After a month full of leaks and teasers, Asus has launched the Zenfone 6 at an event in Valencia, Spain. The flagship succeeds last year’s Zenfone 5Z, which proved to be an underdog as it performed rather well and was priced close to its competitor, the OnePlus 6T. Generally, Asus brings its phones to India as well, but there is no info yet on whether the new flagship would launch in India or not. If launched, it would most likely go head-to-head with the recently-launched OnePlus 7 Series of devices.
The USP of the Zenfone 6 is not its processor, but its camera module that flips and can be used as rear and the front shooter. The Zenfone 6’s camera uses a similar concept as the Samsung Galaxy A80, that employs a similar set of camera sensors to shoot regular images and selfies. Read on to know more about what this phone has to offer.
Under the hood, the phone has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 that is coupled with up to 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of UFS 2.1 local storage. This configuration seems to be the standard for most of the flagships that are bound to launch in 2019. In comparison, OnePlus has moved on to the UFS 3.0 storage that will give it a little edge over phones that still run on UFS 2.1 storage. Digit still doesn’t have the final numbers, but we were able to get our hands on a pre-production device and it performed well. To read about how the phone performed, you can check out this link.
The Asus Zenfone 6 has a 6.4-inch IPS LCD display and delivers a 92 percent sreen-to-body ration. The display has over 600 nits of brightness with 100 percent DCI-P3 colour space coverage. Additionally, the Zenfone 6 offers a triple-slot for two SIM cards and a memory card. The phone draws power from a massive 5,000mAh battery that come with a Quick-Charge 4.0-certified 18W charger. In comparison, the OnePlus 7 Pro comes with a 4000mAh pack and the standard OnePlus 7 ships with 3700mAh battery. Both the OnePlus phones come with Warp Charge fast charging technology. The Asus handset features dual speakers paired with two smart amplifiers and it runs custom ZenUI 6 interface baked on top of Android 9. It has a fingerprint sensor on the back. The Zenfone 6 will be offered in two colour variants — Twilight Silver and Midnight Black.
The phone's USP is its camera and as mentioned earlier, the handset featrues a flip camera that swivels to double up as a selfie shooter. We saw the same concept being used on the Samsung Galaxy A80, however, there is a striking difference between the two. The Galaxy A80 has a rising mechanism and the camera module rotates to become the selfie shooter. In Zenfone 6, the whole module flips to become the selfie snapper. The module, which is made of an amorphous alloy that Asus calls “Liquid Metal” even enables users to control its angle. The camera module houses a 48MP Sony IMX 586 sensor, along with a 13MP ultra-wide camera with 117-degree field of view. The primary camera is paired with an f/1.79 aperture lens and supports PDAF while the secondary camera has a real-time distortion correction algorithm.
The Asus Zenfone 6 will be available in two/three variants: 6GB RAM + 64GB storage, which is priced at 499 euros (approx Rs 39,000), 6GB RAM + 128GB storage that will cost users at 559 euros (approx Rs 44,000), and the 8GB RAM + 256GB storage variant that will be available for 599 euros (approx Rs 47,000). It will be available in europe from May 25.