Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kim PhD here so weird Hardware is back this is the Asus zenfone 6 this is one of the biggest surprises for phones this year coming in at 500 bucks so this isn't a full review of a cell phone it's more of an impression 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 six point four 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 in 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 on to 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 2002 selfie mode and takes the front-facing shot and it's not quiet 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 bar up at the top that doubled as your selfie camera if you swivel it around the main difference of course was this one was manual so you swallowed it around with your hands like a caveman but 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 dust or 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 this 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 but 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 you can take a vertical or horizontal panorama by just hitting a 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 hundred eighty degrees to flat or until you tell it to 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 hilariously 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 is 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 will just snap back that camera where it was to avoid it you know landing weird and crunching it it actually snaps back a little bit faster than it normally goes in and out and regularly use which i think is that just preserving the motors 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 gotta 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 - - a B so it's gotten a couple software updates and there are more coming I think its main problem still is dynamic range and inconsistency like it can't really be trusted to take a great shot every time and the ultra wide 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 its edge to edge sharp and then when you swivel it around to face yourself of course that's gonna 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 the high-end specs snapdragon a 55 and up to 8 gigs of ram and it's an all metal and glass build and its hefty like this is a chunky solid phone and a big part of that is because it has a five thousand 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 there's also a 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 I'll let you customize it but it's with a couple of sort of quick actions that they've pre-selected I have single press 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 assistants something like that but you can't do that and then it's also kind of hard to reach so I love having these extract 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 she was on the other side of the volume rocker which is blank but hey it's up there so one of the biggest most welcomed changes on this whole phone is Asus finally dropping that massive Zen UI 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 then phone six 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 swivel e camera feature not to be clear this is definitely still a workaround this isn't like the permanent solution on our white to bezel US 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 three 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 liked 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 which would you get a phone with a swiveling camera like this would you be into it let me know in the comment section below either way thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace