Gadgetory

so there's this hilarious typo and a Seuss's PR materials for the zenfone 2 but I think perfectly captures my biggest gripe with this product I'm sorry available for purchase one yes the most annoying thing about the zenfone 2 was the fact that it took so very long for Asus to deliver the 200 dollar smartphone that they showed off at CES this year but is the delay a big deal has the competitive landscape really changed so much in three month that it's significantly less market shaking I guess we'll find out strap in folks the coarser HX 1200 eye power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet efficient power and coarser link digital for advanced monitoring and control click right here to learn more Oh a soos I love those guys dearly but they really are a PC company at heart and it really shows through sometimes the zenfone 2 actually comes in two flavors a 16 gig storage version with two gigs of LP ddr3 RAM and an atom's e35 60 for $200 and a 64 gig storage version with four gigs of LP ddr3 RAM in an atom z3580 for $300 I mean RAM and storage we've seen before but changing out the CPU who do does that with phones anyway other than those core speeds and feeds both models of the phone are the same starting at the front we've got a 5-megapixel selfie camera a 5.5 inch 1080p IPS display covered in Gorilla Glass 3 fixed off-screen buttons above a circular finished metal chin then around the bottom a microUSB port and microphone on the sides a whole lot of nothing at the top second mic for noise cancellation a three-and-a-half millimeter audio jack and the quite disappointing lock button the position makes it kind of hard to press without really mushing the phone into your finger and the tactile response is marshmallow like to put it kindly around the back we've got a two-tone flash next to the 13 megapixel rear camera volume up and down buttons that can also be used for the camera shutter and a rear-facing speaker that I would describe as functional but it's under the brushed finished plastic backing where things actually start to get pretty interesting microSD expansion is one feature that's been trending towards extinction in the industry but asus has gone ahead and included and dual micro-sim slots something pretty uncommon here in North America are also present back here very nice oh and we can't really show this but if you were to dig in further you'd find wireless AC and LTE chipsets as well as the sorry it's not user replaceable and it doesn't charge wirelessly but it does support Qualcomm quick charge 3000 milliamp hour battery so those are some pretty impressive specs am i right but what's it like to actually hold the thing well the screen isn't the best or brightest IPS display I've ever seen and I'm not a huge fan of the five and a half inch form factor but I've got to give it to Asus it handles pretty well their reviewers guide however one-sided its representation of the facts might be makes a point that I've made multiple times about the awkwardness of a flat-backed versus a curved back device and other than that physically Wow I guess there's really not much to say it's a Pho any phone depending on who it is you ask so let's talk the make or break of any Android device the Android 5 lollipop based Zen UI skin and this is going to be a tough one here folks because then you eye does some things very right and something's very wrong and some in-between so let's start with the former responsiveness is solid although it should be given that the zenfone 2 m CPU performs similarly to a Snapdragon 801 according to this Tom's article quick settings are customizable and available for pretty much any phone setting you could possibly want and on the subject of settings there is some fan bit elite astok stuff buried in the settings menu separate user profiles including a kid mode that allows time limits and locks down certain apps some super smart do not disturb settings like ignoring a call from someone the first time then accepting it the second since it's presumably urgent automatic phone call recording although you'll want to check on the legality of this in your area before activating it the auto start manager that lets you force apps to wait for your permission to launch and do anything in the background customizable gestures like DoubleTap to wake and sleep and double volume tap to wake to camera and even the ability to tweak the saturation and color temperature of your display or save your screenshots as a PNG instead of a JPEG I mean to even things of that but every in there is a yang for every up there is a down and for all the positive things I found about Zen UI there were definitely some others that urged me first up in real talk Thai masseuse what is up with the incredible number of pre-installed apps it's some of them like flashlight I guess we need but everyone else just does this through the quick toggle directly so I don't get why it needs to launch an app on the zenfone 2 and some of these things are just inexcusable what the chuffing hell is Zen circle are you a social network company now a soos why is the fact that it comes with Trend Micro nonsense on it considered a selling point in the reviewers guide even Samsung has finally figured this out if a feature is useless to 99% of your users make it an optional download don't pack your device full of junk that nobody cares about which leads to complaint number two the overall polish the asus launcher wasn't configured with notification access by default causing my lock screen to never display my new alerts the app that lets you use your phone on the desktop actually super handy very cool but also kind of janky the phone actually locked up outright twice on me during the time I was using it including a startling full power off while I was writing an email with 15 percent battery showing on the meter and then when I went to turn it back on and told me the battery was dead and on the subject of battery life I've confirmed with a soos that I'm running the latest firmware but I haven't been able to get past 8 p.m. without topping up the battery now in their defense I am a bit of a power user all the radios on all the time is my policy I got like smartwatches and stuff but with a 3000 milliamp hour battery capacity I should be easily making it through the day so I suspect software whether it's one of my usual apps that disagrees with Zen UI or some of the stupid bloke that asu's pre-loaded I think there's something stealthily draining battery in the background but unfortunately my usual battery meter apps are not picking up on it so I'll try and post in the video description when and if I figure out what it is which leads to the other make-or-break smartphone feet these days the camera I'm torn on this one too on the one hand the manual mode is great for camera geeks and using the super resolution like multi exposure merging mode and the low-light for pixels acting as one for higher sensitivity modes result in some shockingly good photos Albee it with a higher processing time cost and/or a lower resolution cost in both ideally lit and poorly lit situations on the other hand while the Toshiba sensor behind the F 2.0 lens might be okay it's not very feature-rich with a max video resolution of 1080p and no slo-mo support whatsoever it lacks optical image stabilization the camera launches quite slowly and the auto photo mode the one most people will usually use is just not very good with smeary noise reduction processing artifacts eliminating a lot of the detail from even photos that are taken under pretty good conditions but this is a $200 smartphone off contract for the base model and even for the $300 one you get more than a token increase in storage with CPU and RAM upgrades being thrown in along with a perdu poleng of your storage not to mention that asus has committed to allowing bootloader unlocking and that they even includes a quick charger something HTC couldn't be bothered to do on a smart phone that costs over twice as much so here's the conclusion while it's not perfect at the price the bottom line is a soos you're going to have a lot of to clean up when the zenfone 2 is done picking all the ass it's going to kick out there in the market and you can quote that on the box if you want to speaking of kicking a lot of ass crunchyroll is the site created by anime fans for anime fans they offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan like Kuroko's basketball 3 and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and a large collection of the most popular anime series like Naruto and one piece with the bonus being that all the content is professionally subtitled so head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and sign up for a 30-day trial of crunchyroll Premium so that's completely ad-free you get 1080p streaming you get new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere and you're able to stream anytime anywhere on a variety of devices like your phone tablet game console Roku whatever the case may be and if you decide you like it continue your premium membership for only seven bucks a month so our French roll comm / - and check them out so I think that pretty much wraps it up guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this preferably on our forum which is linked in the video description also linked in the video description a place to buy a cool t-shirt like this one a place to give us a monthly contribution in a place to change your Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate codes whenever you buy phones or watches or whatever it is you buy on Amazon we get a small kickback that helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe you