Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Asus ZenFone 6: Swivel Camera Magic!”.
Foreign Hardware is back: this is the Asus Zenfone 6.. This is one of the bigger surprises for phones this year coming in at 500 bucks. So this isn’t a full review of the cell phone. It’S more of an impressions of what’s turned into yet another way.
To avoid the Notch and what’s ended up being one of the more interesting impressive mid-range phones of 2019., so the Zenfone 6 has a 6.4 inch. Full HD, Plus IPS LCD display rounded Corners as you can see, but of course, no Notch. No cutouts no hole punch. No interruptions now the ads show it as this kind of Glorious full screen display from edge to edge and corner to corner. You know it’s a little more of a chin and a bezel than that, but we’ll go with it.
So how do they achieve this? In a 500 phone, and where do they put that front-facing stuff? Well, the fingerprint reader they didn’t put under the glass? It’S still on the back, and I still like this – it’s lower and sort of in the middle. So it’s super reachable. It’S right where my finger. Naturally rests it’s the same place I like it on the pixel phones and the earpiece speaker is still up in this little slot here at the top, alongside actually an LED notification light, which is rare nowadays, there isn’t much customization to it, but I like that, it’s There and then the selfie camera well, you’ve seen it by now. It’S the main camera flipped around. It’S kind of great it’s, this massive chassis with dual cameras that sort of flips around when you go to selfie mode and takes the front-facing shot and it’s not quite either. Those Motors make a sound every time, but believe it or not.
This is not the first camera or phone that I’ve used to do this back in 2013, I actually reviewed, What’s called the Oppo N1, this gigantic phone running CyanogenMod, with like the world’s largest forehead and chin, and a 13 megapixel camera in this Barb at the top. That doubled as your selfie camera, if you swiveled it around the main difference, of course, was this one was manual, so you swiveled it around with your hands like a caveman but uh yeah. This one from Asus in 2019 is electronic. It’S motorized and, like I said it’s actually dual cameras, so you have a 48 megapixel, F, 1.8 main sensor and a 13 megapixel Ultra wide as well. And then because it’s motorized, you have all kinds of extra features, but also all kinds of other stuff.
To worry about so, first of all, don’t expect this to be water resistant anymore, there’s no IP rating for this phone, and I just don’t think you’d want to get any water near this piece anyway, and even duster dirt getting in there could eventually be an actual Problem, so you got to be careful with it and then, of course, there’s no way you want anything to impact it or have anything bend it. The motor already makes some pretty concerning noises when it encounters any resistance, but, like I said, the motor actually gives you the ability to do a bunch of other interesting things, the first being the volume rocker isn’t a shutter button anymore. It’S actually a controller to control the exact precise angle that you want that camera to flip up at any given time which is fascinating, and then the software button becomes a slider to do the same thing. So now you have this fine control over the exact angle of this swiveling camera chassis.
At any time. I don’t know if that becomes kind of useful or just kind of creepy that you can hold it at whatever angle you want, but it seems firmly in the gimmick bucket to me at least that feature, but then in panorama mode there is a fully automatic Panorama Tilt so if you can take a vertical or horizontal Panorama by just hitting the button and it uses the motors to move the lens for you across the frame, this is actually kind of useful. I could see someone just holding the phone perfectly still and it’ll spin up to a full 180 degrees to flat, or until you tell it, stop essentially maximizing your Panorama quality. Now I don’t know how often you take panoramas. Personally, I don’t do this a ton, but it works really well and it’s kind of hilarious that you can get yourself into the Panorama. If you let it flip all the way around, so that that is a clever use of the motor and then there is object tracking mode.
So if you’re trying to take a video or something without moving the phone of a subject, you can have it latch on to what what looks like just contrast, based object, detection and then, as long as that, subject moves to the left. Basically, the camera can swivel over and keep it in the frame. As long as you keep that video going. For me, this was pretty finicky from my experience, since the contrast based detection isn’t perfect, but I guess I could see people taking videos maybe of themselves using this, and it also has drop protection as well. So you remember how the OnePlus would sort of retract the selfie camera if it detected free fall this one if it detects free, fall, we’ll just snap back that camera where it was to avoid it. You know Landing weird and crunching: it um it actually snaps back a little bit faster than it normally goes in and out in regular use, which I think is it just preserving the motor’s life.
But it’s rated for a hundred thousand opens and closes. I feel like I’ve already opened and closed it like a thousand times, but that’s at least good for a couple years and then the camera quality itself is actually pretty good. So I got ta be honest. I wasn’t expecting much out of the Zenfone, but if the pixels camera is my a plus, then this is a solid B minus to a b.
So it’s gotten a couple. Software updates and there are more coming. I think it’s main problem still is dynamic range and inconsistency like it can’t really be trusted to take a great shot every time and the ultrawide camera, while it’s nice to have really is much worse than the main camera, but the main camera, especially as a selfie Camera is quite good, so shots are detailed. Color is pretty good, uh, it’s edge to edge sharp and then, when you swivel it around to face yourself. Of course, that’s going to be right up. There is now one of the best selfie cameras. So it’s one of the only ones to actually get real background, blur and depth of field that isn’t fake on a selfie, so yeah. This whole camera mechanism by itself is fascinating, but there is of course the whole rest of the phone here.
That’S low-key! A really nice collection of choices and pieces to put together for a 500 phone. It has a high-end specs, Snapdragon 855 and up to eight gigs of RAM, and it’s an all metal and glass build. And it’s Hefty like this is a chunky, solid phone and a big part of that is because it has a 5 000 milliamp hour battery inside. That is absolutely massive, and I think that now makes it the largest battery cell in a phone I’ve ever used.
It doesn’t charge quite as fast as some others, because of the way the cell is built and it has 18 watt fast charging and no wireless charging. But that’s much more acceptable when you can imagine how long a 5 000 milliamp hour battery with a 1080p display will probably last that’s exciting in a phone by itself and I’m happy that phone batteries just keep getting bigger at this rate, uh there’s also Bluetooth. 5.0. There is a headphone jack there’s some pretty good speakers, which a lot of phones in this range don’t have a power button with this ring of blue paint around it, and then it has this extra button up above the volume rocker that by default is a Google Assistant button, so you can remap it to a couple other functions, so it’s kind of halfway to being awesome, this extra button. So technically, yes, they let you customize it, but it’s with a couple of sort of quick actions that they’ve pre-selected. I have single pressed to. Google Assistant double press to open or turn on the flashlight, which is cool, but they don’t just let you open whatever app you want with it. That would have been what I really wanted.
You know single press for Google Tasks, double tap for Google Assistant, something like that, but you can’t do that and then it’s also kind of hard to reach. So I love having these extra customizable buttons, but this one is so high up that you need sort of a whole hand shimmy just to reach it. I kind of just wish it was on the other side of the volume rocker, which is blank, but hey. It’S up there, so one of the biggest most welcome changes on this whole phone is Asus. Finally, dropping that massive zenui skin and bringing it way back to near stock, Android dropping all the bloatware, all the unnecessary duplicate apps and the Ugly launcher and custom icons and themes and settings and things we didn’t like this is much better, much cleaner and hopefully, that Spells faster software updates as well, so yeah Zenfone 6.. It’S definitely one of the surprises of the Year for me. So far, of course, being a pretty great all-around budget phone that happens to have one really impressive, swively camera feature not to be be clear. This is definitely still a workaround.
This isn’t like the permanent solution on our way to bezel-less phones. This falls in the category of notches and hole, punch, cutouts and pop-up cameras, but it’s a pretty cool one. I guess this specific version of it with the swiveling camera. I don’t hate it like it’s, obviously not practical for long-term future Solutions, but for me I think I’m a sucker for camera quality over like anything else. As far as practicality, like that’s, why I was so into the pixel 3 for so long. Despite so many of the issues that it had so when I saw this one, this just flips around and becomes one of the best quality selfie cameras instantly. That to me made me kind of like it a lot more, but we’ll keep an eye on this phone and a bunch more coming in the future. But as far as I can tell definitely a pretty great all-around 500 phone. But let me know, would you would you get a phone with a swiveling camera like this? Would you be into it? Let me know in the comments section below either way, thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace .