When it comes to something “New” leave it to ASUS for them to tap that market and make it flourish. With the #Seflie game now saturated (Still sad there isn’t a ZenFone 3 Selfie), the next step is the new generation of sharing and that is #Live.
A new generation of millennials is now on the rise, sharing their heart’s desire of what the experience live. Plus, it’s the fastest and best way to share something especially in the time of emergency or just simply important. That’s why ASUS create the ZenFone Live, designed to give you the boost of confidence to break barriers when doing Live as it beautifies you with real-time and make you camera ready.
Note: We will be giving away this unit to one lucky reader, mechanics are found below
ASUS ZenFone Live (ZB501KL) specs:
- 5-inch HD IPS display w/ TruVivid tech
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core CPU
- 2GB RAM
- 16GB storage up to 128GB via microSD
- 13MP AF rear camera, f/2.0, LED Flash
- 5MP AF front camera, f/2.2 aperture, 1.4µm pixel size, LED flash
- Dual-SIM (Hybrid)
- 3G, LTE
- WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, A-GPS
- 5-magnet speaker, FM radio
- Noise Cancellation Microphones
- Android 6.0 Marshmallow
- ZenUI 3.0
- 2,650mAh non-removable battery
- 141.2 x 71.74 x 7.95 mm
- 120 g
- Php6,995
Design
The unit we have is a Rose Pink color where it’s very favored to feminine, but don’t fret as ASUS also has navy black and shimmer gold colors for the male audience.
At the back is a full plastic body with a matte finish for the color, the device feels lighter than usual and isn’t cold to the touch. It has rounded edges at the back for a circular and complementing grip. There is a slight champer though at the side which separates the side frame and the back/front panel, so you will feel a slight bump that you will get used to.
The 3.5mm audio jack is at the top and the micro-usb port is at the bottom, we personally don’t like this setup as it will be hard to use both when you are mobile. Especially when charging the phone and listening to music and you want it to place in your pocket.
The package of the Live is straightforward with a standard adapter, earphones, cable that are all ASUS branded. Hopefully, ASUS will understand that even a simple screen protector or case isn’t hard to bundle and would greatly increase the chances of purchase as finding 3rd party accessories is very very hard.
The display is a 5″ 1280×720 HD resolution screen that is also IPS, it has good colors and decent direct sunlight visibility. One thing we like about the Live is the color reproduction, it’s vivid and give great clarity when indoor. As for the glass, no mention of any certain protection so make sure you buy a screen protector.
Performance
The Snapdragon 410 and 2GB RAM won’t impress any tech enthusiasts, but it’s decent enough for entry-level smartphone users with optimal battery life. Remember that this is the same processor that the legendary Gen 1ZenFone Max uses, it was able to last 3 days on regular use.
At AnTuTu benchmark, it scored around 26,000 to 28,000 based on our tests. If you ask us, it a bit short but gets the job done. So far with the live, the only heavy app that made it lag is the switching of the camera to another app. But it’s not significant enough to make you boil and throw the phone, the old days of slow phones are gone now.
Storage side, the 16GB internal storage will leave you around 8GB of usable space for your apps. For us advance users, that will surely fill up and a MicroSD storage will be needed. But we think it’s ample enough for 1st-time smartphone users, just make sure your photos and videos will be used via a microSD card.
Beauty Live – Livestreaming
So how is the Beauty Live app? Well, to be honest, we are shy people to face the camera and broadcast our face but the beautification feature surely helped a lot. The dedicated Beauty Live app lets you choose the beautification level you want, from levels 1 to 10 you can reduce your face’s blemishes, pimples, and other marks as well as make it glow.
You can choose between Facebook, Instagram and Youtube to broadcast with the beautification, a beauty live head will be always accessible should you need to adjust your beauty level and turn on the front LED flash.
Camera
The ZenFone Live has a 13mp rear camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) technology, including one LED flash. Photos taken with the Live are decent with accurate colors but produces grainy photos in darker conditions.
Interestingly, the best photos come out when using the special HDR Pro mode, it scans your current view from the lowest ISO to the highest ISO to get the balance of lighting. As a result, your photos in the brightest and glaring sun is still visible. The only downside is you need to have stable hands and wait for 1 second to take the shot.
Selfies are good as well, the 5MP front camera with better pixels has the better detail to normal 5mp cameras. We can see the difference between beauty enhanced and normal selfies.
ZenUI
The user interface of the Live doesn’t go at par with its old ZenFone 3 buddies, its still flexible and highly customizable. Something people with a phone at this price point will love, hopefully, ASUS would lighten a bit in segmenting their services per app as it would highly reduce confusion.
Battery Life
The ZenFone Live has a decent 2,650mAh battery, it lasts us until the end of the day leaving us around 23% in moderate use. It’s honestly battery efficient, even standby overnight will only eat around 2-3% of battery life. This isn’t even using the battery saving feature, so what more if you use the basic power saving of the ZenUI.
Conclusion
The ZenFone Live is definitely an eye-catch smartphone if your budget is less than $200, it performs decently and has a great camera for sharing both in the back and front. The Beauty Live feature might sound gimmicky for some, but you’ll find it useful especially if you are a person who is social savvy.
For Php6,995, the ZenFone Live is a good entry level smartphone to jump start your social media life. Perhaps if ASUS could have provided protection accessories out of the box, then it would have been a compelling package already.
Giveaway
We’re looking for the most interesting question you can ask about the ZenFone Live or anything about live streaming, hit us up in the comment section of this article and we will check all questions by May 7, 2017. It won’t hurt as well if you could share this article in your facebook profile publicly, we do check ?
ZenFone Live Prize includes
- ZenFone Live Unit
- Tripod
- Mirror
- Stickers
Don’t worry as we will also consider the questions from the previous live streams we’ve done. So just make sure to like Hungry Geeks Facebook Page to see the latest update from us!