ASUS recently launched the Zenfone 3 series smartphones with some great changes if we compare it to the previous series. The phones are now slim and have a modern metallic look. One such device Zenfone 3 laser is focused on the camera segment with a pretty quick focusing technique. So let us do a Zenfone 3 Laser hands on review to find out more about it.
Zenfone 3 Laser hands on Review :
Design
As you know the smartphones in the Zenfone 3 series have this amazing design. The rear has a brushed aluminum finish with antenna lines, while the front is all white with non-backlight capacitive buttons. The Zenfone 3 Laser is a lightweight phone which weighs only 150g and is 7.9mm thick. The fingerprint sensor is a bit vertically stretched exposing more area for your fingerprint. On the bottom we have the speaker grill, micro-USB port, and the primary microphone while on the top there is the 3.5 mm jack(sigh) with secondary noise cancellation microphone. The phone has a nice build but is a bit slippery to hold in your hand. Overall I like the design of the Zenfone 3 laser apart from the fact that the capacitive buttons are not backlit. I really want to see this in the lower budget smartphones.
Display
Zenfone 3 Laser has a 5.5 inch full HD display with 2.5D corning gorilla glass. The contoured edges gives the phone a nice smooth grip. This time the phone has a bit wide display which is actually great, but you might need two hands to properly operate the phone. The brightness of the display can go up to 500 nits which means there will not be any issue while using the phone in the bright daylight. The viewing angles on this device are just great and the colors are sharp. The screen to body ratio for the Zenfone 3 Laser is 77%.
Performance
This is the part where the Zenfone 3 laser will confuse you. It comes with the Snapdragon 430 chipset with octa-core 64-bit processor clocked at 1.4 GHz. It has this massive 4GB of RAM which is unusual to be seen in this price range. On the graphics end, it has the support of Adreno 505 GPU. Now when I put it to the benchmarking tests, the phone gets a low score. Like for the AnTuTu benchmarking test it managed to score around 44000. But when you actually use the smartphone and play some high graphic intensive games, the phone will surprise you. In the normal usage the phone was quite snappy and I didn’t experience any lag. The phone performed quite well with the mid-level games and even managed to run some of the high-end games. Though I won’t recommend this device for intensive gamers. But the phone did surprise me with the performance and we don’t expect any less with this price range. The Snapdragon 430 chipset also helps in keeping the power efficiency to the optimum level. On the software side the phone runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with the ASUS ZenUI on top of it. The real time clock-weather widget on the lock screen is just amazing. They have some great themes added in their store too which can be used to customize the look and feel of the software.
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Camera
Well the Zenfone 3 Laser is all about the camera. It has a 13 MP rear auto-focus camera with f/2.0 aperture Sony lens. As for the flash it has dual tone LED flash with 0.03s laser auto-focus. The focusing is indeed fast and pretty accurate. For all those having shaky hands, the device is equipped with 3-axis Electronic Image Stabilizer for shooting stable videos. There are many camera modes available to play with. The phone has 8 MP front facing cameras that is capable of taking decent selfies. For all the people crazy about taking great selfies can use the beautification feature. Low light pictures also come out to be great with this camera.
Camera Samples :
Sound and Connectivity
ASUS Zenfone 3 Laser has this 5-magnet construction with metal voice coil for the speaker setup. I would say that the sound from the device is at the mid-level and is clear even at higher volume. There are different audio modes like the movie mode, gaming mode, music mode, smart mode etc. The connectivity options in this phone include Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, and yes it comes with USB OTG support. It supports dual SIM with hybrid memory card slot. For all the JIO users, yes it has 4G VoLTE support – good news. As for the storage is concerned it has 32 GB of ROM out of which 24 GB is user available.
Battery
Zenfone 3 Laser has a 3000 mAh battery that can easily last for the whole day with intensive 4G usage. Even if this phone is not a Max variant, the battery on Zenfone 3 Laser is quite amazing. As on the paper, it can last up to 20 hrs on 3G talktime, up to 15 hrs for Wifi Web browsing, and up to 12 hrs of video playback.
Price and availability
The price of Zenfone 3 Laser for the 32 GB variant is 16,999 INR on Flipkart. It is available in two color variants viz. Sand Gold and Glacier Silver.
Verdict
So this was the Zenfone 3 Laser hands on review. For those of you who needs a good camera can go for Zenfone 3 Laser. Also for a user having mid-level usage who requires light weight phone with large screen and good battery life can opt for this smartphone. While others can have a look at some of its competitors like Xiaomi Mi Max, Lenovo Z2 Plus or Moto M. ASUS can now actually reduce their price by a little bit to destroy its competitors and stand a better chance.
