phone 11 – asus zenfone 5

image - gsmarena

as if buying 5 phones in 2013 is not enough, i bought one of the best, bang for the buck phones on 2014, released on the same year. asus zenfone 5 belongs to the 1st generation of the zenfone series, not to be confused to the zenfone 5 of the 5th generation. this was released along with zenfone 6 and zenfone 4, again, not to be confused to the 6th generation and the 4th generation, respectively. asus has been making android smartphones before the zenfones. but this one, especially the first generation, was marketed as “bang for the buck” and “for the masses” type of phone. there were so many good things about this phone (when the os was not updated yet, more on this later).

asus zenfone 5 has the biggest foot print and display than all my previous phones. it is more immersive at 5 inches but not as sharp as my htc windows phone 8x. an intel atom powers up the phone and i cannot see the difference with other phones equipped with snapdragon in 2014. and coupled with relatively clean version of android jellybean (on its release). speaking of snappy, this is also the first phone where i heard about fast touch response (in 2020, many phones boast about faster touch sampling which is synonymous to this one). really fluid. but i can put it to the test playing subway surfer.

however, i started to unlike the user experience when it was updated. there were a lot of bloatwares and worse, it cannot be uninstalled. it lags. it is incomparable to the snappy experience i had out of the box.

the phone has a dedicated microsd slot to handle up to 64gb of storage. save music files, documents, photos and videos there. and cram your apps on 8gb internal storage which is already decent in 2014. 8mp rear camera and 2mp front camera cannot fill that up so easily for ordinary users, anyway.

as for the quality and capability. the idea is actually ahead of its time, making the result half-baked. i am talking about the lowlight photography of the phone. it was marketed to “see what you cannot see” by overexposing the lowlight shots. the quality is acceptable back then. you just get a noisy photo and the software cannot just resolve some details. but, i never knew any other phone that can do that in 2014. if only asus improved their camera software from there, they might have the attention the pixel phones got.

music play is also decent, like most phones, prior to its release, the loudspeaker is on the back. no problem when placed on flat surface since it is quite curved on its back. play through speaker, through 3.5mm audio, or wireless audio. you also have fm tuner, which is already absent on most phones in 2021.

as for the battery, i was not able to test it since the device is not on my hands anymore. because of my disappointments on the updated software, it became an extra phone for the family. anyone can use it. until it was gone. untraceable.