The recently released ASUS smartphone zenfone 2 has hit a new price/perf benchmark point with an MSRP of $199 but mid-high range specs:
-4G LTE
-Quadcore x86 processor
-5.5 inch IPS 1080P screen with gorilla glass
-2GB of RAM
-16GB storage
-3000 mAh battery
The low price is in part because Intel has been desperately trying to get a foothold in the mobile market and likely playing contra-revenue games. Unlike past low-cost options like the oneplus phone, this phone has wide release being sold at online retailers like Amazon.
Is this setting a new standard in low-cost, high-performance phones, or is this a temporary ploy until Intel starts charging for their SoCs? Will this lead to a price war between Mediatek, Qualcomm, and Intel? All of which have already released phones this year for the North American marketplace supporting the 4G spectrum. How low-priced can these smartphones with laptop-like specs go?
Reviewed here: http://anandtech.com/show/9251/the-asus-zenfone-2-review
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:59PM
According to the story, paying 100 dollars more gets you 2 times the memory and 4 times the flash-storage and well over twice the speed. That would stave off obsolescence. Code bloat (to say nothing of expectation bloat) in Android these days makes 4gig ram a wise choice.
I guess for me, what would count is how much skin Asus would apply to Vanilla Android. If they left it alone I think this could be a very attractive phone.
Dual Sim! Business and Personal, multiple carriers? Seems like they might be tempting the corporate market.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:40PM
It's a nice looking phone but it's a dealbreaker for me that it includes an Intel processor. They've built backdoors into their desktop and server products so one can easily assume they've done the same this time as well. Any self respecting privacy inclined geek can't in good conscience give Intel their well earned money even if phones these days are privacy destoying devices that we accept in order to remain gainfully employed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:47PM
Identify the backdoors
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khedoros on Friday May 29 2015, @05:18AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Alfred on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:09PM
Jabs aside, since I didn't see a battery life in the article, I will hold to my jab while I put this in the "I'll believe different when I see it" category. I'm kinda prejudiced because I've never been fond of atom chips. The odd/horrible button placement is chip independent though.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Wierd0n3 on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:26PM
I had two big questions after testing the ZenFone 2's display. The first was "Why does ASUS employ the use of such heavy CABC and dynamic contrast?" The second was "Why does ASUS limit the maximum brightness to around 80% of what the display is capable of?" I think these battery results answer both of them, and ASUS provided some additional information that supports it as well. The display and LED backlight on the ZenFone 2 is likely not as efficient as those on some other smartphones.
seems the atom processor isn't the biggest hog on the device.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:31PM
*face palm*
That was my fail. No wonder the article seemed so short, I was missing 10 pages. Thanks
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:40PM
The processor hasn't been the biggest hog on any phone I've ever seen. Its the screen.
4 Cores? Means nothing! 3 of them are essentially shut down 95-99% of the time and the remaining one is rigorously throttled.
There is a hell of a lot of "stare time" on phones, where you can't shut down the screen, but you need virtually zero CPU resources.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Friday May 29 2015, @01:07AM
Meh... My solution has been to just go to buy a couple of extra batteries and an external charger from Amazon or a slow boat from China. They are usually sold in sets and are about $20. I swap phones often so I do this way too often for a normal human (perhaps I am abnormal). I have had to wait about a month before this option was available as the phone was new. I have never had quality issues with the non-OEM batteries.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday May 29 2015, @02:26AM
External battery packs are pretty nice too.
I've been lucky in that my current phone gets about 18 hours with normal use. After its a couple years old, that might change.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:33PM
You don't have to see a battery life. Just the battery size indicates this will guzzle power.
But that said, modern phones are designed to get you through a day (when new). There is no point in developing a phone that gets 6 hours, because you will have no customers. They will size the battery according to what the market demands.
Samsung S6 has a 2,550mAh battery.
HTC M8 Battery capacity (mAh) 2600.
This phone: 3000mAh.
So it appears they've already baked in the difference in efficiency. (And intel is not as laughable as it use to be in this regard).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gman003 on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:43PM
http://anandtech.com/show/9251/the-asus-zenfone-2-review/3 [anandtech.com]
7.3 hours browsing web on Wifi, 6.3 hours on 4G, 3.2 hours running graphics benchmarks. None of those are exceptional, but it's not really that bad. (Anandtech chalks it up more to the display than the CPU as well).
They also support an extremely fast charger, which should help alleviate the limited battery life. As long as it can go a full day (9 hours) between charges with regular use, most people will be fine, and I suspect this can manage that as long as the screen-off idle usage isn't horrible.
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday May 29 2015, @09:33PM
I'm kind of excited about this, to be honest. It's at least double all of my current phone's specs (Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini with CyanogenMod11), for less than what I paid for this one. That being said, I am not an early adopter. About a year from now, when the CyanogenMod teams have made a stable and popular release for this phone, I'll probably pick up one of the $300 models, install CM and roll with it. Provided it lives up to this hype. I could use a bigger screen and more RAM anyway.
If not this, then the next best combination of supported, powerful and cheap that's available in 2016.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:38PM
... so many to choose from.
I have a special hatred for the term "standard" when its used in some capacity other than a document that is ratified by a standards organization like ANSI, ISO, IEEE or IETF.
For example I asked a knowledgeable friend whether I should use PostgreSQL or MySQL. He gave me many good reasons for using MySQL, but his choice was ridiculed by some joker who said "MySQL is the standard".
Look, if all your friends leapt from the golden gate bridge, would suicide become a standard?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by jcross on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:48PM
That's exactly how I lost all my friends, you insensitive clod!
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:51PM
You're not standards-compliant!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:35PM
Oh jeez. Probably. Is the bridge on fire? Oblig XKCD [xkcd.com]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:40PM
the crew of the explosives vessel in the Halifax blast, as well as the driver of the gasoline truck in the caldecott tunnel fire, survived.
As did all those who fled.
In Halifax, over 2,000 perished, in part because a large crowd gathered at the waterfront so as to watch the fire.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:42PM
Nice specs but a fast look at the ASUS forums show lots of complaints about overheating and reliability problems and a it looks like it has a locked bootloader. So apparently Intel still isn't quite ready to play in the big leagues when it comes to the small world.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by frz on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:56PM
Posted from ARM-powered bacon
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:47PM
That's low cost?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:00PM
Compared to the fruit phone it is.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:04PM
Blackberry?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:14PM
No, the phone for fruits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @05:48AM
> That's low cost?
Indeed. I have a couple of nokia 520's I picked up for $20 each.
They have 25% the RAM and 50% the storage, but they were just 10% of the cost.
They run windows, but the GUI is fast. I'm not a big phone guy, so I don't really care that there aren't a million different spyware apps. I do wish I could root them though.
(Score: 1) by dingus on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:50PM
I just can't understand why they would try to cram an x86 processor on a phone. That's like putting an ARM in a gaming rig, but the opposite.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:54PM
Or like putting a tri-cluster 10-core ARM processor [soylentnews.org] in a phone?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Friday May 29 2015, @07:25AM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:57PM
How big is the heatsink? How many BTUs of heat does it pump out?
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:27PM
i got modded down for saying x86 eats too much power [soylentnews.org] but this is vindication. the battery capacity on this thing a monstrously high is 3000 mAh and yet it has poor battery life [anandtech.com] but the excuse of "because it has higher performance!" doesn't add up because poor performance scores [anandtech.com] too!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:29PM
But it cranks out a good amount of BTUs just like any good x86 chip.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:38PM
I haven't actually tried but I would be unsurprised were my Xeon box to run DOS 2.0 just fine.
Yes 16-bit is used for BIOS but now we have UEFI.
According to "Pentium Processor Optimization", the pentium ran a lot faster if you treated it as a RISC chip - that is, if you programmed it in much the same way as you would a powerpc.
Suppose you patched llvm or gcc so that their x86 code generators did that. I expect they already do, but try removing all the support for 16-bit, string instructions, memory-to-memory operations and so on. Now you have a compiler for an "x86 RISC".
Then Intel or AMD could produce a CPU that would run that compiler's binaries. It would be smaller, cheaper, use less power, generate less heat. It would still boot but with EFI.
It's been obvious to me for well over a decade that this would be a good move; why doesn't anyone actually do it?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:41PM
People run lots of legacy software.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:35PM
I didn't think to make that clear - there are lots of people who don't run legacy software. Consider a typical webhost, it's all built from recent source.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:51PM
The answer is that those extra features are a lot less wasteful than you think. Sure the instruction decoder has to be a little bigger, but compared to the rest of the chip it's such a tiny savings that it's not worth the effort. Internally, Intel processors convert x86 to processor-specific microcode and the conversion can take a slow path for rarely used instructions.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:37PM
if you support fewer instructions it's more tractable to implement them directly in circuitry, rather than in microcode. Were that the case the chip could be a lot faster.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:23PM
There is a slight difference between a datacenter and a mobile phone.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:52AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:03PM
Very low price for the specs, and a lot for the $100 upgrade.
It all comes down to the Atom chip. The battery life is bad, but it could be worse. It's funny how the charge time is so low.
Intel has more chances to crack into mobile with newer generations of Atom, but it doesn't look great for smartphones. It looks like a good fit for Microsoft tablets (alongside the more powerful Intel Core-M).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 29 2015, @12:23AM
Let's pray we don't have to deal with Wintel and Wintendo on computerphones. They both suck.
(Score: 1) by Shimitar on Friday May 29 2015, @05:20AM
I have owned a lot of asus device: laptops, small sized computers, tablets, headphones.
All of them are great devices, innovative and unique, and that's why I choose them. For example the eeepc (the first net book ever ) or the transformer tablet (keyboard hardware-coupket optional tablet!)....
Every single one has been associated with terrible build quality and hardware which in a way or the other would be massively disappointing for the great specs it supposedly had.
Like top of the line state of the art tablet... amazing specs... so slow to almost crawl unless heavily hacked?
... or top line very expensive tomorrow - specs laptop with plastic keyboard where after two months backspace key just broke in half?
... or top notch very expensive and fancy bluetooth headset that could not even hold a charge for ONE day?
So, no, i tend to stay away from asus nowadays, but they still push somehow the boundaries of the anonymity and push into experimenting new stuff. Which is great, just remember, there is a flaw you just don't see it.
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @10:34PM
Do wonder how much of a loss Intel is taking to muscle their way into the mobile SoC market...