Asus Zenfone AR ZS571KL

As noted in our first impressions of the ASUS ZenFone AR, the phone doesn’t look much different from the ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe (review). You get a large 5.7-inch display up front, which means it isn’t meant for a single-hand usage. It’s quite thick when compared to its peers at 9mm, and also has a significant heft at 170g. But that gives it a solid build. 

The ASUS ZenFone AR is the second smartphone after the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro offering AR capabilities via Google Tango. If you’re unaware, Tango is the Alphabet-owned company's mobile-based AR computing platform. With the help of a variety of sensors, it can detect the relative position of the smartphone, and thus enable indoor navigation, virtual measurements, and gaming (remember Pokémon Go, the game that utilises augmented reality in its simplest form).

Google’s Daydream platform on the other hand, is more evolved. All you need is to insert the ZenFone AR inside the Daydream View headset, follow the initial setup, and voila. There are a plenty of apps on the Google’s storefront, focussing on multimedia consumption or games. Speaking of games, you can use the Bluetooth remote controller to play them.

While most smartphone manufacturers are opting for lower camera resolutions in order to offer a bigger sensor for promising better pictures, ASUS thinks otherwise. The ZenFone AR comes with a high-res 23-megapixel f/2.0 Sony IMX318 sensor with all the bells and whistles you could expect from a flagship. It has both OIS and EIS, and also promises fast autofocussing speeds thanks to the brand’s TriTech system. The camera utilises PDAF, laser AF as well as the usual contrast detection methods to quickly lock the focus on the subject.

While the OnePlus 5 became the first smartphone in India with 8 gigs of RAM, the ASUS ZenFone AR is actually the world’s first phone with this capacity. And the brand has brought the same variant in India (globally, there’s a 6GB RAM model too, but that has not been launched here). While one might argue that such a high amount of RAM is an overkill, it certainly helps in the case of the ZenFone AR for crunching AR and VR applications. Multitasking is silky smooth as well, and opening and switching between apps is instantaneous. The best part is that even with ~15 apps opened, there’s more than 3GB of spare RAM capacity. Combined with the 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chipset, the device offers flawless performance. There was nary an instance where the handset showed any trace of lag.