Asus ZenFone 5Q Review: Complete Review and Benchmarks

Price	$ 299
OS [19659015] Android 7.1.1 Oreo
Screen Size (Resolution)	6 inch LCD (2160 x 1080)
CPU [19659015] Qualcomm Snapdragon 630
RAM	4GB
Storage [19659015] 64GB
Location microSD	Yes, up to 2 TB
Rear Camera	Dual: 16 MP (f / 2.2); 8 MP (f / 2.4) wide-angle front camera
	Dual: 20 MP (f / 2.0); 8 MP Wide Angle (f / 2.4)
Battery	3,300 mAh
Water Resistance	No
Size	6.32 x 3.00 x 0.31 inches

What we like

] Long Battery Life: The ZenFone 5Q's generous 3,300 mAh battery lasted 10 hours and 59 minutes on our test, where the device has released websites until exhaustion of resources. That's better than the average smartphone 9:48, and not too far from running $ 229 Asus ZenFone Max Plus 11:25

In fact, the ZenFone 5Q surpassed the Nokia 6.1 35 minutes and the Moto G6 1.5 hours. There are budget combinations that will last longer, but generally without performance concessions.

Modern Design: After producing a series of uninspired smartphones, Cooking-cutter, Asus seems to have updated its model. The ZenFone 5Q is not an eye-catching device by any means, but it is harmless and does the job. And unlike the previous efforts of the company, it looks like a handset of this generation, with a big 18: 9 screen, respectable size glasses and a glass mirror on a sturdy polycarbonate frame.

The fingerprint sensor mounted at the back is a small top and has a small diameter, but it quickly unlocks. The ZenFone 5Q does not approach the size and shape of MotoG6's Goldilocks at $ 249, but as Motorola's popular budget offering, it has NFC for Google Pay transactions as well as a headphone jack.

Bright, 6 inch screen: As long as you do not expect the liveliness of a flagship display, the ZenFone 5Q's 6-inch Full HD LCD will compare securely with those competing devices, offering correct color reproduction, a wide range of hues and one of the brightest backlights we've seen in this category.

The ZenFone 5Q tops exactly 500 nits when we measured maximum brightness from the screen with our light meter. It's even better than the other leaders in the under $ 300 segment, like the Nokia 612 (450 nits) and the Moto G6 (413 nits), and makes the ZenFone 5Q very comfortable to use outdoors.

scored a Delta-E result of 0.39, indicating accurate calibration. (The numbers closer to zero are better.) In terms of color gamut, the 137% ZenFone 5Q sRGB color space band was between the best efforts of Motorola (113) and Nokia (142)

performance: The ZenFone 5Q uses the same Snapdragon 630 chip as the Nokia 6.1, but combines it with 4GB RAM instead of 3GB.

This is the best combination of processor and memory that you will likely find for $ 300 or less, and this makes the ZenFone 5Q one of the best performing handsets in its class. The extra gigabyte of RAM gives multitasking confidence, and we like this Asus phone includes 64GB of built-in storage, which is closer to what you get on a basic iPhone or Galaxy S9.

The ZenFone 5Q with 4GB of RAM gives confidence in multitasking, and we like that Asus includes 64GB of built-in storage

In Geekbench 4, a benchmark that measures overall performance, the ZenFone 5Q has gotten a score of 4.108 – some 400 points more than the Nokia 6.1, and functionally on a par with 4.12 of the Moto G6.

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The ZenFone 5Q also impressed in the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test, a benchmark we use for mid-range and low-end devices . There, the Asus handset totaled a very respectable 16,607, which is slightly behind the 16,847 Nokia 6.1. That's enough to play high-end games like PUBG Mobile with moderate settings, which is not too bad for a $ 300 device.

What's n? not like

micro USB in 2018: The ZenFone 5Q supports the micro-USB instead of the newer and faster USB Type-C format and, therefore, does not have a fast charge. This means that it takes a while to recharge this big battery with the included adapter. In half an hour, the device reached only 34% of our tests

And good luck if you plan on using a third party charger that you might have dragged on. The ZenFone 5Q took 3 full hours to go from empty to full with an old Sony micro USB charger that I still had in my days using a Xperia XZ2 Compact.

The other problem with such an old port is that new accessories have won do not work with. This is going to be a problem if you have a pair of USB-C headphones that you really like, for example.

Meh Cameras: Just as HTC did with its U12 +, Asus opted for dual cameras at the front and back of the ZenFone 5Q. Unfortunately, more lenses do not always lead to better photos.

On the back, there is a 16-megapixel primary sensor with a f / 2.2 coupled lens to a 8 MP wide angle camera, f / 2.4 for landscapes and portrait mode. The front has a 20 MP sensor even sharper with a larger f / 2.0 aperture, but it is associated with the same 8 MP sub-sensor and its wider field of view.

Shallow depth of field portraits are in vogue now, but you would be much better served by ignoring ZenFone 5Q's portrait mode.

The inclusion of wide-angle lenses in the front and back makes the ZenFone 5Q an ideal tool to capture the full extent of your environment. a group selfie. But the phone's cameras produce mixed results, with highlights, low exposure and blurry details as you zoom in further.

The picturesque scene above, taken on a race track during a perfect summer day, illustrates the strengths of the ZenFone 5Q as well as its shortcomings. The Asus offer is sharper than that of the Nokia 6.1, with more details kept in shady trees to the left. However, things get a lot fuzzier off, and there is significant distortion around the perimeter of the frame that Nokia's rendering avoids. Plus, the ZenFone 5Q paints a gray, gritty and noisy sky, and strangely, the greens are a bit too hot for what the situation requires.

The portraits were also not the bag of ZenFone 5Q, as evidenced by the dark example above. Some users may appreciate the addition of a portrait mode, but the Asus implementation is unable to accurately separate the foreground from the background. The smoothing is also too aggressive, which gives the effect of a bad Photoshop work.

Before entering the front camera results, you should know that Asus is very, very serious about selfies. The ZenFone 5Q even includes an application called Selfie Master, which offers an assortment of dials to refine your cheeks, enlarge your eyes and, rather problematic, whiten your skin. I had a hard time making sure that Selfie Master made me look like something else than an extraterrestrial, so I turned it off.

I realized that, like its rear cameras, the ZenFone 5Q's front cameras favored a spectacular contrast. tints. There is no doubt that Asus shooters do more with indoor lighting in the example above; It's surprisingly well exposed. But the lighting is a bit erratic and does not look natural, and the color of my hair is too light. If you prefer more stylized selfies, you may like what you see.

Android OS dated: We come to the anniversary of the release of Android 8.0 Oreo last year, and yet the ZenFone 5Q is doing with Android 7.1.1 Nougat. It's indefensible, but maybe it would not sting so much if ZenUI's skin of Asus was not the mess that it is. ZenUI Trafficking All the Bad Habits of Desperate Android Phone Manufacturers to Differentiate Their Products with Features additional fragile and garish animations at the expense of sensible design. Take, for example, the phone's Boost function, which frees up memory to improve performance. It's an "erase all" button, which Android really does not need because it handles the resources very well by itself.

This is not unusual among third-party Android apps. But Asus then added another more aggressive Super Boost mode that actively prevents background processes on many of the default applications – including those you may need to run quietly, like Chrome.

Asus doesn that does not seem to want or not know how to reject bad software ideas

It's pretty irresponsible to encourage users to activate a mode that prevents the software from working properly, and yet Asus went ahead and did it anyway. There is also an optional high-performance profile (for special occasions where you want your phone to be fast) and a host of blunt behaviors, such as the brightness that changes constantly depending on what's on the screen, and an app called Marker that gobbles up articles and spits them out in unintelligible CSS

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If the 5Q Eventually Sees this Oreo update cruelly needed Asus has made it later in the year, it would be refreshing to see reduced bloat

Price and Availability

The ZenFone 5Q is priced at $ 299 and comes with a hardware configuration of 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. Two colors are proposed: black (which is really more indigo) and white. The rest of the world receives a red variant, but it jumps the United States. The ZenFone 5Q works on GSM networks like those of AT & T and T-Mobile, but you can not use it on CDMA networks like those of Sprint and Verizon

Bottom Line [19659072] With the ZenFone 5Q, Asus offers for budget buyers, with fast performance for the price and a long battery life (albeit slow). And again, it's hindered by a list of features that look good on paper, but that mean almost nothing in the real world.

The photographic suite is attractive with its four lenses, wide-angle perspective and many shooting modes. but the photos do not look much better than those of the competition. Even worse, the ZenFone 5Q continues Asus' contempt for the software. Android Nougat is old, and ZenUI only makes things worse.

For all the ways in which the ZenFone 5Q is trying to grab your attention, it's really a low budget phone. But it is not very polite, nor is it the cheapest, and it does not work on the widest choice of networks. And that makes it difficult to recommend in light of the more rounded options like the Moto G6, Nokia 6.1 or even the Honor 7X

Source: Tom's Guide