When Facebook first announced its livestreaming aspirations, many hailed the move as revolutionary. It’s true, livestreaming on the Internet is without a doubt the fastest way to get information to the world, and livestreaming on Facebook or YouTube can give television a run for its money.
Asus
recently unveiled the Zenfone Live smartphone in India, which was being teased
days before its launch with hashtag #GoLive. It is being touted as the world’s
first smartphone with real-time beautification technology for
live-streaming.
Multiple phones from various manufacturers offer to do just
that thanks to beautification modes of their own. However these beauty
modes are restricted to photos only. What the ZenFone Live claims to do differently
is to let you have the artificial beauty enhancement feature in live videos. So
will the Asus ZenFone Live make you look good online? And how is the rest of
the package? We find out.
Look and Design
The
Zenfone Live has a typical iPhone like design, and it’s something that’s
already seen on many other phones. But that doesn’t mean the phone looks bad or
ugly in anyway, it has a very handy and lightweight design, which seems perfect
for one handed usage. The ZenFone Live
is available in three colours Rose Pink, Black, and Gold. The phone has rounded
sides and edges that make it comfortable to hold and grip. We also found it to
be light, tipping the scales at 120gms. Asus has used plastic as the primary
material for the phone and it does not feel all that premium. The smartphone is very compact measuring
141.18 x 71.74 x 7.95mm.
There is a 5-megapixel camera on the top along
with the earpiece, usual set of proximity, accelerometer, and ambient light
sensors but it doesn’t have a magnetic sensor or gyroscope. Also, there is a
LED light on the top left of the device to notify about the messages and calls.
Just below the display, we have three capacitive buttons — back, home and
menu/recent apps buttons below the display. These are not backlit but offer
haptic feedback when pressed.
The
volume and power/ lock buttons on the ZenFone Live are positioned on the right
and have the same textured finish. A different texture would have made it
easier to distinguish between the two. On the left side is the hybrid SIM tray
that can house two Nano SIM cards or one Nano SIM along with a microSD card.
The
Asus ZenFone Live has a Micro-USB port, a single speaker grill, and a
microphone port at the bottom and a 3.5mm audio socket and secondary microphone
on the top. At the back, a 13-megapixel camera sits above the single LED flash
and a metallic Asus logo is embossed near the middle.
Display
The smartphone comes with a 5-inch IPS LCD display with HD
(720p) resolution. The display gets pretty bright in outdoors. It can be viewed
from extreme angles even in bright lighting conditions. The display doesn't
produce the best colours, and looks slightly dull when compared to competing
smartphones in the category. The display has a black border on the sides, which
looks slightly odd considering the level we have reached in a smartphone
design. I would not call it a bad display but it is not an outstanding display
either.
Specifications
Asus
does not provide detailed information about the SoC inside the ZenFone
Live on its website, simply stating it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon Quad Core
Processor. Most people will guess it to be the Snapdragon 425 or be a little
grumpy at the possibility of an older Snapdragon 410. But what Asus has opted
for is the Snapdragon 400. That's right, a SoC from 2013 is powering this
phone launched in 2017. The processor is clocked at 1.5GHz and there is 2GB of
RAM onboard.
Internal
storage on the ZenFone Live is 16GB out of which around 10GB is available to
the user. Storage is expandable up to 256GB via a microSD card at the expense
of the second SIM. The battery is non removable and is rated at 2650mAh. Asus
provides a SIM ejector tool, a USB cable and a 5.2W charger in the box.
Software
The Asus Zenfone Live runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with
company’s own Zen UI on top. Asus has worked on optimisation but the icon pack,
quick settings panel, and settings menu still look flashy, which is liked and
disliked depending on personal choice.
It comes pre-loaded with several bloatware apps, out of
which, only few come to practical usage. The sad part is that you can’t remove
these apps, instead you can disable them in the settings. If you prefer
personal customisation, then this UI may be a decent choice for you. You get apps
like Facebook, Messenger and Instagram apps pre-loaded.
Out of 16GB
storage, the user will get around 9.91GB free storage and out of 2GB RAM,
1.89GB of RAM is usable. and about 559MB of RAM is free when default apps are
running in the background.
Performance
We are very
disappointed with its processor. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor. The same SoC was powering Android wearables. The choice of
the SoC is quite odd and could turn out to be an expensive mistake. However, it can easily make
up to basic tasks like calling, texting, listening to music or watching videos.
If you plan to play games on this smartphone, you better rethink once
again. Loading apps and games would
take really long and just 2GB of RAM onboard doesn't help its case. We found
the ZenFone Live to be very aggressive with RAM management forcing the phone to
relaunch most apps again. This resulted in frustrating wait times for the app
to load all over again.
One good thing is that there
are no heating issues, but the phone feels slow when browsing on Google Chrome,
scrolling through your Facebook News Feed or launching apps one after the
other.
You
can understand the performance by taking a look at benchmark scores. Asus
Zenfone Live gets very low benchmark score. It gets 26559 on AnTuTu benchmark,
488 on Geekbench 4 single Core, 1489 on Geekbench 4 Multicore. Almost every
phone in this range managed to get much better scores.
The Zenfone Live comes with a
mono 5-magnet loudspeaker. The loudspeaker grill is at the bottom which has a
fairly loud volume but with slight distortion at high tones. It sounds similar
to most other phones at this price or lower. On top of this, it comes with a pair
of MEMS microphones to send clearer noise during video calls and live stream.
All the calls made with the
smartphone are fine and I didn’t face any issue with network reception.
Camera
It supports a 13MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, autofocus
and a 5MP front camera with f/2/2 aperture, 82 degree wide angle and a LED
flash. Camera software on Zenfone Live is similar to what we have seen on
previous Zenfones. It is neatly laid out and a beginner can easily get used to
camera settings and toggles and there are lots of modes to choose from.
In our use, the phone focused quickly while shooting in
daylight conditions. In low
light, the camera took slightly longer to focus.
The rear camera captures good details and colours in natural
light that looks relatable to the original object. Moving from outer areas to indoors,
the camera interface showed lags right from the beginning, all because to the
heavy camera software.
Clicking a moving object using this phone is not recommended
at all, no matter in which lighting condition you are. It’s not that the
autofocus is slow, but the shutter lag makes it difficult to take a clear shot.
For video recording, the
camera maxes out at 1080p. Sadly there is no continuous autofocus and you'll
have to tap to focus when recording. Beautification mode is also available when
recording video but has fewer beautification options. We also noticed a slight
lag when recording video with beautification mode switched on.
The 5-megapixel selfie camera on the ZenFone Live has
1.4 micron pixels and a selfie flash, both of which help in low-light
conditions. Again performs at an
average, nothing special here. If you are of artificially blemished selfies
then you might like the beautification feature. With the beautification enabled it takes
slightly longer for the phone to process the output. The selfies lack details and clarity in most of the cases,
it’s just the natural light that helps the camera to click some impressive
selfies.
Battery
The Asus Zenfone
Live is juiced with 2650mAh battery that can take you throughout a day easily
with casual usage. On paper, the Zenfone
Live’s battery isn’t very big, and you wouldn’t expect much here. It also has several power saver modes such as Performance,
Normal, Power saving, Super saving and customized. However, the phone will last you for about a work day on
regular usage. It lacks support for fast charging so it takes several hours
to charge the phone.
Conclusion
To sum up, the Asus Zenfone Live fails to achieve the
goals Asus had in mind. This phone is the
first to have live beautification for social media. It somewhat delivers on
that front but there are too many sacrifices. The choice of an outdated
processor for the ZenFone Live is highly questionable and the missing
fingerprint sensor does not help its case. The rear camera isn’t
great either. That, and the fact that the phone is noticeably slow, means the
Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Redmi 4, Lenovo K6 Power and most others are better
smartphones than this. Unless, if you are a desperate Asus
fanboy, it’s worth skipping.
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