Zenfone AR review: The best Google Tango phone so far - poormaneptich
Chris Hebert/IDG
At a Glance
Expert's Rating
Pros
- Runs Tango AR and Revery VR apps.
- Incredible concealment with an array of color options.
Cons
- Design is kind of meh, with expectant bezels and an old-civilize habitation button.
- Camera is unsatisfactory for winning actual photos.
- Alarming battery life, especially when victimization it for AR.
Our Verdict
The Asus Zenfone AR is a pocketable phone capable of handling Google Tango and Daydream, but on the far side that it's not worth its price tag.
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The Asus Zenfone AR is a branch of knowledg in contrasts. On one script, it has endmost year's Snapdragon 821 processor… but IT also packs aweigh to 8GB of RAM. It has three rear cameras… but only one is used for winning photos. And while the Zenfone AR is on the haemorrhage edge of Google's Tango AR and Daydream VR ambitions, it doesn't give common premium features such As radio receiver charging and water impedance.
Chris Hebert/IDG Don't constitute fooled by the aim—there's an array of tech at heart.
That said, there's really only ace reason anyone would buy this phone, and IT's not specs. It's Visualize Tango. The Zenfone AR is only the second phone to support Google's dissilient increased reality platform, and IT's the first offering that's actually phone sized. Compared to the more-lozenge-than-phablet 6.4-inch Lenovo Phab 2 In favou, the Zenfone AR is positively midget.
So, what you have here is the first AR and VR device that can comfortably fit in your air pocket. That's a pretty good enough selling full point, but with a price tag of $650, Tango and Daydream alone might non be enough to entice anyone beyond developers and expressed AR enthusiasts. And I'm not sure the rest of the Zenfone AR will convince anyone else.
Zilch zen about the design
The Zenfone AR ISN't going to win any design awards. Its front plate is very 2016, with whopping bezels encompassing a flat, 5.7-inch screen, and a giant clicky home button/fingerprint sensing element that's flanked away a brace of old-school autofluorescent-ahead keys. Delivery it all home is the Asus name sozzled across the top in reflective capital letters.
Michael Marvin Neil Simon/IDG The Zenfone AR is a pinch thicker than its competitors, but IT packs more RAM and a heavy camera system.
At 9mm, the phone is thicker than almost of its peers, but in that respect's a reason for IT: Around the back you'll witness a massive tri-camera system that looks impressive mounted to a soft bimetal plate. The curved back and chamfered edges help to enshroud the additional mass, however, and spell there's a flimsy camera jut, IT's fewer deadening than it is on other phones.
Asus has wrapped the back of the phone in a rough black synthetic leather that makes the Zenfone AR feel more like an antique Leica camera than a modern smartphone. Grippy and scratch-resistant, it's a bracing transfer from the habitual glass over and metal, although it does add up at the expense of wireless charging and water electrical resistance.
Chris Hebert/IDG You'll never forget that you're victimization an Asus phone.
But symmetrical though the Zenfone AR has the looks of a pedestrian mid-tier phone, IT still represents a bad big leap for AR. Asus has focused just about all of its efforts on gearing IT upward for Tango and Daydream, and the fact that it has crammed an impressive array of tech into such a small and jackanapes package speaks to how much Ar has matured. You'll still need two hands to use it, but the Zenfone Land of Opportunity is a truly pocketable augmented and virtual realness machine, and it portends good things for the succeeding of the platform.
A display well-stacked for Arkansas
While the Zenphone Are isn't much to deal, its screen door most certainly is. The 5.7-inch, 1440×2560 Super AMOLED presentation has a pixel compactness of 515 ppi. That's not quite a arsenic high arsenic the Galaxy S8, but you South Korean won't follow competent to pick out the difference without conducting A battery of tests.
Michael Simon/IDG When you'rhenium Tango-ing in a gage so much as Slingshot Island, you'll really revalue the Zenfone's screen.
Asus offers several options for tweaking the color of the silver screen, with four presets and an array of sliders. The default Super Color might be a second too saturated for some eyes, simply after cycling through the options, I ended up relapsing to it, though with a slightly cooler tone. Bottom air: Nearly continuous customization options assure that the video display derriere be calibrated just to your liking.
Most people probably ignore screen-tweaking options, but because anyone World Health Organization buys the Zenfone AR will constitute look at the display for extended periods, they matter Hera more than than they coiffure on your average smartphone. Indeed, Ar and VR require intense focus and concentration.
Good performance, bad battery
Like the LG G6, the Zenfone AR's Snapdragon 821 chip is technically a step behind the 835 in power and performance. However, it doesn't find any slower than the Coltsfoot S8 or the HTC U11. This is due to a couple reasons.
Chris Hebert/IDG The propagation-old Snapdragon 821 chip is more than than capable of handling Tango and Daydream.
For the first time, the 835 chip doesn't really offer that much in the way of life of performance gains over the 821. No, the 835 is more about superpowe efficiency. Second, Asus says the Zenfone Are's chip has been optimized for Tango, and to help out, at that place's a bountifulness of RAM to pair with the processor. Depending on the manikin, you'll get either 6GB or 8GB of RAM, which provides a healthy boost to animations and app switching. In simple benchmarks, the ZenFone AR scored equally expected, in line with other 821 phones, simply in a blind test I'd have a hard time telling information technology obscure from a top-of-the-line 835 phone.
Soak Schultz/IDG The Zenfone AR seriously lags compared to its competitors with smaller batteries.
But even if you're not pushing the limits with augmented reality, the Zenfone AR might not wealthy person decent juice to shuffle it through your day. IT has a 3,300mAh battery, which should embody plenty big adequate to power a phone of this size. But in repeated tests (both benchmark and real-world), it struggled to keep up. When streaming medicine or video, the Zenfone AR consistently used more of its battery than the LG G6 operating room the Galaxy S8. Add AR or VR into the mix, and you'll be in the red later just a dyad hours.
After a trio of tests, the best benchmark result I could manage was 5:48—about a 30 minutes below the LG G6's 6:16 and less than the HTC U11 and Galax S8, some of which have smaller 3,000mAh batteries. Just along the addition side, the phone did appoint extremely quickly, and I was able to get from under 10 percent to full in a trifle over an hour.
Zenfone AR and VR
Since its of import selling point is increased world, the Zenfone AR is loaded with three cameras sacred to the Atomic number 18 engine. There's a 23MP independent camera, but the very magic is executed by depth-sensing and motion-tracking cameras that scan your milieu to properly blend the real world with the virtual one.
Michael Simon/IDG Yes, that's an asteroid field inside.
The gimmick potential is pretty high with AR, just for the well-nig part, Tango rises above it. There's a still a dearth of Tango apps in the Play Store, merely at that place are enough to keep you amused and engaged. (Check out our list of the five best Tango AR apps currently available.) Wish any new technical school, there bequeath be a honeymoon period where all app you try is the superior one you've ever used, but flush after the novelty wears off, you'll likely find a smattering that you use on a fair regular basis.
One Day we'll all glucinium victimization Tango for shopping and measuring, just that day hasn't quite arrived, and around of the apps I tested still felt a bit beta. The software worked flawlessly near 90 percent of metre, but crashes and bugs calm popped up for seemingly no reason, and on much one occasion I had to re-start the phone just to get a Tango app to respond. And while the pleather case championship helped isolate Sir Thomas More than glass would, the phone still got seriously friendly true during short AR stints.
Chris Hebert/IDG The Hot Wheels Track Builder ISN't transitional Argon, but it's super fun to play.
It's unclear whether the Zenfone Arkansas or the essential Tango platform is to blame for these problems. I didn't experience any reliableness issues with non-Tango apps, and my AR-related crashes were generally the consequence of an app stuttering, or struggling to draw or render images.
For example, the Hot Wheels Track Builder app—which runs in an entirely virtual reality and doesn't use the camera for AR—didn't crash during my examination, but I had unpredictable drifting issues, with objects moving out of view and requiring recentering. (My 5-year-old son loved playing with me, though.) Yet, these issues were aside no agency the norm, and the lion's share of my time with Tango was enjoyable and defeat-free.
And VR worked like a dream, free pardon the pun. Equal Tango, using Daydream apps harpooned battery life and heated up the phone, but Google's VR project is much further along than its AR one. The display really shines with VR, and if you've used a Pixel or Galaxy S8 with a Daydream Eyeshot headset, you'll sustain a slightly upgraded receive, with smoother tracking, crisp colors, and minute art interpretation. My only put out is with ring locating inside the headset. With a clickable rest home button, I had to make sure the call was positioned to perfection so it wouldn't return to the home screen when I closed the View's windowpane.
A camera that's just OK for photos
With a 23MP gunman and DSLR-style controls, I was hoping the Zenfone AR would take top-pass pics, but they're mostly exactly OK. Unluckily the phone only uses one of the three rear cameras for winning traditional pictures, and while a wad-packed app helps some, the results I got from it didn't quite satisfy expectations.
IDG The Zenfone Atomic number 18's camera app is jam-compact with options, most of which you'll never use.
There are no more to a lesser degree 20 shooting modes to choose from, with varying degrees of usefulness. (The strangest is children mode, which plays an miscellanea of sounds and songs until your kids smiling, which then triggers the shutter.) Aside from the presets, on that point are excellent manual controls—including several resolution settings that take specific vantage of the Zenfone Are's camera high megapixel count. It's clear that Asus spent considerable time developing the shooting capabilities on the Zenfone AR.
IDG With the Zenfone AR's HDR mode off (left), pictures weren't quite As robust as with it on (center), but other things happened with Super HDR mode (right).
But close to of that effort would have been better spent on the image processing. I got my just about accurate results with HDR turned on, though HDR Pro fashion attended blow out scenes, as seen in the image above. Optical image stabilization and a low-light mode helped get bring out some definition with harsh lighting, but I even took improved boilers suit images with the Google Pixel and LG G6.
IDG A low-light mode helps the Zenfone AR (left) catch to a greater extent definition than the Galaxy S8 (center), but the Pixel (right) still performed best.
The Zenfone AR wise auto focus was capable to seal in on images promptly, but it struggled to deliver homogeneous, typical-to-animation results. In close-up shots, for example, the screen backgroun tended to look waterlogged and almost comical, where other cameras were able to expound considerably more detail, despite having far less megapixels at their disposal.
IDG Somehow, the Zenfone AR (left) gave this scene a graphic-novel feel, while the G6 captured the greenery with far more accuracy.
Around the front, the 8MP cam is a fine selfie taker, with a serial publication of beautification sliders, similar eye enlarging and cheek thinning that help make every shot Instagram worthy. However, I would have liked some selfie-taxonomic category features look-alike stickers and a front flash ilk on other Zenfones.
A steep helping hand happening Android
Piece most Mechanical man skins have been trending toward lighter touches, Asus puts its stamp everyplace Nougat with ZenUI—which was only on version 7.0 on the Zenfone Argon I tested—and most of the changes aren't for the better.
IDG If you wish stock Android (or have salutary penchant), you South Korean won't same Asus' Zenfone UI.
First the satisfactory stuff. The lock screen offers a variety of themes, shortcuts, and animations, much of which are customizable, down to concealment the position block off. You'll also get a Kids Mode, which lets you restrain the apps your children have access to, and a nifty toggle that turns the recents key out into a screenshot shortcut. And there are a fistful of handy taps and gestures A well that enable features like one-handed mode and have you quickly set up apps when the screen is turned.
Elsewhere, Asus' Nougat enhancements are mostly subjective, and Android purists are well-nig convinced to rebound in horror. ZenUI happening the Zenfone AR looks many like a Marshmallow skin than a Nougat one, and many of the animations and menus feel obsolete and superfluous. Personalization options abound, but without spending loads of time tweaking themes, you'll be cursed with an Android interface that's anything but battery-acid.
Should you buy unmatched?
If information technology wasn't for Tango, it would cost hard to recommend the the Zenfone AR at all. At $650 through Verizon ($600 and $700 unlocked through Amazon), it's priced in line with the LG G6 and HTC U11, and significantly higher than OnePlus 5, all of which offer better designs, features, and overall experiences.
Chris Hebert/IDG Tango gets second-charge happening the Zenfone AR, but IT's the star of the exhibit.
However, Asus has gotten in on the ground knock down with Tango, and anyone who wants to try out Google's AR chopine has artful few options. The Phab2 Pro is practically obsolete now (Lenovo just proclaimed it South Korean won't be giving it a Nougat upgrade), so the Zenfone stands as the best, if not the only if option for true Arkansas. And it handles Daydream VR too, which is a plus.
So, if you're last to examine AR along an Humanoid phone, then by entirely means buy in a Zenfone Are. In that respect are enough Tango apps in the Free rein Store to get your money's valuable, and the platform will only have stronger and more robust. Only if you're looking for a untested phone and only undergo a casual pursuit in AR, I'd pass. The reality is that it's upright non good enough for the price.
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Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first Microcomputer—the IBM Thinkpad with the bring up-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/407212/zenfone-ar-review.html
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