Asus Zenfone Selfie first impressions: 13MP front camera for the selfie obsessed

Asus announced a series of phones and tablets at its maiden Zen Festival event in New Delhi yesterday. Asus Chairman Johnney Shih launched the Zenfone 2 Deluxe, Zenfone Selfie, Zenfone 2 Laser along with showing a sneek peek at Asus’ high capacity battery sporting phone – the Zenfone Max.

Apart from this the Taiwan based company also announced the ZenPad 7.0 and ZenPad 8.0 along with a series of accessories such as the Zen Flash, Lolliflash and so on.

We had a brief hands on time with the Zenfone Selfie and here are our first impressions. The Zenfone Selfie was originally announced at Computex 2015. The phone is priced at Rs 15,999.

This phone looks exactly like its other siblings in the Zenfone 2 family, having the same plastic body with a brush metal finish on the rear side, curved arc back, the power button on top and volume rocker behind and so on. Our issues with the power button placement remain. However, the build quality isn’t bad.

The one major addition is the placement of a 13MP front-facing camera along with dual-LED flash, the same setup that is also there on the rear side of the Zenfone Selfie in addition to a laser auto-focus section placed just on the left hand side of the camera. This is similar to the Zenfone 2 Laser which was announced by Asus yesterday.

The Asus Zenfone Selfie sports a 5.5-inch screen with a 1920×1080 resolution along with a 403 ppi. It is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor. The new smartphone will come in two RAM variants – 2GB RAM and 3GB RAM. It also comes with an option to choose between 16GB or 32GB of inbuilt storage and can be further expanded up to 64GB via microSD card.

It also sports the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS with Asus’s proprietary ZenUI skin atop it. As we had mentioned in the Zenfone 2 review, there is a lot of bloatware, which was also visible on this phone. The model that we were trying out was quite smooth in operation and there was no unnecessary lag.

The main USP of the phone is its 13MP front-facing camera. It employs a 1/3.2-inch Toshiba sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and a 24mm focal length where as the rear camera has a 1/3.2-inch Toshiba sensor with an f/2.0 aperture with a 28mm focal length. Both the cameras also come with the laser autofocus system which helps acquiring focus quickly.

The user interface of the camera is similar to the one we saw with the Zenfone 2. The front-camera gets features such as HDR mode, selfie-panorama mode, selfie low light mode and you can adjust the beautification mode in real time. The image quality looked decent. We will need to review it properly to give a verdict on its performance as a selfie-camera.

It is good to note that Asus has priced the Zenfone Selfie under Rs 20,000. We had seen the Micromax Canvas Selfie earlier, which also sports a 13MP front camera but has a MediaTek MT6592 SoC along with 2GB of RAM and that is priced around Rs 15,999. Asus has priced its Zenfone Selfie at that exact price. The other competitor is the HTC Desire EYE, but that comes for around Rs 35,500, which is more than double the Zenfone Selfie’s price. We will be doing a full review of the phone once we get it.