ASUS Zenfone 2 Deluxe Special Edition Review

OS, UI, and Apps

The Asus ZenUI looks simple yet really clean with very little footprint so it feels light and almost bloatware-free. The pre-installed Zenlink collection includes PC Link, Remote Link, Share Link and Party Link. As mentioned earlier, storage won’t be a problem with the Special Edition since it carries a total of 256GB. This comprises of the 128GB of internal space with (111GB available right off the bat) plus the included 128GB microSD card. With this amount of storage, you can put music, videos, and games in your phone and take lots of photos without worrying of running out of space.

Working on an Android Lollipop version 5.0 with the company’s ZenUI layered on top, the handset showed snappy performance while browsing through its UI. There are a few customizations and refinements introduced with the ZenUI. While you’re limited to a maximum of 7 home screens, you can customize the scroll effects, transitions, and animations to your liking.

There’s even that gesture motion feature where you can draw a letter on the screen when it’s off and it will wake up and immediately run a specific app or feature. The first time we saw that was with the Oppo Color OS. It’s quite apparent that Asus learned a trick or two from other vendors and incorporated them to the Zen UI.

Camera

ASUS has been boasting its PixelMaster camera since the first Zenfone and the Zenfone 2 claims to have better optics, starting with the 13-megapixel rear camera.

We took notice that even the sensor on the Zenfone 5 can get good exposure even on low-light environments. That holds true with the Zenfone 2.

Samples above show the 13MP rear camera of the Zenfone 2 takes really good photos in general with much better results in macro mode. Low-light photos appear brighter than usual, thanks to PixelMaster, but accuracy on focus is a hit or miss (we took 4 successive shots of the grill picture above and only 2 out of 4 in focus).

Video recording is equally good at full HD 1080p. There is video stabilization but that is limited to 720p resolution.

There are a lot of options to tinker around with the camera alone — from setting manual ISO between 50 to 800, exposure values form -2 to 2, anti-flicker from 50Hz to 60Hz, anti-shake enhancements, and HDR.

Continued in next page: Performance and Benchmarks, Connectivity and Call Quality, Battery Life, and Conclusion