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What Is It? – The Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe is the newest flagship phone from the Taiwanese computer maker. The first thing you’ll notice is the design, a sleek metal body. No plastic here. The innards are pretty noteworthy as well, with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821 processor, 256 MB of onboard memory, and a whopping 6MB of RAM to handle whatever applications you may want to run. Asus is touting the 23 megapixel Sony camera. The rear camera features optical image stabilization and very fast auto-focusing. We took a number of shots in different lighting conditions and the results were quite good. There’s also an 8MP front camera for all of those selfies.
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The unlocked ZenFone 3 Deluxe comes in two models, 5.5″ and 5.7″. We tried the larger of the two, which has a better processor and more memory. It features an extremely sharp Super AMOLED screen with Gorilla Glass 4. The screen does a great job of displaying both stills and video.
Fans of hi-res audio will be happy to hear that the ZenFone3 comes with a built-in hi-res audio player. Couple it with good headphones and the available 2TB SD card slot and you’ll be able to make this your only hi-res music player, saving the weight and expense of a standalone player. The phone has one down-firing speaker, which we found adequate.
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We used our Netflix streaming test to see how it made out with movies, and there were no issues; no buffering, and great quality. Using several music services we found, no surprise, that the speaker was okay, the headphone output was terrific.
Is It 50+ Friendly? – Asus provides an “Easy Mode” which gives you a simpler screen with fewer, though significantly larger icons. This is a great feature for seniors who may want a smartphone without the clutter of the unnecessary “bloatware” programs that are installed on the normal display. It also has a full suite of accessibility features including high contrast text, voice over, magnification, and large text.
Frustration Factor? – Setup was easy, though you still must run through all of the usual Android steps. Using the NFC function I was able to transfer files easily from another Android device. My only issue was that somehow I mistakenly enabled “Talk Back” that highlighted and voiced over everything I touched. It took me a while to figure out how to make it go away.
Is It Worth The Mony? – You bet it is. This has much of the great functionality we’ve come to expect from flagship phones from Samsung and LG but at a fraction of the price. Amazon is carrying it for $499. Compare that to an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S7 with half the memory for $672 at Verizon. The ZenFone 3 Deluxe stacks up well to the top ranking competition on almost all fronts, but sweeps them away on price.
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