Asus unveiled the ZenFone 6 in Valencia, Spain, yesterday evening. The new Asus flagship smartphone has a number of standout features and attractions. Probably the first thing you will notice is the motorized flip camera, Asus' design for facilitating selfies using a full-screen phone. We have recently seen pop-up, sharks fin style, and rotating cameras, but without experience of all these designs it's hard to know whether the Asus solution is better or just different. Other standout-specs of the ZenFone 6 are its; 6.4-inch edge-to-edge display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, a 5,000mAh battery, and the starting price of €499.
As well as being an interesting design, the flip camera sounds rather capable. The filp portion includes a 48MP Sony IMX586 sensor and boasts a f/1.79 aperture, 1.6um pixels, and 2x1 OCL PDAF autofocus. It is accompanied by a secondary 13MP camera with ultra-wide (11mm) view plus distortion correction. The cameras offer HDR+ enhanced photography, a Super Night mode, auto tracking focus, and more. Additionally the rotating flip mechanism can be adjusted from 0-180° via the camera interface for comfortable shooting at various angles. If you drop the phone, a sensor will notice and attempt to retract the camera safely ahead of any impact.
The new Asus ZenFone 6 is built around a notchless NanoEdge all-screen display that's covered with Corning Gorilla Glass 6. The screen is an IPS-type panel with 2340 x 1080 pixels and pushes out 600nits peak brightness, offering 100 per cent DCI-P3 colour. Inside you will find an octa-core 7nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor. This is accompanied by 6GB/8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB/128GB/256GB of built-in UFS 2.1 storage (plus microSD up to 2TB). Asus has managed to squeeze a 5,000mAh battery into the new ZenFone 6 - said to be OK "for up to two days non-stop use," or 21hrs of Wi-Fi web browsing, and it can charge up again quickly via Quick Charge 4.0 support.
Asus has fitted stereo speakers to the ZenFone 6 and it boasts ZenEar Pro sound, DTS-X 7.1 surround and Qualcomm aptX capabilities. A 3.5mm headphone jack is present. Other key specs include; WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2.4GHz / 5GHz, slots for dual-SIM (4G) plus microSD, the rear fingerprint sensor, a dedicated Assitant or smart command button, Dual-LED flash, 1080p at 240 fps / 720p at 480 fps video recording, and Android Pie with new Asus ZenUI 6. The ZenFone 6 measures 159 x 75 x 8.4-9.1mm and weighs 190g. Full tech specs are available on the official product page.
The Asus ZenFone 6 will be available from €499 with 6GB of RAM plus 64GB of storage. Pre-orders are open in Europe today with shipments expected to start at the end of next week.
