ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe Review: Unlocked Android With 6GB RAM And 64GB Storage

The ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe ships with an installation of Android Marshmallow v6.0.1 customized with ASUS’ ZenUI. Generally speaking, ASUS’ customizations are fairly unobtrusive and navigating through the various menus, screens, and prompts will be familiar to anyone that’s poked around an Android-based device. We should note that number themes are also available for the ZenFone 3, should you want to further customize the phone.

There are three home screens setup by default. The main screen is home to a clock and weather widget, the Google search bar, and an array of shortcuts to Themes, the Play Store, and other ASUS and Google-branded apps. Swipe right and the second home screen has only a trio of shortcuts to ZenFone Care, ZenTalk, and Mobile Manager. Swipe right one more time and the third home screen is completely blank.

Ever preset at the bottom are a quintet of shortcuts to the phones, messaging, and camera apps, along with a shotcut from Chrome, and the app tray. All of these (except for the app tray) can be customized, of course.

ASUS has done a bang-up job with the cameras on the ZenFone 3 Deluxe. The rear-camera on the phone features a 23 megapixels sensor with a 1.12 µm pixel size, f/2.0 aperture, 6-element Largan lens with sapphire lens protection, and 4-axis / 4-stop optical image stabilization. The rear camera is complemented by a dual-LED flash, and offers very fast auto-focus and full-time HDR as well.

The front camera is a 8MP shooter with autofocus with an ƒ/2.0 aperture and 84° field of view. Both the front and rear cameras are capable of 1080p video capture (and below), but the rear camera ups the ante with 4K video recording (3840x2160) at 30 FPS too.

In terms of picture quality, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe produced some nice images, but in sub-optimal lighting conditions a bit of noise is evident – which is par for the course with small smartphone camera sensors. The autofocus system is super-fast, however, and colors had good saturation with realistic tones and good sharpness.

Under optimal lighting conditions though, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is capable of producing some exceptionally nice photos, with excellent color reproduction and clarity. If you look at the shots of the tree tops, you can make out some really fine details off in the distance. Nice bokeh effects are also possible.

The ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe’s camera app also offers a host of manual controls, which includes all of the adjustments for things like ISO, white balance, etc. that you would expect to find on a high-end smartphone and it had a handy level indicator (to ensure subjects aren’t shot off-kilter) as well. Overall, if photography is a main consideration of yours in a smartphone purchase, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe should be appealing.

4K Sample 1080p 30FPS Sample 1080p 60FPS Sample

Video performance is a mixed bag with the ZenFone 3 Deluxe. The lighting was identical for all three of the video samples above. All we did was change the resolution between clips; high-quality capture mode was used throughout. As you can see, the 1080p clips are sharp and smooth, though the 1080p 60FPS clip is significantly darker. The 4K clip is more choppy and noisy that both. You can manually tweak settings to help alleviate or minimize these issues, but since most people shoot video on auto, that’s what we did here. And as you can see, your mileage will vary.