Mobile World Congress (MWC 2018) is just around the bend and major brands are looking to reveal their flagship devices for the year. Asus has also scheduled an event to unveil their Zenfone 5 lineup. Since we are so close to the event, there has been a flood of rumors and leaks already. Antutu, the popular benchmarking website has revealed what we can expect from the alleged Asus Zenfone 5z which will bear the model number Z01RD. Let’s have a look.
Underneath its hood, the phone will be powered by Qualcomm’s flagship processor – the Snapdragon 845. This processor is also expected to be featured on flagship smartphones from other brands like Samsung and LG. It is an octa-core SoC which is projected to be up to 25% faster in comparison to its predecessor, the Snapdragon 835. That being said, the phone is expected to be able to blaze through most games and applications. In addition to that, the phone will be packed with 6GB of RAM. This should ensure smooth multitasking as well. With the hardware sorted, it’ll be left to see if Asus can finally streamline their clumsy ZenUI user interface.
Up front, the phone bears some striking resemblance to the iPhone X. On the front, the phone will embrace the bezel-less design language. However, the phone will also feature a notch on the top. This will accommodate the front-facing camera sensor and earpiece. Similar to its Apple counterpart, this device will also have a rather odd resolution of 2246 x 1080 pixels, which is likely to be because of the notch.
On the software side of things, this smartphone should come with Android Oreo out of the box. This would mean it would bring all the goodness offered by Oreo such as picture-in-picture mode, notification dots and an overall snappier interface. Unfortunately not much has been revealed about its cameras, but we can safely assume that the phone may come with a dual-rear camera setup. Asus has been known to experiment with dual-front cameras on devices such as the Zenfone 4 Selfie (Dual). It would be nice to see if Asus can pull that off with this smartphone as well.
Asus has been known to make some high-quality smartphones in the past and our expectations are high with the Zenfone 5 series as well. Can the brand deliver and manage to compete against the likes of Samsung and LG? We’ll have to wait and watch. Stay tuned as we bring all the coverage from MWC as it happens.