ASUS is, to a lot of people, still a company known for their laptops, PCs and perhaps more recently their gaming hardware. The company has been branching out over the last few years however, and have been instrumental in a number of things where Android is concerned. They were first in line with a tablet to feature a keyboard way back during the Honeycomb days with the EEE Pad Transformer, and they helped Google make affordable tablets worthwhile with the first and second-generation of the Nexus 7 tablets. More recently, they’ve made a name for themselves with the ZenFone line of smartphones. Last year, during CES 2015 they wowed onlookers with the ZenFone 2, a device with specs unheard of at the prices they were asking for and throughout 2015 the phone enjoyed global success. Now, ASUS is back with the ZenFone Zoom.
The ZenFone Zoom has been announced previously a couple of times before, and there are a few variants that have been seen before. For the US market however, ASUS is using CES 2016 to make some more announcements, namely that the ZenFone Zoom will be available in February of this year for $399. For that 400 dollar price tag, users get the familiar 5.5-inch 1080p display as other ZenFone devices as well as a quad-core Intel Atom processor and 4GB of RAM, with 64GB of storage. The Zoom is of course all about the camera, which is itself a 13-megapixel SmartFSI sensor made by Panasonic, with a 10-element lens designed by HOYA. All of this comes together with ASUS’ smart software known as PixelMaster to offer a shooting experience that has 3x Optical Zoom, Optical Image Stabilization as well as Laser Autofocus that can focus at 0.03 seconds. The real party trick however, is that the ZenFone Zoom can take four 13-megapixel images and combine them to create an image of 52-megapixels.
With 64GB of storage as well as being the thinnest smartphone in the world to feature 3x Optical Zoom, there’s a lot going on in the ZenFone Zoom. ASUS is pretty proud of their new hardware and they’re showing it off during CES while announcing new details. Hopefully we’ll be to get some hands-on shots and a look at what ASUS has come up with while roaming the show floor and hotels in Las Vegas this week.