Friends+Design
- Looks premium and sleek, with an all-metal design, in a thin-and-light body
- The Zenfone 3 Deluxe is tall and wide, which is not a very ergonomic design - it will feel less than comfortable to people with average sized or small hands
- Reaching this fingerprint sensor at the back can also take some getting used to, thanks to the smaller surface area
Display
- Decent AMOLED display with good colour reproduction
- The display is decent but nothing outstanding, as one would have expected at this price point - it's glossy and reflective and can be stuttery when automatically changing brightness
Software
- At the same time, the sea of apps that ZenUI brings with itself is overwhelming, each one of these needs some permissions, and there are in any case better alternatives to all of them in the Play Store
- Because of all the bloatware, no less than 12.61GB is system reserved memory - that’s nearly 20% of the internal memory - which is unavailable to use
Performance
- From a pure power point of view, the Zenfone 3 Deluxe is supremely fast, matching up to the other Snapdragon 820 powered flagships
- The phone also tends to heat up a bit with gaming, and tends to throttle too, leading to slight stutters, that a flagship phone shouldn’t have
Camera
- Decent camera - works especially well in outdoor sunlight, producing high sharpness levels
- Camera is decent but not deserving of this price bracket - shot-to-shot time is slow at about 1.5 seconds, and performance under indoor lights is very average
Audio
- The loudspeaker is decently loud, but doesn’t offer much quality - and the placement of the speaker leads to muffled sound while playing games or watching videos in landscape mode
Battery
- Decent battery - usually lasting the work day
- Fast charging time
More
- Asus' UI is overwhelming and heavy, and a major deterrent to the phone’s performance, bringing a general sluggishness to everything - for instance the fingerprint sensor takes over a second to register and jump to the home screen, and the camera app takes about 2 seconds to boot, and about 2.3 seconds to boot and focus automatically
