Asus Zenfone 3 Laser detailed review Remember the teacher’s pet back in school? The kid who would ruin things for all others? That’s pretty much how the sub-20k market works today. Phones like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and LeEco Le 2 ruin things for most other companies. But, does that mean everyone should, or may, provide the same value? Well, Asus doesn’t think so. The Asus Zenfone 3 Laser is priced at Rs. 18,999, almost double its predecessor, and its specifications do not match its price tag, following current market trends. Why, then, is Asus betting that you’ll buy this phone? Here’s what we found in our review of the Asus Zenfone 3 Laser. Build and Design Starting with the obvious, the Zenfone 3 Laser looks similar to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. However, I prefer this design. The Laser decidedly feels lighter, thinner and more premium as well, giving it ergonomic value over its competitors. The phone nestles in your palm and the curves near the edges make it easier to use with one hand. While it does look like the Redmi Note 3, the Zenfone 3 Laser is thinner and lighter To be clear, the Zenfone 3 Laser isn’t perfectly suited for single-handed usage, but it’s still a pretty efficient design. The back has a metallic finish, which feels good, especially because of its smudge resistant, and oleophobic properties. It’s smooth and seamless, and feels more “metallic” than similarly designed phones. The body also seems well put-together and sturdy, capable of withstanding usual scratches, like those caused by keys in pocket. It may get scratched if dropped, though. The only real fault in the design is in the cuts for the micro-USB port and screws at the bottom. You probably won’t even feel them, but running your fingers across these holes reveal lack of polish. The corners of these holes are sharp, and can occasionally leave marks on your hands. The capacitive buttons on the front aren't backlit Asus' concentric circles design is seen only on the Power On/Off button and Volume Rocker Also, the capacitive back, home and recents buttons below the display aren’t backlit. Personally, I don’t mind that, but many do. You’ll find the earpiece, front camera and sensor hub above the display, and the soon-to-be obsolete if Apple has its way headphone jack is on the top as well. The biggest misstep with the Zenfone 3 Laser’s design is in the fingerprint sensor. Asus decided to go with one on the back, but with a thinner, rectangular design. This reduces the surface area for your finger to interact with the sensor, and makes it tougher to find. While it’s good at recognising your print, the smaller surface area makes it seem slower because you’ll often be shifting your finger to find the right spot. This, combined with the rather slow phone more on that later, makes the fingerprint sensor quite unsavoury. Interestingly, Asus’ peculiar concentric circles’ design can only be found on the home button, and the volume rocker on the right. This, for me, is a big positive. The concentric circles looked good on the Zenfone 5 and that family, but I’ve found them disagreeable on all Asus phones since then. The phone also has a sizeable camera bump at the back, with a shiny metal lining around the camera unit. On either sides of this are the dual-LED flash and the Laser AF system. Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the Zenfone 3 Laser’s design. Yes, Asus can refine it more, but it’s still one of the better-designed smartphones in this price range. It feels premium enough, and is even quite ergonomic, despite the display. Display You’re looking at a pretty pixel-dense display, measuring 401ppi and with a curved screen on top. It’s reasonably good with colours, although it doesn’t provide the deepest blacks. It’s on the upper end of the IPS LCD family, though, and that should satisfy most. Asus also allows you to tweak the display’s colour temperature, hue etc., using its preinstalled Hue app. There’s a slight shift in colours from some angles, but not enough to complain. The achieves maximum luminance of 598 Lux, which is not the best but works. While colours and sharpness aren’t really an issue, I’m not a big fan of the display’s reflectiveness. The glossy display affects sunlight visibility, which isn’t the best, and LED lights in your home will also be in conflict. You may have to hold the phone in your hand throughout full movies, unless you find a spot away from light sources. Further, Asus uses Corning Gorilla Glass for the screen, which is fine. However, the display is somewhat weak against oily fingers. Moreover, the touch sensitivity doesn’t seem as good as it is on most smartphones today, irrespective of price. Touch latency is good enough, but the display doesn’t feel very premium. User Interface Even Asus’ ZenUI does not feel premium. The Zenfone 3 Laser, like all other phones in the Zenfone 3 family, have ZenUI layered over Android Marshmallow, to be precise. Asus’ UI is bloated and lacks polish. There’s just too much happening on the phone. I can’t remember a time when an Asus app didn’t notify me of something I didn’t care about. Even the Splendid app, which tweaks display temperature, could simply have been put into the Settings menu. Instead, Asus created a whole new app for it, adding to clutter and disturbance. You have apps like Do It Later, Flashlight, Go2Pay, Mobile Manager, MiniMovie, Puffin and so on. All of these can be replaced by better apps from the Play Store, and I had little use for them. There’s even a Game Genie that’ll appear as a floating bubble while you game. It makes no sense, since the Zenfone 3 Laser struggles to render high frame rates on graphically intensive games in the first place. Asus has even provided a Laser Ruler app, which apparently uses the Laser auto-focus to measure the distance to an object. The app, however, can’t measure anything over 50 centimetres, and I didn’t find any practical real-world use case for it. Most of Asus’ apps can’t be uninstalled, either. You can disable them to avoid annoying notifications, but you’d still not get that lost space back, and each megabyte matters today. This is even more of an issue because all of these apps are asking for additional permissions to run, and that can be irksome. Bloatware aside, ZenUI feels like the early days of Samsung’s Touchwiz. I find it childish, and an UI made simply for the sake of differentiation. If there are background enhancements to the Android software, they’re not discernible on regular usage, and that makes the UI all the more unnecessary. The only aspect of ZenUI that’s useful and you’ll really use is Pixelmaster which is built into the camera app. We’ll discuss this when we get to the camera. Performance For me, the most disappointing aspect of the Zenfone 3 Laser is its performance. It’s a slow smartphone that doesn’t justify its price tag. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 430 SoC makes sense on a sub-10k smartphone, but not here, and especially not with a Snapdragon 820-powered device available at a lower price point the Lenovo Z2 Plus. In practice, you’ll easily find lags and stutters on the Zenfone 3 Laser. It lags heavily on games like Injustice Gods Among Us and Asphalt 8, and takes considerable durations to load. The phone’s slow single-core performance speeds increase app load times - for anything from Facebook to Subway Surfer, and calling one app from another results in noticeable lags. As mentioned before, the fingerprint sensor is slow as well. The upside with all this is that the Zenfone 3 Laser doesn’t heat up. Under a temperature of 24 degree Celsius outside, the Laser doesn’t rise beyond 38 degrees after over 15 minutes of gaming, and recording video for 10 minutes takes the temperature to about degrees. This, though, is warranted, given the weak performance. The Snapdragon 430 doesn’t support 4K video, which is disappointing for a camera-centric smartphone, and I’m willing to trade a few degrees for better performance. The Zenfone 3 Laser is slower than a last-gen smartphone like the Moto X Play. The Power Management settings offer slight customisation to the performance. You can choose between Super Saving, Power Saving, Normal and Performance modes. The temperatures above are on the Normal mode, and turning on Performance Mode doesn’t bring much of a difference, either. Our Asus Zenfone 3 Laser stress test has more on this. Camera The absence of snappy, fluid performance also means that the camera app takes a second to load. This means that you’ll often miss a moment, because the camera was loading. However, when it does load, the Zenfone 3 Laser does a reasonably good job. It has a 13MP f/ camera with the Sony IMX214 sensor and pixel size. It’s quite good under well-lit conditions and sunlight outdoors. Under white LED lights, the phone loses some details to noise, and images aren’t very sharp. However, colours are retained quite well across various lighting conditions. Essentially, you’ll be fine unless you’re zooming into photos. Asus Zenfone 3 Laser Camera Samples Asus says, the Laser AF system focuses in seconds, which may even be true under ideal conditions. In practice, though, your hand shakes and the phone will keep changing focus points the longer you point the camera at a subject. Moreover, Laser AF is best suited for close-up photography, and during low light shots. And that is where the Zenfone 3 Laser excels. Under low light, close-ups are decent, but the phone creates considerable noise and loses a lot of details when shooting scenes. Low light shots are considerably enhanced by the low light mode, though, and it is well ahead of most of its competitors. Here again, speed matters. Asus’ slow camera makes it difficult to just point and shoot. You’ll get good photos if you have the time to fix focus manually, or by tapping the screen, but the auto mode isn’t very dependable. On auto, the camera sometimes messes up the white balance and subdues colours. Pixelmaster This is where Pixelmaster comes in. Asus’ camera app gives you a Manual mode with control over ISO, White Balance, Exposure Value, Focus and Shutter Speed. There are also Super Resolution, Low Light, Manual, HDR Pro, Beautification and Children modes. Of these, the low light mode is the really useful one, but it also adds a few button taps, thereby increasing the time taken to shoot a photo. This mode basically increases image brightness, while softening the details. It’s useful, but would have been better had Asus made it a part of the regular Pixelmaster algorithm than instead of adding a separate button for it. The Super Resolution mode allows you to take 52MP photos, by taking multiple images using the 13MP camera and then combining them together. You can have some fun with it, but it remains more of a gimmick, as it has been before. In general, you’ll be using the auto-mode most often, which can shoot in HDR, HDR Auto and simple auto modes. Battery A 3000mAh battery drives the Zenfone 3 Laser, and as in the Zenfone 3, it lasts quite long. On heavy usage, with lots of browsing, calling, texts, IMs, social networking, and some video, the phone dropped from 80% to 20% battery in about 8-9 hours. That’s quite good, considering the usage. A full workday’s battery life is easily obtainable, and for many others, it’ll run for over a day and a half. In practice, charging it every night should be enough, which is pretty much the industry standard. The Performance Mode doesn’t seem to affect battery life much either, which is warranted given that the performance doesn’t increase much, either. You can use Asus’ power manager when needed, but it’s pretty standard. The more intense power saving modes turn off the mobile data and limit both the processor, and screen brightness. I wonder how difficult it would be to drop the screen resolution as well, though. That’s a feature I quite liked on Huawei’s EMUI. Bottomline The Asus Zenfone 3 Laser has a better camera than the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, LeEco Le 2, Lenovo Z2 Plus and Xiaomi Mi Max. However, these phones are also miles ahead in performance. In my opinion, what those phones lack in the camera department, they more than make up for in others, and that’s why I wouldn’t recommend the Zenfone 3 Laser over them. Asus has done a good job designing this phone, and it has a decent display as well, but there are ifs and buts all over, and the phone is not very good in overall terms. If you want a camera-centric smartphone, the Nubia Z11 Mini which we’ll be reviewing soon is a better buy. It’s cheaper and faster than the Zenfone 3 Laser, with a very good camera. Asus Zenfone 3 Laser Key Specs, Price and Launch Date Price ₹18999 Release Date 08 Nov 2016 Variant 32GB Market Status Launched Key Specs Screen Size 1080 x 1920 Camera 13 8 MP Memory 32 GB/4 GB Battery 3000 mAh Related Reviews About Me Trying to explain technology to my parents. Failing miserably. Read More

The all new Zenfone 3 smartphone series has created a buzz in the market with superior design and cutting-edge hardware specifications. With this new lineup, Asus has gone all premium by leaving the competition of budget smartphones behind. This week we have The Asus Zenfone 3 Laser for review, which follows suit in this new strategy. So how well it compares with previous versions and other devices in the series? Let’s find out! Asus Zenfone 3 Laser Review Display, Design & Build Quality With this new series, Asus has made great changes to the aesthetics of the smartphone. The introduction of Corning Gorilla Glass display with an all aluminum body has added a premium feel to new devices. The moment you hold the Asus Zenfone 3 Laser, you realize this immediately. We reviewed the Zenfone 3 and Zenfone 3 Max a while ago, and the Zenfone 3 Laser follows the same design and build quality aspects. The only substantial difference I found with the Zenfone 3 Laser is that it is lighter than the others as it weighs only 150gms and measures It’s the most comfortable Zenfone 3 series smartphone for a single handed use. The design is similar to the other devices in the series we’ve reviewed. The front is dominated by the big display above which sits the front camera speaker and sensors. Below the screen, there are the back, home and recent apps buttons which are again not backlit. On the lower side of the smartphone, there are the speakers, charging port Not USB-C, microphone and also two big screws one on each side of the charging port. These screws look odd and unnecessary placement for any smartphone in general. On the top of the smartphone, there is the headphone jack, and on the right side, you’ll find the power button and volume rockers. On the left, there is the hybrid sim card tray, which supports dual-sim 4G connectivity. On the back side, you have the rear camera with dual-tone LED flash and laser auto-focus along with fingerprint sensor and the Asus logo on the lower side. The full HD IPS display of Zenfone 3 Laser comes with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels which effectively gives you a pixel density of 401. Therefore, the display looks sharp, and color reproduction is excellent. The display is bright enough to be viewed in excessively lit conditions or under direct sunlight. I find the Splendid app that comes built-in with Asus smartphones very effective for display. It allows us to adjust the color temperature and it also has a blue light filter which protects our eyes from prolonged usage of the smartphone. Being an IPS display, viewing angles are great, therefore, watching a movie or playing games is fun. The display is a fingerprint magnet, so it needs a frequent cleaning. Performance The Asus Zenfone 3 Laser sports mighty 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 octa-core processor with a clock speed of and an Adreno 505 graphics GPU. It has 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM and has a 32GB of built-in storage which can be expanded up to 128GB via microSD card. With this device, you get additional 100GB of cloud storage on Google Drive for two years. For connectivity, it has a Bluetooth Wi-Fi Wi-Fi Direct, GPS/A-GPS, Glonass, and 4G. The only downside I found here, is the lack of USB Type-C port which now you can get in smartphones costing almost half the price as this one. Out of the two sim cards, it supports one Micro-SIM and other Nano-sim card. Users have to choose between either two sim cards or a SIM card and a micro-SD card. Both the sim cards can support 3G and 4G connectivity and the ZenFone 3 Laser supports super high-speed LTE CAT with downloading speed of up to 150 Mbps and upload speed of up to 50 Mbps. It runs Android Marshmallow with the company’s ZenUI skin on top. Asus has improved the ZenUI a lot over the years, and most noticeable features are the Zen motion gesture, animated clock and widgets and motion effect on the home screen. The Zenfone 3 Laser performs seamlessly while running daily tasks. There is absolutely no clutter while multitasking or browsing. Games like Asphalt 8, or the Extreme Edition ran smoothly without any issues. The Laser did get a little warm after prolonged gaming and while recording videos at 1080p, but it wasn’t uncomfortable at any point. The fingerprint sensor does its job well. It unlocked the device quickly and responded well for my two-week long usage. Even when I tried unlocking it in different angles, it always recognized me. The speakers are loud enough but can get easily muffled. The headphones with come with the smartphone are decent enough and have a minimal distortion at high volumes. The 3000 mAh Li-Ion non-removable battery performs well as it always had some juice left at the end of the day even while I was using the smartphone frequently at the full brightness for most of the times. The Zenfone 3 Laser doesn’t support fast-charging, so the it takes about 2 hours to charge from zero to 100. Benchmarks For this Zenfone 3 Laser review, we ran AnTuTu and Geekbench 4 tests for benchmarks, and below you can see the scores we got. The numbers appear quite poor for a smartphone that charges you a premium to own. Although, I found nothing to complain during my real world usage. Camera The Asus Zenfone 3 Laser has a 13 MP rear camera with f/ aperture and dual-LED real-tone flash. It supports 1080p video recording at 30 fps. The camera app can be launched even from the lock screen. There are a lot of capture modes to choose from to enhance your images. The best feature of this particular camera is that it has a laser autofocus which helps it to focus on a specific object in about secs as claimed by Asus. The display also brightens up when you click pictures, that helps a lot when you are working in low light conditions. We clicked a lot of images with Laser, some of which you can see below. [metaslider id=19902] The images appear sharp and crisp and the he camera captures a lot of details. The camera is the best feature of this smartphone as it captures beautiful pictures and performs well even in poorly lit conditions. Videos captured are also quite good, and it does manage to capture good videos even when you are moving or in a crowded place thanks to its EIS feature. Its other features include 1/3″ sensor size, geo-tagging, touch focus, face/smile detection, panorama, and HDR. There’s also an 8-megapixel front camera with f/ aperture. The selfies looks great, and it manages to capture all the colors properly. The 8MP does help to catch more details than a 5MP camera, and it shows clearly in the images. Verdict of the Zenfone 3 Laser Asus Zenfone 3 Laser is a significant improvement over the Zenfone 2 Laser. It performs well and has an excellent camera. The metal body design does give it a premium feel, but all of this just doesn’t justify the hefty price tag Asus has put on it. With a price of RS 17,000 Asus does seem to have taken a gamble. With Xiaomi’s Redmi 3S and 3S Primes offering same SoC and other competitors like Samsung Galaxy J7 and Lenovo Z2 Plus offering better value for money. For the extra price you pay compared to the competitors, you get the better camera and much better design and build quality. But if you’re not looking for those, Zenfone 3 Laser might just be an expensive buy! If you enjoyed reading this Zenfone 3 Laser Review, Please Join us on Facebook for more smartphone, PC hardware and game reviews. Check out latest price of Zenfone 3 Flipkart Amazon

asus zenfone 3 laser review