The Asus Zenfone 4 is the cheapest of the Zenfone series, carrying a price tag even lower than the Moto E despite a more complete hardware package — there’s an autofocus camera on the back, a front-facing camera for video calls and the ever-important selfies, and more internal storage compared to Motorola’s latest budget smartphone. But does it offer a solid user experience? Well, let’s find out.
Design and build
Budget smartphones have never been known to be visually attractive, but like the Moto E, the Zenfone 4 looks better than the average phone. It’s got a standard rectangular build – it’s a bit fat, but the small size makes it easy to handle. The back cover is plastic, but it’s not the cheap-feeling plastic that Samsung phones are infamous for. This gives the device high points for its construction, especially given its price tag.
The Zenfone 4 has back, home and recent apps buttons (unfortunately, without a backlight) and a VGA camera on the front, a headphone jack at the top left, and power and volume buttons on the right side. A microUSB port is the sole inhabitant of the left side, while the bottom is completely devoid of any ports or keys. Oh, and there’s also an ASUS logo on both the front and back.
The Zenfone 4 comes in white, black, blue and red colour variants, and all of them look rather sporty. Ours is the red version of the phone, and it offers a nice visual touch without being too in-your-face, something Nokia’s Lumia phones are guilty of (even though those Lumia phones do look attractive.)
Display
The display is usually the first aspect that gets compromised when it comes to budget smartphones, and it’s somewhat the case on the Zenfone 4. The phone has a 4-inch WVGA (800×480 pixels) display – that’s a lower resolution than the Moto E’s display, but since the screen is smaller, pixel density and screen sharpness isn’t something you’ll have a problem with. Viewing angles are good as well, though contrast does increase and make the screen a bit hazy when you look at it from the top or bottom. You also get a Gorilla Glass 3 screen, which means you won’t be scratching it very easily.
What people will have a problem with on the Zenfone 4 is the brightness. Indoors, the brightness isn’t an issue, but go outdoors and you will be struggling to decipher the screen under a bright sun, which is further complicated by the lack of automatic brightness. The colours aren’t vibrant either, though ASUS offers an app to tune the colour temperature and parameters like hue and saturation, along with a Vivid mode for deeper contrast.
Camera
Fortunately, the camera is something the Zenfone 4 makes little compromise on. For a US$100 device, the 5-megapixel camera on the back is nothing short of impressive. Under good lighting conditions, photos come out with sufficient detail, leaving some room to zoom in without seeing the quality of the photo deteriorating horribly. Macro shots are particularly good – just look at the image of a laptop keyboard down below.
Night shots aren’t very usable, but once again defy what you would expect at this price range, especially when you use Night or HDR mode. There’s no LED flash though, so taking photos in extremely dark conditions is out of the question. The Zenfone 4 records videos at Full HD with software-based video stabilisation. Video quality isn’t the best either, but under good lighting it should get the job done for most.
The camera software is also amazingly full-featured. You can tune settings like White Balance, ISO, photo resolution, exposure, or the image quality, and you can select from various modes like HDR, Beautification, Night, Selfies, Depth of Field, and Panorama, some of which are usually reserved for higher-end devices. For example, there’s a Smart Remove mode – this takes multiple photos and lets you remove moving objects from a scene, and it works surprisingly well. Then there’s Time Rewind – the camera starts taking multiple photos as soon as you turn on this mode, and then lets you select a final image from all the photos taken until you hit that shutter button.
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