Design
- Good build quality with metal frame design that has now become a norm in this price bracket
- The edges are smooth and have curved finish, and the compact form factor (and lightweight) makes it easy to hold and operate the smartphone in one hand
- Misses out on a fingerprint scanner, that is now present on a lot of the competition
Display
- Nice 5-inch HD (720p) display - the screen is bright, colors look decent, and viewing angles are good too
Software
- The Asus Zen UI is full of bloatware with apps such as ZenCircle, MiniMovie, DoItLater, ZenFone Care and Go2Pay among others, and sadly, you can’t uninstall most of them either
- The software also tends to be buggy at places
Performance
- Powered by an outdated Snapdragon quad-core chipset - which means that although performance is acceptable in daily use, it lags behind a lot of the competition
- Also tends to heat up a bit, when taxed
Battery
- Battery life is decent but could be better - struggles to last the day under heavy use
More
- The ‘real-time beautification’ feature for your Facebook, YouTube and Instagram live videos is innovative on paper, but not actually implemented well - the videos shot with the beauty mode on look completely artificial, and sometimes dull or washed out - in fact, phones with no claim on offering superior live videos, like the Redmi 4 actually do a better job
- In fact on the whole too, both the rear and front cameras are ok, but a step behind the Redmi 4 cameras