Qualcomm had promised to unveil details about its latest Snapdragon 835 chip during CES 2017 but recent benchmark data have revealed the enormous power of the flagship SoC. The Qualcomm chip was hitherto expected to be used by Samsung first on its Galaxy S8 flagship earlier billed for MWC in February and then on the Xiaomi Mi 6 also.

However, there are indications that Taiwanese smartphone maker ASUS may beat the duo of Samsung and Xiaomi to use the flagship Snapdragon 835 chip on its smartphone. The company recently teased via Twitter, the launch of a flagship Asus Zenfone model during CES that would be powered by the world’s best processor. The launch will take place on January 4, 2017.

Level up! World's best processor now fully unleashed the potential! Save the date: 01.04.17 #ASUS #ZenFone #Zennovation #CES2017! pic.twitter.com/c6WuavRiHT

— ASUS (@ASUS) January 2, 2017

We are not entirely sure if the Asus Zenfone expected would actually feature the Snapdragon 835 chip, as it is not categorically stated but don’t forget that the ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe was the first Snapdragon 821-powered phone.In addition, it is sure going to be a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip on board and the best so far Qualcomm has got is the Snapdragon 835. It is possible, though, that the SD 821 which is also one of the best around is being referred to.

Read More: ASUS X00GD Shows Up AT TENAA: Sports 4850mAh Battery and Runs Android Nougat

From earlier teaser, the Asus Zenfone model would likely feature a dual camera set up on board but other details are a bit sketchy right now. We’ll keep you updated here on Gizmochina as more details emerge.

(source)

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People usually associate the brand Asus with computers or related accessories but the company has already proven that it is capable of producing some top quality phones. The Zenfone 3 is one of their latest models and it costs about $370. Is it worth the price? Learn more if this phone is any good in the full review.

Thanks to Gearbest for sending the Asus Zenfone 3 for a review.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: VIDEO REVIEW

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: UNBOXING

The phone ships with all the usual stuff and some extras include a pair of earphones.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: DESIGN and DISPLAY

The Zenfone 3 is a nice looking phone and it uses some premium materials like Gorilla Glass on the front and rear and a metal chassis.

Obviously, using glass has its tradeoffs as the phone is a huge fingerprint magnet.

However, the buttons are made of plastic and the hybrid dual SIM card tray rattles quite a bit.

On a positive note, the 5.5” 1080p display is just beautiful to look at. It is sharp, vibrant and bright both for indoor and outdoor use.

It’s great that we have an 8MP camera and the notification LED light but I don’t understand why Asus thinks that implementing the non-backlit capacitive buttons is okay. Also, I always love the back button on the right side.

The Zenfone 3 has a pretty powerful camera setup that includes a high-end 16MP Sony IMX298 sensor, 4-axis OIS, 6-axis EIS, hybrid laser/phase/contrast detection autofocus system and dual tone dual-LED flash. The fingerprint scanner is one of the best. It’s fast, accurate and it allows you to unlock the phone straight from the standby mode.

As far as audio, I love the quality of sound via the headset jack. Also, the loudspeaker is great. The volume output is good and the sound is crisp, and balanced.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: HARDWARE and PERFORMANCE, BATTERY LIFE

When it comes to hardware, the Zenfone 3 ships with the midrange-level Snapdragon 625 chip, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage.

The sheers specs may suggest the midrange nature of the phone but the Zenfone 3 is an excellent performer when it comes to 3D gaming. There are no skipped frames or stutter and the phone stays absolutely cold to the touch even after 30 mins of gaming. That’s really impressive.

In addition, I just love the Snapdragon 625 chip due to its power efficiency. The phone ships with the 3000mAh battery, which does not look impressive on paper but I could constantly get over 5 hours of screen-on time with the max. auto-brightness, using the phone quite heavily and having installed a lot of apps and 4 Google accounts.

Finally, the phone supports the Quick Charge 3.0 feature but it ships with a regular charger, so it takes about 2 hours to fully charge the phone.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: BENCHMARKS

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: USER INTERFACE

The user interface is what makes the Asus phones unique. The phone runs on the Android 6.0 but we have a heavily customized ZenUI skin on top of it. Honestly, I didn’t like it at first but it started growing on me after 2 weeks of using this phone.

There are so many features, customization options and some little tweaks to make the phone look your own. Just to name a few, you can choose from a huge collection of themes, select from different icons packs and so on. Also, you can use some gesture and motion controls that work well. I’m not sure if you are going to use all the customization options since there are many more features to choose from.

Most importantly, the user interface performance is good on the daily basis. There is no stutter or lag despite all those extra features.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: CAMERA

The camera app is a good example of how Asus looks into their smartphones. There are just so many shooting modes to choose from and I’m not really sure if an average user would use them all.

Firstly, you can tweak the image settings using the manual mode. Other modes that I found useful are super resolution mode that takes images at a whopping resolution of 66MP. Finally, I loved using the low-light and night modes.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: IMAGE QUALITY

IT IS HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED TO DOWNLOAD FULL RESOLUTION CAMERA SAMPLES TO SEE THE ACTUAL IMAGE QUALITY. THE PICTURES UPLOADED ON THE WEBSITE ARE 50% SMALLER IN RESOLUTION.

When it comes to the actual image quality, the Asus Zenfone 3 can take some nice-looking photos that are pretty sharp, have a good amount of detail and accurate colors. Also, the white balance is usually spot on. My only complaint would be that some of the images look underexposed. Anyway, I tested the camera in the cloudy day.

As for low-light camera performance, it is actually very good. Sure, there is more noise but the camera takes some flagship-worthy night photos. The dedicated night mode will brighten up the image by lowering the shutter speed but the images usually turn out softer. The low-light mode takes 4MP images that have less noise but there is less detail too.

The selfie camera is usually good but the selfies I took came out slightly soft, so I may not have held my hand steadily.

The 4k video looks sharp and detailed, the color reproduction is accurate and the sound recording quality is decent. Also, the video stabilization works pretty well reducing the shakiness. A few complaints would be that there were a few noticeable video artefacts and the auto-exposure feature could work more gracefully.

Download full resolution camera samples

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: CONNECTIVITY

When it comes to connectivity, I have zero complaints. The signal reception and the call quality are great using either SIM card as the phone comes with a hybrid dual SIM card tray.

Also, the GPS is very accurate, Bluetooth 4.2 and dual-band Wifi work absolutely fine.

Asus Zenfone 3 Review: CONCLUSIONS

The Asus Zenfone 3 is quite an interesting phone since it has a midrange-level chipset but the flagship-grade real life performance.

Also, the phone has a nice and premium-looking design, excellent display, great audio quality and a very capable camera

Even though the Snapdragon 625 chip is not as powerful as the 820-series processors, there is plenty of power under the hood to handle anything you throw at it. Also, a great power management of this chip leads to a good battery life.

I love that the user interface performance is great too. However, you may love it or hate it since you may not really need all those extra features, so you may end up using a third-party launcher.

Some more serious complaints would be the non-backlit capacitive keys, the SIM card tray rattles quite a bit and finally, the phone is an enormous fingerprint magnet.

At the end of the day, I still love the Asus Zenfone 3 after using it for a couple of weeks but it is up to you to decide if the midrange-level chip and the previously mentioned shortcomings are important to you or not.

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Just days after clearing TENAA, Taiwan-based smartphone and PC maker, ASUS has officially unveiled its Zenfone 3 smartphone models in China. The Zenfone 3 models include the ASUS Zenfone 3, Zenfone 3 Deluxe having both SD 820 and SD 821 versions, and Zenfone 3 Ultra.

Top of the pack is the ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe, the world’s first smartphone to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chipset. The Zenfone 3 Deluxe equally features a design where the antenna bands are hidden with a premium all-metal build.

Along with the Snapdragon 821 chips, the ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe sports a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display, 6GB of RAM, and a mammoth 256GB of built-in storage. Obviously, there is no need for an SD card. There is also a cool 23MP Sony IMX318 rear camera with OIS, laser auto-focus, RBG color sensor calibration. The rear camera is protected by sapphire glass and  an 8MP front-facing selfie shooter completes the set up.

The Zenfone 3 Deluxe also comes with an SD 820 version with 3GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage but both versions run Android Marshmallow with ASUS Zen UI 3.0 on top. The device also features a fingerprint scanner, dual-SIM slots, and a 3000mAh battery with QC 3.0 Support among others.

The Zenfone 3 Ultra is the largest of the lot, with a 6.8-inch display having a resolution of 1080 pixels. The big Zenfone 3 Ultra also comes with a big 4,600mAh battery that supports fast charging with Quick Charge 3.0. The Zenfone 3 Ultra is powered by an Octa-core Snapdragon 652 SoC accompanied by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage on board which can be expanded up to 128GB. On the camera end, the ASUS Zenfone 3 Ultra packs a 23-megapixel primary camera on the rear and a 8-megapixel front shooter for selfies.

Next is the ASUS Zenfone 3 with a 5.5-inch Full-HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) display.  Recall that there is a low-end Zenfone 3 version with SD 430 chips, 5.2-inch display unveiled in India but this version of the Zenfone 3 is powered by the Snapdragon 652 SoC with 4GB of RAM. The phone packs 64GB of internal storage that can be expanded via microSD card. As far as the cameras are concerned, the Asus ZenFone 3 packs a 16-megapixel primary camera on the rear and a 8-megapixel front shooter for selfies and is powered by a 3000mAh battery.

The top-end Zenfone 3 Deluxe with SD 821 chips seems to be priced at 4,999 Yuan (around $750), while the one with SD 820 is priced at 3299 Yuan ($495). The Zenfone 3 Ultra carries a price tag of 3999 Yuan in China ($600) and finally the Zenfone 3 starts at  2699 Yuan ($405)

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The first  Snapdragon 821 phone, the Zenfone 3 Deluxe was announced over 2 months ago. While being the first phone manufacturer to ”announce”, we thought other manufacturers such as Samsung, LeEco or Xiaomi will beat them to releasing a Snapdragon 821 phone for sale, as ASUS is known for announcing a device but taking months to release it. But surprisingly, no one beat them to it as the Zenfone 3 deluxe is now available for purchase starting in the company’s own home country, Taiwan.

The phone costs 24,990 Taiwanese dollars which is about 5320 Yuan (roughly $800) and will be available in Glacier Silver and Shimmer Gold with the former shipping first by September 12 and the gold by September 23.

The Snapdragon 821 chip is a slight improvement over the Snapdragon 820. It has a higher clock-speed for the CPU and GPU. Qualcomm puts the improvement in performance over the SD 820 at 10%.

Zenfone 3 Deluxe Specs

The Zenfone 3 Deluxe has other things going for it apart from the new chip. It has a 5.7” Super AMOLED 1080p display with Gorilla Glass 4, 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM, a generous 256GB UFS 2.0 memory, an 8MP shooter up front, and a 23MP Sony IMX318 rear camera that is protected by sapphire glass. The rear camera has OIS, laser focus, and RGB color sensor calibration.

The phone runs Android 6.0.1 with ASUS Zen UI 3.0 overlay, has dual SIM slots, a fingerprint scanner, a 3000mAh battery with QC 3.0 Support. The Zenfone 3 Deluxe weighs 170 g and is 7.5 mm thick.

RELATED: Qualcomm Reveals Details About Snapdragon 821

If you feel you don’t want to spend that much on a Snapdragon 821 phone, there’s a Snapdragon 820 version which has 4GB of RAM and 32GB ROM that sells for 15,990 Taiwanese Dollars which is about 3400 Yuan ($510) and another 4GB + 64GB that sells for 17,990 Taiwanese Dollars (3830 Yuan/$575). All other features remain the same.

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Recently, we heard that the ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe model, which is the top-end variant in the lineup will have another version reportedly sold in some Asian countries. The major difference in the new model would be that it will be powered by the Snapdragon 823 chipset. However, now, we have just spotted a promotional material of the ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe which reveals that the phone is powered by Snapdragon 821 and not Snapdragon 823. So, the SD821 powered variant of the device could be announced later.

From what we could make out from the promotional material of the device, it looks like the Snapdragon 821 chip will upgrade the clock speed to 2.3GHz. The Snapdragon 820 is clocked at 2.15GHz, so this will be a slight upgrade. Rest of the specs seems to be the same, like 14nm manufacturing node, and Adreno 530 GPU. So, this could be the overclocked version of the chipset.

But, what about Snapdragon 823? Well, earlier we had heard rumors that Snapdragon 821 was renamed to Snapdragon 823, but looks like that didn’t happen. Further, IHS analyst Kevin Wang said earlier today that the flagships of the second half of 2016 will be powered by Snapdragon 821 and not Snapdragon 823.

The name doesn’t matter much. Whether it’s called the Snapdragon 821 or Snapdragon 823, the chip would just be a gentle upgrade to the existing Snapdragon 820 SoC. This makes sense, because 820 is already a powerful chip, and even if it was going to be upgraded within a year, it should be only a gentle one.

What are your thoughts? Do we need an even faster Snapdragon chip for 2016 flagships?

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