so this is Theta zenfone 5 my full review of it the being using this find
out for the last week and it's my first phone were they notch and it's taken a
little while to get used to it luckily if you don't like it you can
actually hide it they released an OTA update just recently that allows you to
do that so it puts black either side and you won't see it so much so this is a
Snapdragon 6-3 6 mar 4 gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of storage just the vision
I have here and has micro SD card support and a 3.5 millimeter headphone
jack so they haven't done anything crazy like removed bow for those that a lot of
people like to have so this mobile phone is priced around about 350 u.s. so it is
a little bit expensive I feel overpriced really for what it is
the spec and what you're getting which I'll cover here in this review so the
design of it quite premium it is a really nice phone in hand it feels good
it looks good it's got the glass on the back of course the downside is it's
going to be very slippery and if you drop it it's gonna be a lot easier to
break here with that glass on the rear so it's got your cameras on the back you
can see so one is a wide angled sensor that is a complete and utter letdown and
they missed an opportunity here is with this one so the very muddy the photos
but below that there is a 12 megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization
this one at least does take a very decent image it's not bad at all and
considering this apparently has quite a high
DxO rating or the same rating as the Google pixel I was expecting a lot from
this camera and it does disappoint as you see later on we do have metal around
the outside you can see some antenna lines here at the top we just got a
microphone that's for noise cancellation and for voice calls now the display I'll
mention the nights you can see it's there we've got an earpiece that doubles
as a loudspeaker and it also has an LED and side there for the status led to the
side of it we've got an ambient light sensor and proximity sensor and then the
8 megapixel front-facing camera so that's why the knotch is that wide so
the screen apart from the notch of course not everyone's going to like that
you can hide it which is good but it also has a very bright panel it's 630
lux maximum brightness that I measured good color reproduction as well you use
the splendid application that provide and you can tweak the white
and tweak exactly how you want this display to look and I do like they've
included that now on my panel I have a little tiny bit of Darkness around some
of the edges on the bottom the chin is quite a small chin so they have slimmed
that down which is great and it fits in hand nicely so it's not the tallest fun
even though it's 6.2 inches it is actually a little bit shorter than some
5.99 18 by 9 aspect ratio phones the ratio and this one is 19 by 9 aspect
ratio because of the the knotch but it's basically just a 1080p display and on
the left hand side we have a sim tray so this will take either a micro sim and a
nano sim or a nano sim and a micro SD cards and the build overall is excellent
its premium definitely with the glass ok little slippery but in terms of build
quality really right up there so that's great from a Zeus down the bottom we
have eight allowed speaker now the earpiece also doubles as a loudspeaker
and it has good volume but it does distort a little bit at 100% foam I'll
give you a sample of that now
the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack also outputs really good audio quality it's
clean as clear and the loudness is acceptable it's good it's not the
loudest I've heard but it is one of the better ones now the core quality I did
have an issue with core quality that I couldn't hear the other end a couple of
times then I thought it was down to orange who is my network provider but it
turns out they released an over-the-air update just the last one it's now the
fifth update from them that fixed that problem I haven't had any problems with
call quality since then so that's one issue they have addressed now hopefully
they will address the rear cameras because that white angled sensor does
take quite a poor photo you can see from these examples here so it's not the best
I mean when you first look you say okay that's an okay photo but zoom in and
look how muddy the images it's just lacking sharpness clarity details where
are they so poor sensor or poor lens they've gone it's a missed opportunity
but the 12 megapixel rear facing camera can take a really good image if you have
a look at these samples here of course it does come with portrait mode where
the dual sensors you can get a blue background the depth effect they call it
on both the front camera using AI to stitch around your face it's not perfect
no one really gets this 100% perfect I have seen better examples and I've also
seen worse it does apparently improve with the time it gets to learn people's
faces around here and things like that and stitch things out a little better
so for front-facing camera performance the 8 megapixel sensor can shoot only up
to 1080p but it does have good electronic image stabilization as you
can see so on the rear camera we get up to 4k 30 frames per second I've noticed
that the focus is stable no focus hunting issues and the audio quality is
good the video quality as well is good now does have optical image
stabilization unfortunately electronic image
stabilization is disabled so you will see a bit of that OSI rocking around
from time to time
alright I feel for this price range kateri it is good I just hope that a
future patch as this will be able to add electronic image stabilization as well
so it comes with Android 8.0 it's not quite the latest version it does have a
recent security patch level however which is good and there's any way that
it has their own custom skin on here that logos the icon set that they've
gone with does look quite Samsung as she doesn't it it looks a lot like same Suns
and it's not really original there but the speed of the UI at least is very
quick it's very smooth chrome performance very smooth multitasking
aside by side apps as well if you wanted to do that or the absolute support it
good performance and no complaints really with it at all I do like it it is
fast the animation speed is also very short making it seem really quick to
open things up and to move around RAM management as well as good and even the
gallery performance very fast with lots of photos on board here and we never
look at synthetic benchmarks so this is the antutu score very high this is what
the AI booster mode on and what that is is a little bit of marketing gimmick and
well it actually does work out to improve the performance it will boost up
and hold the highest clocks it can on all of the cause as a result it will
true through the battery a little faster but it will improve gaming performance
and the overall the fluidity of the UI and everything just seems to be slightly
better there then we have a look at the internal storage speeds it's using an
emmc type of storage and not quite as fast
of course as ufs storage and i think for the price of
phone they should have gone with ufs 2.1 storage 3G speeds Wireless speeds GPS
everything there is working perfectly fine no issues with the signal strength
either now the battery life this surprises I didn't quite think I was
going to get seven hours but I managed to get over seven hours on screen time
from the 3300 milliamp hour battery and if you have a look at my use here it's
quite heavy so I've done quite a bit of gaming a few hours of gaming some
Chrome's and YouTube I wouldn't exactly call it light use this was continual use
mostly on wireless about 20-30 percent on data and overall it held up really
well so a great battery life there's going to be a 2-day better each phone at
least now charging times I did run into a problem that it would stop charging at
84% and later at 94 91% sorry it stopped the game charging now it could be just
my unit it may need and over-the-air update for this
so my charging times here you can see I don't know whether these are correct
because it did stop there and I was on top of it most of the time and I saw but
expect quicker times if you're not having this problem so hopefully Azusa
is going to address this I will hold on to the phone and see if the charging
issue that I have is going to be fixed so for gaming performance it is very
smooth so all of the games I tested will de tanks lineage 2 on high settings it's
smooth its playable you do see some loading lag but this even happens for me
on Snapdragon 845 Mobile's Pub G on the high settings high frame rate very
playable it's smooth and you do see a couple of little legs and stutters here
and there to be expected but overall a great gaming experience from the zenfone
5 the zenfone 5 also has face unlocking and it will unlock really quick I
haven't had any problems with it do you just basically hold it up look into it
and within seconds even not even seconds under half a second it's unlocked and
ready to go now the fingerprint reader on the rear very quick it unlocks
straightaway it's an always-on fingerprint reader so you don't have to
wake the phone you simply place your finger that you have already set up and
straight away it unlocks and you're in the system and it works ten out of ten
times alright guys so is this a phone I can recommend well first off as erst
need to lower the price and that would make it a lot easier to
recommend at the moment it's just overpriced for the chipset okay it is a
very fast phone it feels as fast as a snapdragon 8 to 1 like a flagship phone
it's really hard to tell the difference like if you handed this phone to someone
and you told them it had a Snapdragon eight four five in it they would
probably believe you of how it performs good it has really quick the animations
and just how the you I feel so they've done an excellent job there but things
aren't 100% stable now they have been pushing out a lot of over-the-air
updates but I've run into two issues the core quality issue will the fact that I
couldn't hear that other end in some calls that's being fixed so that's no
longer an issue but it was there but the problem I have now charging so we're not
charged to 100% in one go for me it's happened now twice no three times that
I've tested it it'll either stop at 84% it'll stop at eighty late 80s or even 91
or something like that so that should not be happening it should charge on one
go so it's either a problem with my unit or just a problem in general that
hopefully they can fix with it over-the-air update now the camera they
hyped it up with the camera as good as the Google pixel according to the DxO
mark now I don't believe you can trust those benchmarks anymore because it
seems whoever pays them to optimize or help optimize the cameras gets a higher
score so it's a really a paid score now so completely untrustworthy and as I saw
of my comparison make sure you check that video out by the way that even and
much cheaper phone can beat this the redmi note 5 in still shots at least not
in low light not in video but in stills and that to me was a bit of a
disappointment they're not to mean that this doesn't take a great photo
it does front-facing camera as well is reasonable we've got electronic image
stabilization but not on for cable diss but overall as a package it is a good
phone I like it you're either going to hate the notch and not buy it for that
reason and the price of it will probably put you off so if they drop the price
this will be a good phone or what I almost forgot another big con is the
wide-angle lens camera super disappointing they missed that up a
missed opportunity it really is bad so thank you for watching this review here
I hope you liked it if you're new to the channel and you like this kind of style
of review here please subscribe and I will have what happen coming soon also
check out my review of Shelby's redmi note 5 that's up here that is another
Snapdragon 636 mobile bye for now