Asus might not be the first to bring an 8GB RAM phone to India (courtesy OnePlus 5), but they do take the award for getting the first augmented and virtual reality ready smartphone, the ZenFone AR.
Priced at Rs 49,999, you’d be mistaken to think that ZenFone AR is yet another flagship phone that’ll get lost in the flagship crowd, but with AR and VR capabilities under its helm, standing out from the crowd won’t be that difficult after all.
The phone is not only compatible with Project Tango, it can also cater to affordable VR gears, such as the Google’s Daydream VR headset.
During our brief time with the Asus ZenFone AR, we played Need for Speed (via the Daydream), and explored virtual furniture in the room, seeing sofas where there were none.
After a bit of an initial struggle, the phone kicks smoothly into AR and VR, and experiencing that on a smartphone is. But is it worth Rs 49,999?
That’s where the hardware comes into play. The ZenFone AR gets a 5.7-inch Quad-HD display, powered by Snapdragon 821 and optimised for AR and VR by Qualcomm. Like the OnePlus 5, ZenFone AR has 8GB RAM. The phone offers 128GB storage.
The raw power underneath the phone, that ensures the processing of graphic intensive content, speaks for itself when it comes to experiencing AR and VR on the phone.
A Powerful Camera Supports AR and VR
As you can see in the launch graphic, the ZenFone AR features a 23-megapixel primary camera at the back, a fish eye camera, a depth sensing camera and an IR projector.
The shooter comes with F/2.0 aperture, which means, sadly, that the phone can’t rival low-light specialists in the business right now.
Interestingly, the phone has optical image stabilisation (OIS) for stills, while the video stability has been trusted on electronic image stabilisation (EIS) which was recently seen on the OnePlus 5.
With respect to the phone’s design, you get a metal body in the front, and faux-leather at the back. Not sure, if we need that in 2017, to be honest.
Packed inside this multi-dimensional device is a 3300mAh battery. Would it be enough to back this hardware heavy phone? Asus thinks so.
Stay tuned with us, we’ll share more exciting stuff that the Asus ZenFone AR offers.
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