Asus ZenFone Live Review - Livestream Beautifully

One of the most talked about entry-level Asus handset today is the ZenFone Live. The first ever entry-level smartphone with live beautification feature.

Asus ZenFone Live review

For almost two weeks, we are using the handset as our secondary phone, for live streaming purposes, and to conduct this review. Now, here's everything we discovered about the new Asus ZenFone Live. Is it worth the hype? Check this out!

For our review part 1: Asus ZenFone Live Unboxing And First Impressions

Display Quality

5 inch HD screen

Asus equipped the ZenFone Live with a pretty decent 5 inch screen with HD resolution. At 294 ppi, the sharpness is there and colors are average in quality. It's more on the cooler side, but if you are not used to that setting, colors can be calibrated on the display settings part. Viewing angles are acceptable as well. Interestingly, it has 10 points of touch, a feature not that common for the price.

Battery Life

8 hours and 55 mins score

Equipped with a 2,650 mAh of battery on just a 5 inch HD screen. The battery performance of this handset is great. It lasted for almost 9 hours in our PC Mark battery test. That's better than most of the Snapdragon 410 powered handset we tested in the past.

Battery life can lasts for an entire day on a single charge!

In real life performance, we recorded a screen on time of 7 hours and 20 mins. Still not bad considering that we are heavy users.

Audio Quality

Speaker holes on lower left side

The speaker quality of the ZenFone Live is average. Loudness is good enough to fill a small room with decent sound. Quality is pretty clear as well. Just don't expect it to be super refined.

For headphones and earphones, output is better than expected. Bass punch is strong, but it won't muddy the mids and the rest of the audio spectrum that much. We just noticed that it needs some tweaking to sound even better.

Microphone quality is better than average, it has two mics in total, one on top and one below. As a result, it can record very good audio, great for both calls and recordings with less noise.

Camera

13 MP shooter behind

As usual, one of the highlights of a ZenFone device is their cameras. At the back, it's loaded with a 13 MP main camera with pretty bright f/2.0 aperture.

Camera modes

It has most of the modes found on PixelMaster ready Asus devices. In particular, we love the HDR Pro. It still has the usual lowlight mode, night mode, and super resolution. What's missing is the full manual control mode for pro mobile photography.

Quality-wise, daylight performance is a just okay. Focus speed and focus speed is decent with less than a second speed. Sharpness isn't the crispiest and shots could be grainy at times, but colors are fine.

There are even shots where you'll get great saturation and contrast. However, lowlight performance isn't great even with a supposedly bright f/2.0 aperture. Use the HDR Pro or flash most of the time.

Rear Camera Samples

Daylight auto

Decent bright daylight shot

Indoor daylight

Indoor lowlight

Lowlight shot

Lowlight sample

In front, Asus highlights a 5 MP f/2.2 lens for selfies. Asus even coupled it with a nice type of LED flash for taking selfies even in the dark. It even has modes like lowlight night, beautify, and HDR Pro well. It also has the usual Asus different beautify levels. Just don't use anything above level 3 or it'll look so unnatural.

Front camera with flash

Quality-wise, it won't be that sharp again and colors is either yellowish or reddish even with good lighting condition. Also, use the flash as much as possible in the dark.

Selfie Camera Samples

Daylight selfie

Indoor beautify

Lowlight selfie

For videos, this handset has the ability to record in FHD (1080p) behind and HD (720p) in front. Quality is identical to what you'll see in photos except that focus won't be that fast behind. In front, we find it a little brighter than what you'll see in photos. Both will be shaky due to lack of OIS for stabilization.

Asus BeautyLive app

Going to the highlight of this phone, the Asus ZenFone Live is truly designed to broadcast live videos on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube beautifully. Using the app, it has the ability to beautify your videos before going live. You can even adjust how beautify you want yourself to be.

Live Video Sample

Performance

Benchmark scores

Inside, the Asus ZenFone Live is equipped with a Snapdragon 400 series chip paired with 2 GB of RAM. It also has 16 GB of expandable storage for your files and apps. For casual use and social media apps, the handset would be usable.

We expected a better chipset for the price!

However, the processor Asus used on ZenFone Live is already dated. Yes, it would be enough for its beautify live purpose, but you'll feel the lag and sluggishness when opening too many social media apps all at the same time. Even some of the native apps and camera app would have occasional stutters. 

Asus ZenUI

For the software, the phone boots with Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS with the newer ZenUI 3.5 skin on top. Icons looks clean, rich in features and gestures, and user friendly enough. However, the usual unwanted Asus bloats are still there.

For telephony and connection quality, the performance is average. We liked that OTG works, LTE is table, and GSM signal is fine.

Pros - HD screen, nice battery life, dual microphones, beautify live, selfie flash

Cons - Outdated chipset, slightly sluggish performance, beautify only works in front camera, usual unwanted Asus bloatwares

Verdict

For its main purpose of making you look GREAT on your LIVE videos, the Asus ZenFone Live is the budget smartphone to get. It'll also be a decent social media companion due to its long battery life.

Other than that, consider other affordable Asus smartphones. Just add a little and you'll get the likes of ZenFone 2 5.5 S and the ZenFone 3 Max ZC520TL. If you can even push your limit to PHP 10K, then the ZenFone 3 Max ZC553KL is one of the very best all around phone for the price.

Why? All of those other Asus smartphones are simply more capable and value packed compared with ZenFone Live.

Build / Design - 3.5

Display - 3.5

Audio - 3.5

Battery - 3.75

Camera - 3.25

Performance - 3.25

Average - 3.45 / 5