Camera bump and notch are perhaps the worst thing to happen in smartphone design. While we see no end to the camera bump trend, there is hope for a notch-free world. It is heartening that everyone else, except for Apple, is trying their best to eliminate the notch. ASUS ZenFone 6 is one of the latest entrants to join the on-going notch-less revolution. Instead of pop-up camera and slide-and-flip system, ZenFone 6 chose to adopt a flip-up camera.
Like Samsung Galaxy A80, it has only one set of camera to serve as both a selfie camera and a main snapper. The flip camera, which packs a 48 MP Sony IMX586 sensor with laser AF and an ultra wide 13 MP camera, remain facing rear until you need to use it front-facing. When that happens, a custom stepper motor flips the camera unit 180-degree upwards and voila! the front facing is lock and ready. ASUS’ answer is not the best solution yet, so are pop-up and slide-and-flip cameras, but I guess this will do until under display camera is a reality.
With the flip-up camera, it allows the ASUS ZenFone 6 to show off its 6.4-inch FHD+ (2,340 x 1,080) IPS all-screen NanoEdge Display in all its interrupted glory. But it does so at the expense of the thickness, which now is 8.4-9.1 mm. It is still thin, but not the sub 8 mm kind of thin we used to see. Novel camera aside, the ZenFone 6 is also the few 6-inch class smartphone to pack a big 5,000 mAh battery that has Quick Charge 4.0 to boot.
Key details include Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform, up to 8 GB LPDDR4X RAM, up to 256 GB UFS 2.1 storage, NFC with Google Pay, Corning Gorilla Glass 6, 3D-curved rear glass cover (also Corning Gorilla Glass), physical ‘Smart Key’ (presumably, programmable), 5-magnet speaker with dual NXP TFA9874 smart amplifiers, support Hi-Res audio, DTS and DTS:X, built-in FM radio, dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0 with aptX and aptX HD support, triple slots (dual SIM + microSD card slot), and physical rear fingerprint sensor.
The fact that it still has a physical fingerprint sensor is quite a bit of deal breaker. Out-of-the-box, ASUS ZenFone 6 runs on Android Pie with the new ASUS ZenUI 6. Each ZenFone 6 comes with a ZenEar Pro earbuds tuned by 1MORE. We are aware when the ASUS ZenFone 6 will be available, nor is the pricing made known. The ASUS ZenFone 6 Smartphone was officially unveiled at a launch event in Valencia, Spain on May 16. Promo video after the break.
P.S. Apparently, you can record image or video at just about any angle. Pretty neat, huh?
All images courtesy of ASUS.
