- Who would've thought Asus would make it
to eight iterations of their Zen Fone lineup
and still not spell phone right.
It's P-H-O-N-E Asus, not F-O-N-E.
I can have some fun with these.
Who am I? Who am I?
No, you don't get an Einstein vibe?
- [Brandon] No!
(chuckles)
- You know what? What'd they say, "Defy ordinary"?
I'd say this is a better-than-bare-minimum
included phone case.
I really don't like those clear,
kinda vinyl-y plastic ones.
This is kind of a harder plastic.
Feels a little more robust.
Oo! It's kinda weighty, but actually compact.
Oh, Interesting.
Wow, it's really holdable.
This is a kinda different-y feeling phone.
It's got like a...
It kinda reminds me of the Galaxy S6 or S7,
but more modern-feeling in the hand, somehow.
So you don't have that two and a half D glass
that you see on a lot of the newer flagship phones.
A lot of people will like that.
A lot of people prefer a flat glass.
But in terms of the shape, right,
and the antenna bands it does kinda remind me
of those other phones,
but then I also get kind of like a
almost couple-generation-ago
like a Pixel 2 vibe to the feel of it.
'Cause it's gotta nice skinny screen,
it's got the color accented lock button.
Actually, we should probably go through the rest of the IL
and then it's like, it's like kind of, it's thicker,
rather than being a super skinny slab.
It feels really good in the hand,
and the curve, the curve back here,
is just kind of perfect for sitting in your hand like that.
I really like the hand feel, bare in mind of course,
I do have slightly smaller hands.
Another thing that is a bit of a blast from the past is,
of course, the inclusion of the 3.5 millimeter jack.
Got our volume rocker over here,
we've got a USB-C port that can take up to
30 watts of power for quick charging.
It's a 4,000 milliampere battery
and then around back,
we've got a dual-camera system
with a 64, and a 12 megapixel Sony sensor.
This is kind of a funny one to me.
In Asus' marketing materials,
they actually say, "Hey, the 64 megapixel one is like
really good, so you could just use that
as your telephoto lens and just zoom in."
It's like, "Yeah, especially some of the
earlier dedicated telephoto lenses on phones.
That has kind of always been the case that
when they had inferior sensors on them
but longer lenses, you could just use your main shooter
and just digitally punch in and it looked as good,
if not better."
These days though, especially with a lot of the, ya know,
AI fixing that's done by folks like Apple, and Samsung
that's not really the case anymore.
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So this is the links in the description
to find the repair kit for your phone.
30 watts, max charging, right, there?
And they include a Type C to Type C cable.
Thank you, Asus.
Under screen fingerprint sensor.
Feels pretty responsive but we won't know
until we actually go to unlock the phone.
Oh, that's interesting.
Maybe due to the smaller screen, but Asus opted
to, set it to gesture-based navigation by default.
So far, ya know, checking out some underwear
on LTTstore.com, you wanna go back,
just a little something like that.
And then if you want to multitask,
little something like that.
Interesting, I mean, you don't really have a ton of
space, even though the chin bar and forehead bar
are both very respectable.
It's not like you have a ton of space on this screen
to take up with buttons in the light.
Now that, is an improvement over those older phones.
It's got a 120 hertz E4 Samsung AMOLED display
that peaks at, I think it's, 1,000 nits of brightness.
So that means, if you were to fire up Netflix,
or any other HDR capable video watching program,
like, oh I don't know, say, let's head over to YouTube.
You are probably going to be getting a better HDR experience
on this screen than you would on the main one
in your living room.
Of course, because this isn't really that large
of a phone screen, I can't say that I would recommend
doing all of your movie watching on it.
You can see that while it is easily one-handable,
it's pretty small, even compared to an older flagship phone,
like my daily driver, Note 9.
Surprisingly, nice feeling haptics,
that's kind of unexpected.
A lot of the time, on more budget-oriented phones,
that's one of the first things that they just
don't bother putting the work into because
it doesn't really show up on the spec list
the way that the SOC or the RAM, or whatever else, do
and it's easy to just ignore it.
But they actually feel pretty nice.
Oh! Actually, we should talk about the specs
because while I've referred to it as
more budget-optimized, it still has
flagship-ish internal specs, making it
a really unusual, almost like a Sony-esque phone.
It's, ya know, small, when every other flagship
is gigantic these days.
But it still has a Snapdragon 888 processor,
up to 16 LPDDR5 memory, up to 256 gigs of UFS 3.1 storage
Bluetooth, 5.2 Wifi 6, basically everything that
you would expect from a flagship phone,
except there's like that weird stuff missing.
I guess to fit into this compact frame.
Like normally, you'd see a triple camera
or you'd have wireless charging,
that's like reverse charging, all that kind of stuff.
But they were like, "No, we're going for compact,
high performance, but lower price
and maybe some of the pre-chart comfort features
aren't really present.
There's no micro SD expansion, but
it does have dual SIM.
Man, that is, that is a yeah, a good looking display.
Oh yeah, one of the other selling points that
you wouldn't normally find on a...
I don't even know what this thing is.
It's not, it's like budget flagship, I guess,
but that you wouldn't find on a
budget phone is an amplified earpiece speaker for stereo.
Uh, I think this one should have it though.
Yeah.
So you get the bottom firing speaker,
along with the amplified earpiece speaker.
It's a lot harder to put decent speakers in a
small frame like this.
Man, that display looks really good.
Yeah, I would keep my expectations tempered,
in terms of the camera.
Asus is doing a better job than they ever have in the past,
but it's not, um, ya know, the most exceptional thing.
(camera clicks)
Mm, after processing, it looks a little bit better
than the viewfinder does, so credit for that.
'Sup surge?
- Eh, not much, you?
- Eh, I'm pretty good.
- Is it doing that recording there for ya?
- Oh yeah.
- Nice.
- Alright, sweet.
Oh, now it seems like uh,
(camera clicks)
as a good of time to mention as any,
that Asus has another version of this phone though,
the Zen Fone 8 Flip.
And that one is 6.6 inches, instead of 5.9 inches
on the display, it has their like, rear camera.
It's a triple camera range, it flips around instead of
having a hole punch selfie camera on the front,
which I'm still not a big fan of.
Especially, with how it's sort of
wide the bezel around it is on this particular one.
It's got a 5,000 milliampere battery,
rather than a 4,000 milliampere battery.
A couple other key upgrades, but also some downgrades.
So, it has SD card expansion,
but the display doesn't get as bright.
Honestly, I think this one is, was the right one to send me.
Because if nothing else, it's pretty unique.
Like, Snapdragon 888 in this form factor,
almost nobody is doing anything like that.
And as long as you don't care about wireless charging,
I would say, that you would be getting basically everything
that you could need unless you are like,
a shutterbug, then you wanna take
the best possible mobile photos.
Yeah, it's one-handable.
Oh yeah, it has the response, okay.
Unlock speed, not bad.
Not great, not the fastest I've seen, it's no One Plus,
but not bad at all.
I like it and I like telling you guys to
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