So, there's this hilarious typo in ASUS's PR materials for the Xen Phone 2
that I think perfectly captures my biggest gripe with this product. I'm
sorry. Available for purchase when? Yes,
the most annoying thing about the Zen Phone 2 was the fact that it took so
very long for ASUS to deliver the $200
smartphone that they showed off at CES this year. But, is the delay a big deal?
Has the competitive landscape really changed so much in three months that
it's significantly less market shaking?
I guess we'll find out. Strap in, folks.
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Oh, ASUS. I love those guys dearly, but
they really are a PC company at heart and it really shows through sometimes.
The Xen Phone 2 actually comes in two flavors. a 16 gig storage version with 2
gigs of LPDDR3 RAM and an Atom
Z3560 for $200 and a 64 gig storage
version with 4 gigs of LPDDR3 RAM and an Atom
Z3580 for $300. I mean, RAM and storage we've seen
before, but changing out the CPU, who
who does that with phones? Anyway, other
than those core speeds and feeds, both models of the phone are the same.
Starting at the front, we've got a 5 megapixel selfie camera, a 5.5 in 1080p
IPS display covered in Gorilla Glass 3, fixed offscreen buttons above a circular
finished metal chin. Then around the bottom, a micro USB port and microphone.
On the sides, a whole lot of nothing. At the top, a second mic for noise
cancellation, a 3 and 12 mm audio jack, and the quite disappointing lock button.
The position makes it kind of hard to press without really mushing the phone
into your finger, and the tactile response is marshmallowike, to put it
kindly. Around the back, we've got a two-tone flash next to the 13 megapixel
rear camera, volume up and down buttons that can also be used for the camera
shutter, and a rear-facing speaker that I would describe as functional. But it's
under the brushed finished plastic backing where things actually start to
get pretty interesting. Micro SD expansion is one feature that's been
trending towards extinction in the industry, but ASUS has gone ahead and
included. And dual micro SIM slots,
something pretty uncommon here in North America, are also present back here.
Very nice. Oh, and we can't really show
this, but if you were to dig in further, you'd find wireless AC and LTE chipsets,
as well as the sorry, it's not userreplaceable, and it doesn't charge
wirelessly, but it does support Qualcomm quick charge 3000 milliamp hour battery.
So, those are some pretty impressive specs, am I right? But what's it like to
actually hold the thing? Well, the screen isn't the best or brightest IPS
display I've ever seen, and I'm not a huge fan of the 5 and a half inch form
factor, but I've got to give it to ASUS.
It handles pretty well. Their reviewers guide, however one-sided its
representation of the facts might be, makes a point that I've made multiple
times about the awkwardness of a flatbacked versus a curved back device.
And other than that, physically, wow. I guess there's really not much to say.
It's a ph any phone depending on who it is you ask.
So, let's talk the make or break of any Android device. The Android 5
Lollipopbased Zen UI skin. And this is
going to be a tough one here, folks, because Zen UI does some things very
right and some things very wrong and some in between. So, let's start with
the former. Responsiveness is solid, although it should be given that the Xen
Phone 2's Atom CPU performs similarly to a Snapdragon 801. According to this
Tom's article, quick settings are customizable and available for pretty
much any phone setting you could possibly want. And on the subject of
settings, there is some fan diddlyastic stuff buried in the settings menu.
Separate user profiles, including a kid mode that allows time limits and locks
down certain apps. some super smart do not disturb settings like ignoring a
call from someone the first time then accepting it the second since it's presumably urgent. Automatic phone call
recording, although you'll want to check on the legality of this in your area
before activating it. The auto start manager that lets you force apps to wait
for your permission to launch and do anything in the background. customizable
gestures like double tap to wake and sleep and double volume tap to wake to
camera and even the ability to tweak the saturation and color temperature of your
display or save your screenshots as a PNG instead of a JPEG. I mean, who even
thinks of that? But for every yin, there
is a yang. For every up there is a down. And for all the positive things I found
about Zenui, there were definitely some others that irked me. First up in real
talk time, ASUS, what is up with the incredible number of pre-installed apps?
I mean, some of them, like flashlight, I guess we need, but everyone else just
does this through the quick toggle directly. So, I don't get why it needs to launch an app on the Zen phone, too.
And some of these things are just inexcusable. What the chuffing hell is
Zen Circle? Are you a social network company now, ASUS? Why is the fact that
it comes with trend micro nonsense on it considered a selling point in the
reviewer's guide? Even Samsung has
finally figured this out. If a feature is useless to 99% of your users, make it
an optional download. Don't pack your device full of junk that nobody cares
about. Which leads to complaint number two, the overall polish. The ASUS
launcher wasn't configured with notification access by default, causing
my lock screen to never display my new alerts. The app that lets you use your
phone on the desktop, actually super handy, very cool, but also kind of
janky. The phone actually locked up outright twice on me during the time I
was using it, including a startling full power off while I was writing an email
with 15% battery showing on the meter. And then when I went to turn it back on,
it told me the battery was dead. And on the subject of battery life, I've
confirmed with ASUS that I'm running the latest firmware, but I haven't been able
to get past 8:00 PM without topping up the battery. Now, in their defense, I am
a bit of a power user. All the radios on all the time is my policy. I got like
smartwatches and stuff, but with a 3,000
milliamp hour battery capacity, I should be easily making it through the day. So,
I suspect software, whether it's one of my usual apps that disagrees with Zenui
or some of the stupid bloat that ASUS preloaded, I think there's something
stealthily draining battery in the background. But unfortunately, my usual
battery meter apps are not picking up on it. So, I'll try and post in the video
description when and if I figure out what it is. Which leads to the other
make or break smartphone feature these days, the camera. I'm torn on this one,
too. On the one hand, the manual mode is great for camera geeks and using the
super resolution like multi-exposure merging mode and the low light four
pixels acting as one for higher sensitivity modes result in some
shockingly good photos, albeit with a higher processing time cost and or a
lower resolution cost in both ideally lit and poorly lit situations. On the
other hand, while the Toshiba sensor behind the f2.0 lens might be okay. It's
not very featurerich with a max video resolution of 1080p and no slow-mo
support whatsoever. It lacks optical image stabilization. The camera launches
quite slowly. And the auto photo mode, the one most people will usually use, is
just not very good with smeary noise
reduction processing artifacts eliminating a lot of the detail from
even photos that are taken under pretty good conditions.
But this is a $200 smartphone off contract for the
base model. And even for the $300 one,
you get more than a token increase in storage with CPU and RAM upgrades being
thrown in along with a quadrupling of your storage. Not to mention that ASUS
has committed to allowing bootloadader unlocking. And the thing even includes a
quick charger, something HTC couldn't be bothered to do on a smartphone that
costs over twice as much. So, here's the
conclusion. While it's not perfect at
the price, the bottom line is ASUS,
you're going to have a lot of to clean up when the Xen Phone 2 is done kicking
all the ass it's going to kick out there in the market. And you can quote that on
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out. So I think that pretty much wraps it up, guys. Like this video if you
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