Asus Zenphone 6
A CLEVER CAMERA IS JUST THE START.
FOR YEARS ASUS made fairly conventional Android phones that, while solid, did not establish the company as a big name in phones. You may know Asus for laptops and routers, but probably not its mobiles.
The Asus ZenFone 6 is part of a new class of attention-grabbing models a little different to others you’ll find on shelves.
In 2018, Asus gave us the ROG Phone, a gaming Android based on the style of its popular ROG gaming laptops. The Asus ZenFone 6 has broader appeal, but you could argue it is actually stranger.
The Asus ZenFone 6 has a motorized flip camera. It can track subjects as they move, take ‘auto’ panoramas, and lets you shoot 4K 60fps selfie video.
This is not what makes it a great phone, fun as it is. Excellent value, clean-looking software and two-day battery life are. The Asus ZenFone 6 is one of the best sub-$1,000 phones, now Huawei and Honor handsets are harder to recommend following cut ties with companies like Google.
If you forget the Asus ZenFone 6’s flip camera for a moment, it seems a typical ‘challenger brand’ mobile. It needs to lure us away from the likes of Google, Samsung and Huawei. And to do that, Asus offers a lot of tech for relatively little money.
The ZenFone 6 has the high-end Snapdragon 855 chipset. It has 128GB or 256GB of storage, a huge 5,000mAh battery and a hole-free 6.4-inch screen.
All the core elements of a top-end phone are here. But you pay what they used to cost years ago, not today’s prices.
You’re probably here because you have heard
about the ZenFone 6’s motorised camera. Some other phones have little selfie cameras that pop out of the top of the frame, but the ZenFone 6’s flips around from the back, so the same two lenses are used for both selfies and regular shots.
One is a 48MP camera with a ‘normal’ view, the other a 13MP ultra-wide one. There’s no zoom, and night image quality is not nearly best-in-class. The Honor 20 Pro and Pixel 3a XL pip it for image quality with some scenes, but we think most of you will be happy.
The camera also has an effect on the ZenFone 6’s appearance. This is a gadgetylooking phone, one that will go down better with a nerdy crowd than those who like big names and slick or minimalist looks.
However, that does not mean any corners have been cut. The Asus ZenFone 6 has a curved Gorilla Glass 6 front, an earlier generation of this toughened glass on its back, and aluminum sides. It may have a geeky aura, but this phone does not look or feel remotely cheap.
The flip camera may repel people as well as converting fans, but Asus has done a great job here for the price.
SCREEN
The Asus ZenFone 6 has a 6.4-inch screen. It’s an LCD display, so you don’t quite get the color saturation or contrast of the Galaxy S10 or OnePlus 7 Pro. However, it’s hard to imagine exactly who would want more color punch than you get here.
This phone’s wide color gamut mode has an OLED-like richness that we actually find a bit too much. It’s based on the DCI-P3 standard, the range of colors used by cinema color graders.
Switch down to ‘standard’ mode and the app icons of Chrome and YouTube look subtler, and less garish.
BATTERY LIFE
The Asus ZenFone 6 has a huge battery. It is rated at 5,000mAh, a good 20% larger than the Huawei P30 Pro.
Asus says it will last for a full two days between charges, and that’s more-or-less consistent with our experience. Or, to be more realistic, it lasts until bedtime on day two.
As we write this it’s 10:20pm on the day after a charge. It has 5% battery left. It’s begging for the charge cable, but still hanging on in there. In the 36 hours prior we listened to a bunch of hours of podcasts, trekked across the city with some Citymapper app help, sent a barrage of WhatsApp messages and browsed the web a bit.
CAMERA
The camera is clearly the most unusual part of the Asus ZenFone 6. However, it feels quite normal until you start flipping it around.
Its main sensor is the 48MP Sony IMX586, also seen in the Honor 20 Pro and OnePlus 7 Pro. Sony seems to have attracted a lot of customers with this.
The other ZenFone 6 camera is a 13MP ultra-wide, which also uses a Sony sensor. It is fundamentally quite similar to the experience of the rival Honor and OnePlus phones, which is no bad thing.
The Asus ZenFone 6 lets you shoot virtually any scene carelessly and you’ll almost always get a decent photo out of it. Compose without thinking about the light levels and the HDR+ processing kicks in to avoid blown highlights and too many dark-looking areas.
PERFORMANCE
How powerful is the Asus ZenFone 6’s Snapdragon 855 chipset? It is the best you’ll find in an Android phone at launch.
The Snapdragon 855 has one turbo-charged Kryo 485 core clocked at 2.84GHz, three at 2.41GHz, and four at 1.78GHz. You get the standard eight cores, but the distribution of power is a little different this time around.
This is matched with 6GB or 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Asus sent us the 6GB version, which will likely be the most popular among all but the hardcore crowd.
In Geekbench 4 our ZenFone 6 scores 10,779 (3,516 per core) points. As expected, this is roughly similar to the OnePlus 7 Pro, and a good 25% better than the Pixel 3 XL’s score. That phone has the last-generation Snapdragon 845.
VERDICT
The Asus ZenFone 6 may seem just as odd as the Asus ROG Phone at first. It has an ambitious motorized camera likely to win ‘cool tech gadget’ and ‘most likely to get damaged one day’ prizes.
Its appeal is wider than the ROG Phone’s, though. The ZenFone 6’s very reasonable price makes it one of the best phones to offer high-end specs at a lower price, like those of Honor and OnePlus.
This might be the better choice for those looking for something a little geeky and unusual. The flip camera is not as slick and safely designed as the OnePlus 7 Pro’s, but it can follow subjects, act as a stand, and lets you shoot better selfie video.