Asus announced its ZenFone 2 Laser range of mid-range smartphones at the Computex trade show in Taiwan earlier this year. The company then launched the devices first and foremost in India in early August, as part of its Zen Festival event held in New Delhi. Now the devices have been officially put up for sale on e-commerce site, Flipkart, as part of an exclusive arrangement between the country’s largest online retailer and the Taiwanese manufacturer. The handsets were originally listed for pre-order for weeks now, with a ‘tentative release date’ of September 16th. However, Flipkart has been shipping the devices to their rightful owners since late last month, going by the spate of (largely positive) reviews and comments on the site itself, and on various internet forums. Looks like both Asus and the e-tailer have now just made it official, as the pre-order tag is now gone on the website. The devices now come with a ‘Buy Now’ button, and are available for purchase at a price-tag of Rs. 9,999 ($150). Curiously though, even the smaller 5-inch version is listed at the exact same price as the larger 5.5-inch model!
Coming to the hardware specs of the ZenFone 2 Laser, the phone comes in different versions, with two distinct 5.5-inch models and a 5.0-inch variant, all featuring 13-megapixel rear cameras with laser auto focus as their USP (Unique Selling Point). All the versions are up for sale now on Flipkart, as already mentioned above. The entry-level ZE500KL and its bigger sibling, the ZE550KL have only two differences – the screen size, and the battery capacity. While the ZE500KL comes with a 5-inch 720p panel, the ZE550KL features a 5.5-inch panel of the exact same resolution and both come with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection. As for the batteries, the smaller device comes with a 2,070 mAh Li-Ion battery, while its bigger sibling carries a much larger 3,000 mAh battery. As for the cameras, all devices carry the exact same cameras, configured the exact same way, topped with the exact same software features.
The ZenFone 2 Laser ZE500KL and ZE550KL are both powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 SoC, which comes with an integrated 64-bit quad-core processor clocked at a maximum of 1.2 GHz and an Adreno 306 GPU. The handsets come with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of built-in storage, which can be further expanded by up to 128 GB with the help of a microSD card. The 5.5-inch version also has Snapdragon 615 variant, which features mostly the same specs as the more mainstream version, apart from of course the more powerful chipset. All devices come with Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box, with Asus’ proprietary Zen UI on top.