Asus Zenfone Live Review – ZB501KL – Live life, Zen Style

Asus has lauched a new variant of their Zenfone, the Zenfone Live (ZB501KL). While there are mobiles which are making selfie based mobile with huge mega pixel count on front camera, Asus Zenfone Live is here to serve a niche community which loves to create live videos on social media. It does not have a large mega pixel count, but relies on making live selfie video experience, better with its software layer called the “Beauty Live”. Asus has sent us the review unit a few weeks ago and I have been using it as my daily driver since then. Let’s us read further to find out if the mobile is worth buying.

Design

The Asus Zenfone Live looks a little different predecessors. It has a full metal-like body with a thin and light profile. The back of the mobile has a 13 MP camera with a single LED flash. There is no laser focus sensor. The bottom has a micro USB port and mono speaker housing. The top has 3.5 mm audio jack. The buttons are at the right side and the hybrid sim slot is on the left side. The display on the front is a 5.0 inch IPS LCD panel and it has 2.5D curved edges. It does not have any branded glass protection. The fingerprint sensor is not present. The navigation keys are non-backlit. The design is stylish and the mobile is handy and comfortable to hold in the hand.

Display

The 5.0 inch IPS LCD panel is capable of 720p resolution. Though it is a 720p display, the images and pictures are crisp and clear. The screen is bright and the color levels are perfect. It has very good viewing angles. Asus has included blue light filter. Adaptive brightness is fast to react and adjust the brightness of the display according to the ambient light. Zenfone Live has got a very good display, but I wish it had a full HD display.

Hardware and Performance

Asus Zenfone Live is powered by a Snapdragon 400 in the variant available in India. It 2 GB of RAM and just 16 GB of internal storage which can be expanded with SD card. The mobile is running on the older version of Android 6.0. The performance of the mobile passes for a budget battery mobile. The hardware is just about able to cope up with Marshmallow and Zen UI. It occasionally lags and shows signs of struggle to open up apps or navigate the UI. The mobile also manages to handle resource heavy games. Asphalt 8 game on medium graphics mode was smoother than in heavy graphics mode. Overall, the performance does not delight, but it depends on how you use your mobile. It is a basic mid-range mobile and it performs like one.

The mobile has single speaker on the bottom and it can easily get muffled when you are holding it while watching media or playing games. But the speaker is loud and clear. The mobile is 4G VoLTE capable. Telephony was good and it had no problem with network latching.

Camera

Asus has masted the camera department. This mobile, though an entry-level device has amazing camera performance. It has 13 MP sensor on the back and 5 MP sensor for the selfies. The camera UI is the same we have seen in any Asus Zen UI powered mobile. It is simple and yet it has a bunch of features and interesting modes. It offers a bunch of modes like HDR, Beautification, Super resolution, Children, Low light, Night mode, Depth of focus, panorama, GIF animation, miniature, time rewind, etc…

Check out the camera samples below

The quality of images is very good. The color saturation is a bit high. It has the right exposure and balanced contrast. Focusing was fast and accurate. It performs good in low light as well. Thanks to Asus Pixel Master algorithm the mobile is a good performance under all light conditions. The selfies has good detail and brightness under good daylight, but performs below average under low light. The skin tonal saturation is a bit off the mark. The skin softening algorithms work work and the selfies are pleasant. I am delighted with the mobile’s camera performance and happy to see that Asus has proved yet again that the zen master of photography in all mobile segments.

Beauty Live

Beauty Live app is the highlight of this mobile. It is actually an app that pops in as an overlay whenever you start a live video on Youtube, Facebook or Instagram. With this app as an overlay, you can control the skin smoothening from a scale of 1-10. Also the mobile has a front led light and the app can control it for better lighting on the face. On my trial, I found that the app does a decent job on lighting. I am not a big fan of skin smoothening, but then it would please anyone who likes it. This feature is not for all, but for the selected few who love to go live, beautifully. The mic and the speaker arrangements are also enhanced to meet the needs of live videos. The dual mic setup does a good job with noise cancelling. The speakers are loud and clear.

Software

Zenfone Live is still running on Android Marshmallow. Most of the older and some of the newer Zenfone have started getting the Nougat update, so we can expect Nougat on Live as well, soon. The Zen UI is heaavily customized. There are many pre-installed applications that hampers the performance of the mobile. The Zen UI has all the usual set of features on any other mobile with ZenUI 3.0. I wish Asus had toned down the feature set and optimized the UI for the hardware. Without that, the UI is laggy shows signs of slow responsiveness.

Battery

Asus Zenfone Live has a 2650 mAh. On an average the mobile gives me 3 hours of screen on time. On my PC Mark test, the mobile lasted for over 4 hours. The mobile does not have fast charging and it takes about 3 hours to charge from 10 to 100%. For an average user, the mobile lasts for about a day.

Verdict

Asus Zenfone Live gives you a metal-like body design, decent display, good camera, and an average performance. It may not be the fastest mobile on the planet, but it has an unique Live Selfie video feature. It is first of its kind and I am sure it will start a revolution. But if you are not into Live videos, you can buy the Redmi 4, priced at Rs 8999, which is a better mobile than the Zenfone Live in all department. I have a hunch that this feature will be made available in upcoming mobiles from Asus. Asus can also make it available for its older mobiles, but the question is, “Will they?”. For the time being, I will not recommend you buying the Zenfone Live, but you can wait for this unique and novel feature of “Beauty Live”, to be available in the upcoming Zenfones with better hardware and performance.

Pricing and Availability

The mobile is priced at Rs 9999 and will be available in all leading online and offline retail markets. It will be available in Black and Gold color variants. The pricing is slightly on the higher side. The 10k price segment in India is crowded with mobiles that offer decent performance and great value for money. I wish Asus has gone really aggressive and launched it at under Rs 8k.