The ASUS Zenfone 5 is one of the three Zonefone devices that were announced at CES earlier this year. Based on Intel’s x86 Atom processors, the Zenfones run ASUS’ new ZenUI on top of Android.
The Zenfone 5 is the middle one of the three devices and comes with a 5.0-inch 720p display, dual-core Intel Atom Z2560, 2GB RAM and 8 megapixel camera. Let’s see how well it performs.
Design
One of the good things about the Zenfone 5 is the design. The phone has a simple yet elegant look to it, with an attractive spun metal finish below the display and a clean matte plastic back. There are some unsightly bezels on the side of the display but the overall design is attractive.
Despite being made entirely out of plastic, the build quality of the phone is solid. The back cover snaps on with a reassuring feel and there is no play or flex in the body. The overall weight of the device is perfectly manageable and despite the 5.0-inch display and sizable bezels the phone offers a comfortable grip for one handed use.
Going around the design we see the earpiece, notification LED and the front camera on top. The notification LED is rather tiny and it’s actually quite easy to miss even when its glowing.
Below the display are the three controls – Back, Home and Multitasking menu – something you’d expect to find on the display itself but ASUS has chosen to place them on the phone itself, thus freeing some space on the screen. The decision to move the controls out of the display doesn’t bring any real issues, although there is some delay between pressing and holding the Home button before you could swipe up to access Google Now. In other phones you can swipe up instantly.
The problem comes with the keys themselves. The back and multitasking buttons are spaced too far apart from the Home key and are a bit harder to access. Secondly, there is no backlight for the keys, which is a monumental blunder on ASUS’ part and makes accessing the keys in the dark frustratingly difficult as you have to hunt them around with your finger before you could hit them.
On the top of the phone is the headphone jack and the secondary microphone, on the right is the power button and the volume control keys with the familiar spun metal finish and on the bottom is the microUSB port and the primary microphone.
On the back, ASUS has kept it simple with the 8 megapixel lens of the camera at the top with a single LED flash below and near the bottom is the loudspeaker grille. The grille is on the tapering edge so it does not get blocked when you keep the phone on a surface and in fact helps the sound reflect towards you. It does get blocked, however, when you hold the phone in landscape mode to watch a video or play a game. And the speaker is not particularly loud to begin with.
The back cover can be removed with a bit of struggle from the side. Once inside, you will find the two SIM card slots and the microSD card slot. The battery is non-removable.
Display
The Zenfone 5 has a 5.0-inch, 1280×720 IPS panel. The display is pretty large but tends to look smaller than it is due to the considerable bezels on the side.
In terms of quality, the display has natural looking colors, sufficient sharpness and ample brightness indoors. Outdoors, however, the visibility isn’t particularly good and it tends to wash out considerably.
ASUS provides a display calibration app on the phone that lets you adjust the color, contrast and white balance of the display. It’s a lot more elaborate than the simple presets that we find on some other smartphones although I found it best left at the default settings.
Hardware, Software and Performance
The Zenfone 5 runs on an Intel Atom Z2560 “Clover Trail+ ” x86 SoC with a dual-core CPU clocked at 1.6GHz and Hyper-Threading support ( which means the OS sees it as quad-core CPU) and PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU clocked at 400MHz. There is also 2GB of RAM, 8GB storage space and a microSD card slot.
On the software side, the phone runs ASUS’ ZenUI on top