Asus made its name under the budget smartphone market last year with Zenfone 5. The device had premium design with great specsheet and most importantly the whole new Zen UI which is better than any OEM UI we have seen till date and something we actually wanted to use. Anyway, Asus is taking the Zenfone brand to another level with the announcement of Zenfone 2 at CES 2015.
The Asus Zenfone 2 specs include a 64-bit Super Quad Core Intel Atom Processor Z3580 clocked at 2.3 GHz with RAM options of 2GB  and 4GB. The device has a 5.5″ FHD display with 72% screen to body ratio which should be a relief to the device’s large body size compared to the display size in previous versions (Zenfone 5).
The camera on Asus Zenfone 2 is 13MP on the back and 5MP on front. The device with Pixel Master feature by Asus which brings a great camera experience to the Zenfone devices, we have used the Zenfone 5 with Pixel master and we can tell you it offers great features to the camera on Zenfone devices.
Like all budget phones, the Zenfone 2 also comes with dual SIM support, a feature that is extremely popular in some developing countries and is critical to compete under the budget smartphone market.
The Zenfone 2 runs on Android 5.0 lollipop out of the box, which means we might see new Zen UI experience with material design and stuff that the Lollipop update brought in to Android ecosystem. However, the Zen UI was very flat designed even on KitKat so we’d doubt if Asus has changed much with the Lollipop.
Zenfone 2 price is set at $199, which converts to Rs. 12600 in India. But that’s just the starting price of the device, as mentioned earlier the Zenfone 2 will also come in a 4GB RAM variant, for which we expect the price to be significantly high.
Asus also announced the Zenfone 2 release date at CES, it’s somewhere in March 2015. If you’re in for a new smartphone, you might wanna hold on till March as Zenfone 2 is going to be a serious competitor to many devices even the ones that live on the premium side of things. Also, the March 2015 will see quite a lot of launches from many manufacturers, so the wait will be worth it.
Image credit: Droid Life
