ASUS Zenfone 2 Laser (ZE550KL) Review

At the ASUS Zen Festival last week, the company had announced three new devices, the Zenfone 2 Deluxe, Zenfone Selfie and Zenfone 2 Laser. The Zenfone 2 Laser is a mid range device which comes in three variants and has the laser autofocus included. The phone has a 5.5 inch HD (1280 X 720p) display and is powered by Snapdragon 410 Quad core chipset with 2GB RAM.

There is also 16GB internal storage along with micro SD card support. On the imaging front, the phone features a 13MP rear camera with dual LED flash and laser auto focus and a front facing 5MP camera. The phone runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop and has custom Zen UI and features a 3000mAh battery.

Here is the detailed review of the device.

Here is the video review.

Design and Build:

Design wise, ASUS has retained the design elements from the Zenfone 2. The front panel does not feature any change and comes with the three capacitive buttons and the finish below it.  The rear panel has a curved finish and more exactly the same as that of Zenfone 2. It also comes in plastic with a matte finish unlike the brushed metal feel of Zenfone 2. The device is slim towards the edges, so holding it is pretty easy and the thickness goes over 10mm at the center. At 170gms, it is also not a light weight phablet.

The sides of the device do not have any buttons, the volume keys are moved to the rear panel and they have been given a metallic touch. The rear panel also houses the 13MP camera and dual tone LED flash along laser autofocus and ASUS branding and speaker.

The front panel has the selfie camera, 5.5-inch screen covered by Gorilla Glass 4 and three capacitive buttons which are not backlit, but does offer haptic feedback. The power button which is on the top panel is awkwardly placed and does not have enough travel as well. Most of the time you end up pressing atleast 2-3 times to get the power button working, but thankfully there is double tap to wake on the display.

Overall, considering the price point, the build quality is good.

Display:

The Zenfone 2 Laser features a 5.5 inch HD display (1280 x 720p) IPS LCD display with 10 finger touch  and anti-fingerprint technology, Corning Gorilla 4 Glass and 178 degree view angle. Even the display is a HD panel it is actually quite good. The colors look pretty good and the viewing angles are also good.

The touch response is very good too. The screen is pretty sharp as well and should be good for multimedia consumption and also gaming.

Software:

Zenfone 2 Laser comes with Android 5.0 with the custom Zen UI. When we reviewed the Zenfone 5 last year, we did mention Zen UI is one of the usable ROMs on Android. There isnt much change in the Zen UI on Lollipop powered Zenfone 2 when compared to the previous version.

The notification center is a completely customized and sports almost all quick toggles which is customizable. Unlike most of the Chinese based ROMs, there is an app drawer in Zenfone 2 and it also comes with quite a lot of options to organize the apps.

There is smart grouping available where in you can automatically sort apps based on category. The settings menu also comes with a customized look and the phone runs Android 5.0. There are quite a lot of additional options included by ASUS.

The phone also feature a handful of gestures including double tap to wake, double tap to sleep, screen gestures to open apps and also motion gestures. There is also an easy mode which makes the UI lighter and easier to use, specifically useful for elderly people and comes with basic options alone.

The Zen UI also comes with themes support, but has only handful of themes and limited options to download new ones. You can also download icon packs from Play store and install them.

UI is mostly responsive and we seldom faced any lags or issues, but the biggest issue with Zenfone 2 is the amount of bloatwares the phone ships with. There are lots of third party unwanted apps included in the UI which we feel ASUS should have excluded. Many of these apps cannot be uninstalled and this is one big issue as it consumes memory.

Performance:

While the Zenfone series right from the first generation, have been running on Intel Atom processors, the Zenfone 2 Laser runs on Snapdragon 410 Quad core 64 bit processor with Adreno 306 GPU. The Snapdragon 410 is on of the best and performing processors in the mid range.

The performance of Zenfone 2 Laser was pretty good and we never encountered any lags or crashes in the normal usage. Multi tasking was also good and it is implemented the Lollipop way. The phone comes with 16GB internal storage and out of which 10.5GB is available in the first boot. You can also expand the storage via micro SD card.

The gaming experience of the device was good and the 5.5 inch HD display is suited for it. You can play most of the high end games without much issues. The call quality on the device was good and we never experienced any call drops and the signal strength was good. The rear speaker performance was decent, but the output wasn’t the best when you increase the volume. The phone comes with dual SIM card and has support for 4G LTE in India. We couldnt test 4G LTE performance as our region does not have 4G.

Camera:

Zenfone 2 Laser features a 13MP camera with the Pixel Master technology and dual tone LED flash along with Laser auto focus. The laser autofocus is found mostly on flagship phones and can focus objects much faster. There is also a 5MP front facing camera for selfies and video calls. The camera interface is mostly unchanged and comes with plethora of options and modes including night mode, HDR, Manual, low light, depth of field, panorama, effects and more. The interface is fairly decent and easy to use.

The manual mode offers control on almost all aspects of the photo and is pretty good to control the photo quality. Now coming to the camera performance, the daylight shots have pretty good amount of clarity and detailing and the colors also look pretty decent. The macro or the close up shots were pretty good and it did add the bokeh effect to the photos. The laser autofocus is quite effective and is able to focus in fraction of a second.

Considering that this is a mid range phone, the camera performance is very good and we were quite impressed with the overall performance.

The front facing 5MP camera can capture decent selfies and works well with the different modes available to customize. The phone can record videos in 1080p and the quality was pretty good.

Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Battery:

The Zenfone 2 Laser packs the same 3000mAh battery found on the Zenfone 2, but the difference here is the processor. While we found the battery on Zenfone 2 to be average, the Zenfone 2 Laser has much better performance.

With average usage, the 3000mAh battery on the Zenfone 2 Laser lasts well over a day and is pretty impressive in this price point. The phone also comes with power management tools to get additional battery life on your phone. You can customize these mode and switch them automatically when battery is low.

Verdict:

One of the most competitive segment is the sub 10k price and there are lots of worthy devices like the Yureka Plus, Lenovo K3 Note, Honor 4X etc. Zenfone 2 Laser, priced Rs 9999, competes in this category with the segment first feature, the laser autofocus and it really works as advertised. With good display, decent UI, good camera and battery life, the ASUS Zenfone 2 Laser is a phone you can definitely consider buying being an all-rounder in this segment.