Asus ZenFone Live

Asus claims to be the first to bring live beautification streaming in the market. Priced at Rs. 7,990, while this feature is easy to use, the phone itself is inferior and falls behind most of its flagship rivals.

ZenFone Live is handy and feels sturdy, but the design is not the only thing to look for in a phone. It has an outdated processor, weak battery and below-average camera, making it fall short on all counts. It is for people who want to start with smartphones and has a tight budget.

Zenfone Live is handy and lightweight at 120 grams, making it an easily manageable with one hand. It is a plastic build, which is a rarity among phones in this range and Asus claims it has a metallic finish on top. The rim around the edges is made of sturdy metal and is rounded to get a better feel. ZenFone Live has an iPhone-like design. The front 2.5D curved glass provides a great feel. Its thinness at 8mm is a plus too. The biggest problem can be said to be the lack of a fingerprint sensor, which is now a common on most smartphones these days. It comes with capacitive navigation keys at the bottom of the screen which is unfortunately not backlit.

ZenFone Live has a 5-inch IPS LCD with 720p HD resolution. It is quite bright and remains so outside giving fine sunlight legibility. The viewing angles do not add any other colour tones which makes it stable and accurate even under intense lights. However, it does not produce the sharpest colours compared to its flagship rivals. While it is possible to tweak the setting, it is not very efficient and leaves you wanting for more options to deal with the display. Plus, there are narrow bezels at the side of the screen, which is odd considering most flagship phones are getting rid of it and opting for a frame-to-frame display.

ZenFone Live is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor coupled with 2GB of RAM. It has a 16GB internal storage space, which is expandable to 128GB. However, users get only 10GB of space to work with, 6GB being used by the system. Benchmark scores place it at 12,316 points which quite mediocre. Heavy games take a long time to load and can experience lags. Asphalt 8 could run well but at low settings. NOVA Legacy – a game which can be run smoothly by most phones of this price range saw some frustrating frame drops. On the whole, the processor provides mediocre performance. On top of that, while it might be able to run the games, it drains a lot of battery juice.

ZenFone Live has a 13MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture featuring autofocus and a 5MP selfie camera with f/2.2 aperture and wide angle of 82 degrees, paired with a LED flash. It captures plenty of details, but it does not perform well when it comes to moving subjects. It is not because of the autofocus, which is quite fast, but the laggy shutter speed that causes a poor motion image.

The front 5MP shooter has average performance. It lacks clarity and details in most cases, and if there are blemishes, the app can engage in beautification process. It can be good but more visual noise can result in extreme beautification, making the image look artificial.

An innovation of ZenFone Live is the capability of Live streaming where the BeautyLive app could be used to set a 0-10 beauty level and begin live streaming on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube with beauty mode on. It is not the best on this device but an innovation nonetheless.

Asus ZenFone Live comes with a weak battery of 2650mAh. Moderate use can make it last up to 7-8 hours, but if you are a competitive gamer, you will only get up to 4-5 hours. It does not get charged fast either and takes around 2 hours and 15 minutes to get charged from 0-100 which is a lot considering the small size of the battery.

Asus ZenFone Live is not the best phone at this price range. While it has a compact design, the hardware on this set is quite weak. The live streaming from which it gets the name is not a flagship quality and is not the main feature of the phone either. On the whole, it is not an exciting phone, and there are better phones in the similar price range in the market. It is recommended to go for a more powerful Lenovo K6 Power or the reliable Xiaomi Redmi 4.