Asus Zenfone Live Review


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Following the launch of Zenfone 3 series of smartphone, Taiwan-based handset maker Asus launched Zenfone Live in India. Taking a different route, Asus launched this smartphone a real-time beautification with live-streaming beautification app.

For the uninitiated, this app lets you see your skin smoothed and blemishes removed in real-time. It has BeautyLive app integrates seamlessly with Facebook, YouTube, and many other popular streaming apps.

Unboxing

We unboxed the smartphone recently, check out the video.

Box Contents

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  • Asus ZenFone Live smartphone in Shimmer Gold color
  • 2-pin charger (5.2V-1A)
  • Micro USB cable
  • SIM ejector tool
  • User manual and warranty information

Display, Design, and Hardware

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The Asus Zenfone Live sports a 5-inch IPS 2.5D curved glass display with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels translating into 294 ppi and 75% screen-to-body ratio. The display is decent, even though it’s not bright as expected, the viewing angles are good and the sunlight legibility is average.

Talking about the design, the smartphone is very compact measuring 141.18 x 71.74 x 7.95mm, and literally weightless at 120 grams that you won’t even feel it in your pocket. The Zenfone Live gives you full control over the grip and feels good to hold as well. This smartphone comes in a metal unibody design with a rear panel stunningly similar to Xiaomi Redmi 4A.

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There is a 5-megapixel camera on the top along with the earpiece, usual set of proximity, accelerometer, and ambient light sensors but it doesn’t have a magnetic sensor or gyroscope. Also, there is a LED light on the top left of the device to notify about the messages and calls. Just below the display, we have three capacitive buttons — back, home and menu/recent apps buttons below the display. These are not backlit but offer haptic feedback when pressed.

In terms of placements, you will get a volume rocker, a power button on the right, 3.5mm audio jack and secondary microphone on the top. Moving on to the left, this smartphone has a Hybrid Dual SIM (nano + nano/microSD) and at the bottom its bit busy with speaker grill, MicroUSB port and a primary microphone sitting right next to each other.

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On the back there is a 13-megapixel camera along with dual-tone LED flash and large ASUS branding below it.

Camera

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The Asus Zenfone Live comes with a 13MP rear camera with LED Flash, f/2.0 aperture, and 5P lens. Camera UI is simple and neat without cramming too much of options. It has various modes including Auto, HDR Pro, Beautification, Super Resolution, Children, Low Light, QR Code, Night, Effect, Selfie, Panorama, and Time Lapse. In the settings, you can access camera resolution, image quality Touch shutter, and much more options.

Talking about the real-time usage, the daylight shots are decent under natural lighting conditions. The Macro shots are above average, but it takes a bit of time to lock the focus, which is a downside. During low light conditions, the image tends to have noise all over the place. However, selecting the low light mode, before clicking makes things bit better. It has a 5MP front-facing camera with f/2.2 aperture, 1.4 um pixel size, soft LED flash, 82-degree wide-angle lens

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The front camera clicks decent selfies and also offers beauty mode that softens the skin and removes the blemishes. The front camera also has a flash, which might come handy during low light condition. Check out the camera samples (Click the image to view the full resolution sample).

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Software

The Asus Zenfone Live runs on an outdated Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Zen UI 3.0 on top. On the lock screen, you can access the camera without unlocking the device and also can access phone, message, and chrome as well. The customizable quick settings menu has toggles for power and boost, Bluelight Filter, Audio Wizard and other usual toggles. It has brightness slider on the top with auto brightness option and a shortcut to settings on top.

There are several gestures option including double tap to wake up, double tap to turn the screen off, Motion gestures and the One Hand Mode that reduces the screen’s size so that you can use the phone in a smaller window.

Coming to its selling point, this mobile has a BeautyLive app as we mentioned above. Unlike other beautify apps, this one works on a live-streaming app that helps in removing blemishes in real-time. This feature works on social media sites including Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

Out of 16GB storage, the user will get around 9.91GB free storage and out of 2GB RAM, 1.89GB of RAM is usable. and about 559MB of RAM is free when default apps are running in the background.

Connectivity and SIM Cards

It has dual SIM support and 4G VoLTE connectivity for Reliance Jio. Both the SIMs support 4G but you can use 4G on only one SIM at a time while the other SIM goes to 2G. Other connectivity features include WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. It also has USB on-the-go (OTG) support.

Performance

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The Asus Zenfone Live is powered by quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor clocked at 1.4 GHz with Adreno 305 GPU. The Zenfone Live performance was average, as we experienced lag/hang several times during multitasking, opening a new app, and typing on messenger.

At times, this might irritate you, when you want to do something urgently. Having said that, we didn’t face any heating issues though, which should not be a problem, if most of the times mobile gets hanged.

Check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.

Asus Zenfone Live AnTuTu 6

Asus Zenfone Live Geekbench 3 Single-Core

Asus Zenfone Live Geekbench 3 Multi-Core

Asus Zenfone Live Basemark OS II

Battery

The Asus Zenfone Live is juiced with 2650mAh battery that can take you throughout a day easily with casual usage. It also has several power saver modes such as Performance, Normal, Power saving, Super saving and customized. It lacks support for fast charging so it takes several hours to charge the phone. We will bring you the complete set of battery life test results soon.

Conclusion

The Asus ZenFone Live also comes in Rose Pink and Navy Black colors and is available from Flipkart, Amazon.in and other online retailers as well as offline stores across India.

Priced at Rs. 9,999, Asus Zenfone Live is the least recommended smartphone from our side as it doesn’t have anything worth to brag about. To mention few, this device lacks fingerprint scanner, powered by a three-year-old processor (Qualcomm Snapdragon 400), and offers a below average performance. Under Rs. 10,000 you can get other smartphones including Xiaomi Redmi Note 4Redmi 4 and more that offer you good performance and worth-the-money factor comparatively. Unless, if you are a desperate Asus fanboy, it’s worth skipping.

Pros

  • Light weight body
  • Compact
  • Live Beautify mode

Cons

  • Lacks Fingerprint scanner
  • Old processor
  • Mediocre camera
  • Below average performance
  • Still runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow
  • Priced on the higher side