Asus released two new iterations in its Zenfone 4 series of smartphones; Zenfone 4 Selfie and Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro. Both of the smartphones are selfie centric and comes with the dual camera for selfies. There is quite a difference between both the smartphones, in hardware and price as well. The Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie is available for buying and is available for Rs. 15,000. We got our hands on the Asus Zenfone Selfie smartphone, and this is our initial impressions.
Design
Zenfone 4 Selfie looks like a basic smartphone with nothing exciting running around it. The front panel is white with 5.5 inches HD (720 x 1280p) display covered with 2.5D curved glass; there is no protection on display. Below the display is the capacitive home button with embedded fingerprint sensor, back and recent apps buttons are also there. Above the screen are the two cameras and the selfie LED flash and other necessary sensors.
The phone is metal unibody, made of some kind of aluminum with a matte finish all over. The top edge has the 3.5 mm audio port with a secondary microphone, left edge has the SIM card tray, volume rocker and power buttons are on the right edge and the bottom edge got the micro USB port and the speaker grills either side.
The back of the phone is mostly empty with the primary camera and LED flash beside it. Below is the ASUS branding logo and some other relevant information are provided at the bottom part. We can also see the two shiny antenna lines running across at the top and bottom part of the back panel.
Camera
The primary camera is 16MP with 80 degrees field of view; it comes with Phase detection autofocus and an LED flash. It can record 1080p Full HD videos at 30 frames per second with 3-axis Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) to stabilize the videos. It can even capture pictures while recording a video.
The secondary (selfie) camera is a setup of two camera sensors; 20MP and 8MP with an LED flash. The main selfie 20MP camera is a normal shooter, but the 8MP sensor is a wide angle lens for wider selfies. The camera also comes with selfie panorama mode which enables to capture wide-angle selfies.
The picture quality of the shots we took from the rear camera are not outstanding; we saw a lot of smartphone cameras can do the same with less powerful hardware. The selfies are good, but they all lack that effect which we all were looking for in the pictures because of the powerful hardware. Panoramic selfie is of high quality, and the phone creates a perfect picture with no stutter.
Performance
The Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor which is a lower mid processor. It further is supported by the Adreno 505 GPU and 3GB RAM; the internal storage is 64GB which is also expandable using the dedicated micro SD card slot in the SIM card tray.
On the performance side, the smartphone is perfect for a daily use and the performance in gaming is lag free even at high graphics. The multitasking is buttery smooth, and there is no reloads in any app or even in the browser. It comes preinstalled with the latest Android 7.1 Nougat with Zen UI 4.0 on top.
Other Features
It comes with 3000 mAh battery which also supports fast charging, it can charge near to full in approximately one hour. The performance is not good though, it can give you a full day of battery, but you have to charge it at the end of the day.
All the other feature works perfectly and the way they should except the Fingerprint Sensor. It’s perfect, but it shows a little delay in unlocking the phone which is the software issue, not the hardware as it recognizes the fingerprint well.
Wrap up
Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie is a good smartphone, but it fails to impress us in many camera parts like the pictures are overexposed and washes out the background. The battery performance is average to decent. Overall the performance of the phone is perfectly fine and didn’t disappoint a bit in that part. In my opinion, the camera of the smartphone doesn’t worth the money, but the performance does.
