ASUS is currently doing their press conference over in Las Vegas at CES. They announced a new Windows tablet in the Transformer Book Chi. And now they’ve moved onto their smartphones. They’ve got two new smartphones this time around the Zenfone 2 and Zenfone Zoom. The Zenfone Zoom is basically a camera with a phone on the front. It kinda looks like the Nokia Pureview camera, when you look at it from the back. ASUS is touting that this is the thinnest phone to offer 3X Optical Zoom and a 13MP camera. But that’s not all, on the camera side. The Zenfone Zoom is the third phone to have Laser AutoFocus, behind the LG G3 and the LG G Flex 2 (which was announced this morning). There is also optical image stabilization inside for those that have shaky hands and want non-blurry pictures. That’s always a good feature to toss into a camera.
The Zenfone Zoom has a manual mode so you are able to control every aspect of the camera. From the white balance to the aperature and everything in between. This is great for those camera nerds out there that want full control when capturing pictures. It is only a 13MP camera, not that is bad or anything, but with a camera that big on the back you’d expect something a bit higher. For instance the Nokia PureView smartphones are 40mp and higher cameras. It also has a 5.5-inch Full HD IPS display, so you don’t have QHD here, but still a pretty damn good screen here on the Zenfone Zoom.
Definitely nice to see more camera centric smartphones like this. But with cameras getting so good on those like the Sony Xperia Z3, LG G3, Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and others, I wonder how popular it’d be? The Zenfone Zoom will be $399 and available in the second quarter of this year.