Asus Zenfone 3 Laser hands-on: First impression

Asus launched the photography-centric smartphone Zenfone 3 Laser in India earlier this month. It comes with upgrades in terms of camera hardware, CPU and especially build-quality compared to its predecessor Zenfone 2 Laser.

We have been using Zenfone 3 Laser as a secondary device for a couple of days. Here's our initial impression on the new Asus phone.

Build and design language:

The new Zenfone 3 Laser unit we received for the review flaunts visually appealing gold-hued metallic shell on the back with curved corners. It's really slim and despite generous use of metal, it is bit lightweight.

Also read: Asus Zenfone 3 Review: New style icon among smartphones

I have a small palm and was pleasantly surprised to be able to comfortably wrap my fingers across the width of the phone and also operate it in one hand. It is 149 mm tall, 76.0 mm wide and just 7.9 mm in thickness, and weighs just 150g.

On the front, it boasts a 5.5-inch full HD display with 2.5D Gorillas Glass shield. It not only protects the screen, but also adds value to the design language at the edges.

Our one and only qualm is that the capacitive button at the chin of the phone is not backlit, which is quite irksome when we use the device in low-light conditions.

Processor, RAM and storage:

It houses Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 octa-core processor with 32GB internal storage.

Though the processor is kind of low-end for its price and we were disappointed with Zen UI's junkware. Having said that, we did not find any lag during normal application launch or playing games, that's probably due to the 4GB RAM.

Camera:

Zenfone 3 Laser houses a 13MP Sony camera with IMX214 sensor, second generation laser autofocus with 0.03 sec speed, large f/2.0-aperture len, EIS (Electronic Image Stabilisation) blur-free video recording and colour correction sensor.

To further enhance the photography experience, Asus has incorporated PixelMaster 3.0 application, which offers several modes. We were particularly impressed with the images captured via HDR Pro and Super Resolution modes. The Zenfone 3's fast auto focus was also able to meet our expectations.

As far as front camera is concerned, it also fared well in bright light condition.

Initial verdict:

Its Rs 18,999 price-tag may fool people of thinking this to be just another mid-range phone, but when held in hand, you can feel how premium the device is.

As far as camera is concerned, it has been able to impress us to an extent, but we will be conducting more tests under low-light conditions and also try out other photography modes offered on the phone to pass on the final verdict.

We will be coming up with the full review next week and as a part of our user interaction initiative, we urge our readers to send us any queries or requests to test on Zenfone 3 Laser in our comments section below. We will include answers (results) of select interesting questions in our final article.