Gadgetory

it's over last year so we've seen a lot of really weird ways of hiding the front-facing camera on the phones we've got pop-up cameras hole punches fins and now we've got this this is the Asus zenfone 6 and it's pretty much a flagship it's just not priced like a flagship but what makes this phone really great is that it's just plain weird okay so we got to talk about the camera first because it's definitely one of the main selling points of this entire phone it's using the sony i MX 586 48 megapixel sensor that very much every other flagship is using right now and it's paired with a 13 megapixel wide-angle camera so you can get really nice group selfies now probably the weirdest thing about this phone is that the camera physically flips over the top of the display so you don't actually have to have any sort of cut or notch in the front of the phone and it's really fun I kind of just want to keep doing it over and over I'm not really a fan of moving parts and phones but the flip camera on this phone actually enables some really cool features one of them is motion tracking so if you're taking a video or a set of photos you can lock on to a subject and as it moves around the frame the camera will physically tilt and move around to follow that subject it's a little janky and it's very jerky but it's still pretty cool nonetheless the other thing is a automatic panorama mode so you can just hold the phone steady and the camera will swivel around a full 180 degrees which is a little bit weird because it's probably gonna get you in the shot but it's really nice that you don't have to physically turn around to actually get that panorama now for the quality of that camera it's actually pretty decent it has a good amount of dynamic range it's not too washed out but I did notice a little bit of skin smoothing when taking pictures of people portrait mode is actually pretty good though it's obviously not as good as the pixel but it's definitely a lack ships that I've seen that really just don't do a good job of cutting out the subject now I do have to know if the Asus just released a firmware update which is supposed to update the camera but I wasn't able to install this for some reason every time I tried to install it it was load up to a hundred percent and then say the update could not be installed so I'm gonna try to figure this out over the next few days and they will be updated camera samples on Android authority comm alright so the camera is definitely the primary feature of this phone and probably the feature that's gonna turn the most heads let's talk about what's good in this phone besides the camera now first of all I see is pretty much scratched the Zen UI that they had before and replaced it with a UI is it's almost stock Android they've just added a few extra features like a long screen shot mode and a built-in screen recorder so those are pretty nice to see and it's really nice that I don't have to deal with all that bloatware anymore it's pretty much just stock Android on a really nice phone and the new UI makes the fun feel really snappy obviously it's running some of the latest specs available on the market and with a really lightweight skin the performance is overall just really great you also got a headphone jack expandable storage and a notification light so there's a lot of features than this phone that you don't even see in some high-end flagships and it's available for just 499 dollars there's also this dedicated quick actions button on the side of the phone that lets you do a ton of different things you can activate Google assistant turn on your flashlight take a screenshot there's a lot of customization here and it's really nice to see that asus is putting the extra effort to include a button like this but of course at $499 there's gonna be some drawbacks asus is using an LCD display in this phone and i'm really missing a whole ide now the last three phones that i reviewed how to a LED display so you're just not gonna get those deep deep blacks like you get from those phones and when it shows you notifications it actually has to light up the entire display so it's gonna use a little bit more battery on standby and speaking of battery this thing is a five thousand milliamp hour battery and I was really excited that I was gonna have true to day battery life just like I saw on the Huawei P 30 Pro but sadly that wasn't really the case now the battery life is not bad at all I got about six and a half hours of screen on time which is pretty good it's about what I got on the oneplus 60 but with a five thousand million power cell I was really hoping that I was gonna see a little bit better battery life there and probably my last write with this phone is the vibration motor it's not good a lot of the times when you get a notification it will physically rattle the camera sensor which just sounds really bad and I was hoping that they would be able to isolate the vibration a little bit better in this phone now I see this phone is competing a lot with the pixel 3a because it's slightly more than the pixel 3/8 but still cheaper than a lot of other flagships out there if you want raw power this is definitely going to beat the pixel 3a but you're not getting things like the really nice screen that you get in that phone so I think the zenfone 6 is gonna turn a lot of heads you're getting more features than you get any a lot of modern-day flagships I'll be it still doesn't have things like water resistance or wireless charging but for people who don't really care about those things and just want raw power and a few extra features this is an awesome device now Asus still hasn't set an official price for all the SKUs of this device because the trade were in the u.s. might set some tariffs which will change the price so stay tuned Android Authority comm because we will update you as soon as we have pricing and availability make sure you head over there as well because we've got tons of sample images from this phone and a ton of pictures and I did a full written review as well so I will catch you in the next video