Asus has brought out a fast, durable andvery affordable phablet that scores well on most fronts
It's funny how trends change over time, even switching back and forth from "out" to "in", and vice versa, in the space of a few years. I'm talking about the size of mobile phones here. Three years back, manufacturers were trying to make their phones as compact as possible; now the bigger they are the better, or so it seems. And with its newest product, a phablet, Asus is certainly jumping on the bandwagon.
Big phones have lots of plus points, making the writing and reading of text messages, watching videos and playing games much more enjoyable experiences. But there are several sacrifices the owners of such phones have to make, too: less convenience/mobility (because you won't be able tuck this kind of phone in your shirt pocket without tearing it wide open) and more weight to carry around, to name just two drawbacks.
Catching up with the bigger-is-better trend, Asus, best known for making motherboards and computers, recently came up with an affordable yet impressively fast phablet, called the Zenfone 6, which is probably way bigger than most phones you've been accustomed to using over the past few years.
Its large (6-inch), vibrant high-definition screen and 2GHz Intel CPU makes this device an excellent choice for gamers and e-book readers and it's great for web-surfing as well. To my surprise, the ladies I've spoken to about the Zenfone 6 don't seem to mind the size of it at all. I'd always thought that the majority of people, and petite Thai women in particular, regarded phablets as being much too cumbersome for practical, everyday use. But five different women who work in my office all said its size was just right for them (and that they loved the huge screen because it made chatting and casual gaming a lot easier).
This phone is very fast, even faster than the best smartphone to come out last year, the HTC One M7, but only half the current retail price of the latter. Intel CPU chips are not a common choice for installation in Android phones, but it's doing a fine job here given all the computing this phone needs to do. Games with heaps of graphics, such as N.O.V.A 3 or Wild Blood, run flawlessly on this. Even my favourite online MMO RPG game, Brave Frontier, a 2D game that displays thousands of sprites and particles at once, can be running on the Zenfone 6 without any hiccups.
The look and feel of this device is clean, simple and very minimalistic and it has a very plain-looking launcher (or, if you're not used to that term, user interface); Asus calls it "ZenUI". Additional useful shortcuts aside, only very slight customisations have been made to Google's original Android operating system. If a colourful, jazzy-looking user interface or lots of eye-candy effects are your cup of tea, you'll need to install another third-party launcher, such as Nova or Go.
There are about 10 free apps from Asus pre-installed, most of which are good for very specific situations that most people couldn't care less about, although a program called Do It Later is very handy for taking notes and for reminding you to complete outstanding tasks.
This phablet can survive for about two days of typical use on a single charge, thanks to its way-above-average 3300mAh battery. But if you game on it a lot, you'll need to recharge it a lot more frequently.
It can be routed extremely easily, too, which opens the opportunity for you to tweak it even further by overclocking its CPU, installing ad blockers or even installing custom ROMs (an off-the-market modified Android OS).
The back cover is all plastic, but it has a matted ceramic feel to it and is marketed as being grease- and fingerprint-resistant, which should be great for keeping the phone looking clean (though in reality it might not be; do try to keep your devices clean, everyone!).
One drawback, though, if that the pictures taken by the cameras (there are two) on this phablet are rather so-so.
Still, I'd say that the going rate for the Zenfone 6 (8,000 baht) is pretty inexpensive, given all the specs you're getting.
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