Taiwanese tech company ASUS has announced that its press event at the upcoming CES trade show in Las Vegas will be held on January 4th, 2017. The company has already started sending out press invites for the ‘Zennovation’ event that is expected to be a launch-pad for a high-end smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 835 SoC from Qualcomm. Although neither the invite nor the dedicated webpage on its global website says anything about the rumored handset, the invite prominently features the Qualcomm Snapdragon logo on the top left corner, as can be seen from the image below. That being the case, large sections of the online tech media are now speculating about what to expect from the company at Last Vegas next month. The company recently launched its ZenFone 3 range of smartphones, which includes the premium ZenFone 3 Deluxe, the mid-range ZenFone 3 and the entry-level ZenFone 3 Laser and ZenFone 3 Max handsets.
ASUS has long been one of the most reputable names in the world of technology, and there’s no real dearth of DIY PC builders who swear by the quality and performance of products manufactured by the company. From motherboards to graphics cards, from monitors to keyboards, the company’s name has been synonymous with PC components and accessories for well over two decades now. However, even though the Taiwanese firm has a towering presence in the PC industry, it did not make a serious foray into the world of smartphones up until 2014, when it unveiled a slew of well-priced, high-quality handsets at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Named ZenFone 4, ZenFone 5 and ZenFone 6, none of the devices came with flagship-level hardware, but were mostly praised by the media and users alike for what they brought to the table at such pocket-friendly price-tags.
The ‘Zen’ branding has served ASUS well over the years, and the company is known to play around with the word while naming its products and press events. Cases in point are the bunch of ‘Zenvolution’ events the company has hosted in Taipei, Beijing and New Delhi over the past couple of years to launch its various Zen-branded products – ZenFones (smartphones), ZenPads (tablets) and ZenBooks (notebooks).