At a time when Chinese smartphone makers such as Vivo and Oppo are focussing on the selfie-loving audience, Asus has come out with a smartphone that comes with real-time beautification mode to beautify you during live streaming.
The latest budget Android smartphone from Asus is the Zenfone Live that comes at a price of Rs 9,999. Its USP – the hardware optimised, live streaming beautification technology. The BeautyLive app lets people ‘beautify’ as they live stream to social media sites. The real-time beautification mode works on live videos on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
Is it worth your time and money? Here is our first impressions review.
The Zenfone Live seems to follow the design language of other Android smartphones in this price segment. Interestingly, it is very lightweight, at only 120 grams.
Asus Zenfone Live sports a unibody design and unlike many other such phones, this one does not slip off your palms easily. It is a compact smartphone with smooth edges and a curved finish. Even people with small hands may not find it much difficult to operate it with one hand.
The gold colour unit that we received for review has white bezels on the front that do not stand out of the crowd. The smartphone, however, feels quite plastic in the hands – Asus says that it comes with a metallic finish.
The 5-inch 720p HD display comes along with 2.5D glass. The display is pretty bright and vivid with decent colour reproduction.
A 5MP camera, earpiece and soft-light LED flash are present at the front for capturing selfies in low-light conditions. It comes with 1.4 um pixel size, LED flash, auto-focus, and 82-degree field of view. Below the display, sit the have capacitive touch buttons, which are not backlit.
The screen to body ratio on the Asus Zenfone Live is around 68 percent, which is good space management.
The ZenFone Live runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow layered with Asus’ custom ZenUI on top. The UI is the one seen on ZenFone 2 series smartphones. The custom UI on-board isn’t one the smoothest of UIs around, for sure and had significant lags.
The smartphone also features duel MEMs microphones for cutting off background noise, and new 5-magnet speaker for better audio output.
It packs a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with only 2GB of RAM.
The primary snapper is 13MP with Asus’ PixelMaster technology, f/2.0 aperture and 5P Largan lens.
Talking about the high point of the Zenfone Live, the special app called BeautifyLive can be activated and one can directly go live on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. You have to be signed in to do a live broadcast.
Despite the hype, the beautification mode does not add much value to the live videos.
For a smartphone in the competitive Rs 10K segment, people would expect better features and performance.
Watch this space for the full review of Asus Zenfone Live.
