Asus has managed to surprise quite a few people at the beginning of this year. This Taiwan-based company has released a couple of ZenFone 2 smartphones, the most powerful of which sported 4GB of RAM, and was the first of its kind out in the market. To make things even more interesting, these devices were powered by Intel’s SoCs, and the highest-end one of them was quite affordable, and it’s still a really solid purchase, almost one year after it was released. Asus has also released a number of additional ZenFone 2 devices throughout the year, but didn’t make such an impact as they did back during CES in January.
That being said, the company is expected to announce the third-gen ZenFone smartphone(s) during CES next month, Asus has already sent out invitations for the event. Anyhow, back in March, a rumor surfaced saying that the ZenFone 3 could sport a fingerprint scanner, and today’s report actually confirms that in a way. According to a Taiwan-based supply chain makers, the ZenFone 3 will definitely sport a fingerprint scanner, and the Taiwan-based Elan Microelectronics and China-based Goodix will manufacture those sensors. This report also says that the adoption of fingerprint scanners is constantly rising, and that we’ll see even more devices sport them in 2016. On top of all of this, Asus’ executive has confirmed that the device will ship with a Type-C USB port.
All in all, it will be interesting to see what did Asus come up with this time. The ZenFone 2 was a really well-designed smartphone, and it sure managed to intrigue us, we do hope that the ZenFone 3 will be as well. The company has been doing really well in 2015, and especially in Southeast Asia, India, Brazil, Russia and Taiwan. The company plans to expand its business even more next year when they plan to enter Myanmar, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt and Nigeria. It is also worth mentioning that Asus expects to ship 20 million smartphones before the end of this year, and plans to increase that number to 30 million in 2016. These numbers seem reasonable, and it remains to be seen if the company will be able to meet both of those sales targets, stay tuned.