum it up, we'll say that the smartphone has a good display.
Performance
Coming down to the hardware specifications, the Asus Zenfone Live is powered by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. It also supports microSD cards of up to 128GB. Running Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system skinned with ZenUI 3.5, it houses a non-removable 2,650mAh battery that is claimed to deliver up to 16 hours of standby time and 471 hours of talk time. For connectivity, the smartphone supports 4G LTE, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.Google will soon be launching Android O, so it is a little disappointing to see smartphones still being launched with an old version of Android. That said, the software tweaks make the Zenfone Live’s experience a little better. The app icons are colourful and the notification panel has big rounded icons, instead of the regular small ones. We have seen these tweaks in other Asus smartphones too, but they look pleasant.
The app drawer can be customized. You can hide/lock apps, arrange them according to your preferences, choose the grid size and do a lot more. We believe that it’s a good thing because it helps in maintaining user privacy.
Asus Zenfone Live comes with a number of preinstalled apps. Among them is the Google suite of apps, social apps like Facebook and Instagram, and some of Asus’ own apps.We particularly liked Mobile Manager, which can scan power-hungry apps and monitor their battery usage. It can help in making the smartphone’s battery last longer, free up storage space and more.
Although we liked the tweaks in software, we don't have the same opinion about the smartphone's performance. There were times when switching between apps took a little longer than usual, but unless you are someone who has used a number of phones, you may not notice it. The image gallery was slow to load and we generally witnessed a lot of lag during multi-tasking.On the other hand, video quality and sound output were good. Even high-resolution videos played without any issues.
Call quality on the Zenfone Live was decent during our testing. We didn’t face any issues with signal reception either. Using Google Maps for navigation was disappointing as the smartphone got heated up in half an hours. We had a similar experience while playing games.
Now, let's talk about the cameras. The Zenfone Live’s 13MP rear camera took decent images in well-lit areas, but the quality went down when we tried using it in dimly-lit areas. Viewing the images on big screen of a laptop left us disappointed.Speaking of the 5MP selfie camera, it did a good job, especially when we used beautification features like skin tone adjustment and smoothening.The smartphone comes with a ‘BeautyLive’ app. It allows users to enable real-time beautification features while using Live videos on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. It smoothens out users’ skin, slims down the face and removes blemishes, among doing a lot of other things. We found the app easy to use and it did add beauty features to our face.
Coming to the 2,650mAh battery, it lasted us an entire day with moderate usage. The usage involved using social media, listening to music, watching videos and of course, taking phone calls. The battery was something we had no problems with, at least with moderate usage of the device.When we ran benchmark tests on the device, it scored 498 (single-core) and 1195 (multi-core) on GeekBench 4 and its AnTuTu score was 26960.
The app drawer can be customized. You can hide/lock apps, arrange them according to your preferences, choose the grid size and do a lot more. We believe that it’s a good thing because it helps in maintaining user privacy.
Asus Zenfone Live comes with a number of preinstalled apps. Among them is the Google suite of apps, social apps like Facebook and Instagram, and some of Asus’ own apps.We particularly liked Mobile Manager, which can scan power-hungry apps and monitor their battery usage. It can help in making the smartphone’s battery last longer, free up storage space and more.
Although we liked the tweaks in software, we don't have the same opinion about the smartphone's performance. There were times when switching between apps took a little longer than usual, but unless you are someone who has used a number of phones, you may not notice it. The image gallery was slow to load and we generally witnessed a lot of lag during multi-tasking.On the other hand, video quality and sound output were good. Even high-resolution videos played without any issues.
Call quality on the Zenfone Live was decent during our testing. We didn’t face any issues with signal reception either. Using Google Maps for navigation was disappointing as the smartphone got heated up in half an hours. We had a similar experience while playing games.
Now, let's talk about the cameras. The Zenfone Live’s 13MP rear camera took decent images in well-lit areas, but the quality went down when we tried using it in dimly-lit areas. Viewing the images on big screen of a laptop left us disappointed.Speaking of the 5MP selfie camera, it did a good job, especially when we used beautification features like skin tone adjustment and smoothening.The smartphone comes with a ‘BeautyLive’ app. It allows users to enable real-time beautification features while using Live videos on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. It smoothens out users’ skin, slims down the face and removes blemishes, among doing a lot of other things. We found the app easy to use and it did add beauty features to our face.
Coming to the 2,650mAh battery, it lasted us an entire day with moderate usage. The usage involved using social media, listening to music, watching videos and of course, taking phone calls. The battery was something we had no problems with, at least with moderate usage of the device.When we ran benchmark tests on the device, it scored 498 (single-core) and 1195 (multi-core) on GeekBench 4 and its AnTuTu score was 26960.
Verdict
We would say that while there a few things about the Asus Zenfone Live that we liked, there were many aspects that disappointed us. While the display, software and beautification app are plus points, the performance, heating issues and average camera are downers.
In this price range, we have seen better smartphones like
In this price range, we have seen better smartphones like
Xiaomi Redmi 4
and
Coolpad Note 5 Lite
. If you don't care about the live-beautification features, you can consider these two alternatives.
Comments
Post a Comment