Asus Zenfone Live - an inexpensive smartphone for an unassuming buyer

The five-inch budget smartphone from Asus is a typical representative of its segment. Phone price makes 9 thousand rubles, and often nothing interesting for such money can be bought. Zenfone Live is a little out of the mainstream, but it doesn’t do it with stuffing, but with the built-in mode for online broadcasts. Review Asus Zenfone Live (zb501kl) tells about the characteristics, features and disadvantages of the device.

Specifications

Asus Zenfone Live (zb501kl) features are quite typical for an inexpensive smartphone. It is very difficult to find interesting details in the hardware, as if they took a list of parameters of a budget smartphone and put all the stuffing in strict accordance with it. Full list of characteristics is given in the table.

Specifications	Zenfone live
Display	5 inches, IPS-TFT, 1280 * 720
Chipset	Snapdragon 400, 4 * 1.4 GHz
Memory	2Gb, 16 / 32Gb
Interfaces	LTE, Wi-Fi, Glonass, GPS, BDS, Bluetooth
Camera	13 and 5 Mp
Battery	2650 mAh
OS and firmware	Android 6.0.1, ZenUI 3.0
Materials	Plastic glass
Colors	Black gold pink
Dimensions and weight	141.8 * 71.4 * 7.95 mm, 120 grams

The processor of the new model is known on a variety of phones, the amount of RAM could be more. The device has a good rear camera. The phone comes in black, pink and gold. In addition to the power supply unit, paperclip, apparatus, cable, instructions, there is a simple headset.

Asus zenfone live

Design

Device made from plastic and glass. The front panel is covered with glass, it is quite typical, thin frames on the sides, rather large at the top and bottom. On the bottom panel are located the touch buttons back, home and menu. Above, except for the speaker, camera and proximity sensor built-in flash. Such a solution is found in principle not often, and certainly not in cheap smartphones.

All connectors are located above and below. At the bottom end of the connector for power, speaker and microphone. At the top end is a 3.5 headset jack and an auxiliary noise-canceling microphone. On the left is a slot for two SIM cards, one of them can be changed to a memory card.On the right is the power button and volume control. On the back panel, nothing new can be found either. Camera and flash in the upper left corner. The camera module is slightly recessed, which is good. It is not necessary to be afraid that it will be scratched.

On a note! The plastic on the back has a texture that is supposed to imitate metal. Visually, this feeling arises, but in the hands it becomes clear that it is plastic.

The device turned out quite small, well in the hand. The plastic case is not the most scratch-resistant, so it’s best to immediately think about protecting it or not carrying the phone in your pocket with other objects.. The front panel has olephobic coating of average quality. You can't call it good, but in the hands of a smartphone from the budget category, which means it’s stupid to expect more.

Display

Asus Zenfone Live Matrix is inexpensive TFT-IPS display. The picture is not bad, quite sharp, but no more. The color rendition is decent, but the contrast is a bit lacking. Angled device inverts colors. There is a slight overestimate of the color temperature to white, but this can be changed in the settings.

High backlight level: on a bright sunny day, you can read the text on the screen, and at night the device will not hit your eyes with light.Multitouch is designed for 10 touches. The oleophobic layer was mentioned above. Generally - the display is not bad, many budget devices are worse. HD resolution, of course, could have been higher, but the manufacturer decided otherwise. In any case, it looks comfortable, the pixels do not catch the eye.

Performance and Interfaces

Smartphone Asus Zenfone Live (zb501kl) is equipped with the popular Snapdragon 400 processor with four cores. The chipset is popular in low-cost devices, and its capabilities are well known. The RAM in the device is only 2 gigabytes, the main one can be 16 or 32 gigabytes.

Asus Zenfon Life has an average performance, that is, it works without stopping when closing background processes and controlling memory load. Application launch speed is also average. In synthetic tests, the model gains about 27 thousand points, which is the norm for the budget segment. The device can play FHD and HD content, but is not designed for 4K video. Games are started only simple, and even they can frizz a little. Device clearly not designed for gamersBut to talk in messengers and look through the Vkontakte feed is quite real.

Zenfone Live is an inexpensive device, so the indicators of its wireless capabilities are quite modest. Navigation systems are fast enough, and there are no questions about them. But with the rest, not everything is so rosy.

Important! Wi-Fi works in the 2.4 GHz band, Bluetooth is version 4, but of the two SIM cards, only one works in LTE networks, the second supports a maximum of 2G. This means that you need to immediately count on the fact that one operator card will be used for calls and SMS, the second for the Internet.

Multimedia and autonomy

The model is equipped with one stereo speakers. Feels like its volume is higher than that of most devices in a similar price tag. The sound quality is above average, to the conversational dynamics of the questions do not arise any.

Important! The model has two noise-canceling microphones, they work at a very high level. The caller hears it clearly regardless of the location of the device.

The company Asus is often in their devices trying to introduce various gadgets related to sound. In expensive models, this turns out to be quite natural and logical, often the top Asus models sound better than competitors. In the phone Asus Zenfon Life DTS Headphone X technology applied, but in this case it does not bring anything interesting to the device. Its presence is more a commercial move than a real advantage.

The model has a 2650 mAh battery that is rather small by today's standards, fast charging is not provided. By autonomy, the device is able to show day of active use. If you set the brightness to 70%, and use a smartphone less often, then he will be able to live for about one and a half days. Hour of the game takes about 30% of the battery, video with disabled wireless interfaces running for about 9 hours.

Camera

The Asus Zenfone Live zb501kl smartphone, like the Go model, sharpened by online broadcast. The main camera has a resolution of 13 megapixels and autofocus, the second is quite modest, at 5 megapixels, but it was supplemented with a flash. In the application a huge number of different modes, including "Super HDR", "Extreme Night" and others.

The main feature of the phone is not in the number of shooting modes or flash for the front camera. The device is equipped with a special utility Beauty Live, which even with the online broadcast allows you to improve the face and impose different masks. It is very useful if the broadcast is conducted immediately after waking up or during a drunken party.The downside is that the frontalka can shoot the video to the maximum VGA quality, that is, 640 * 480 pixels, and this implies that most of the small details simply do not fall on the video due to poor quality. Selfie camera takes decent photos during the day, at night it’s better not to include it at all.

In general, the camera shoots well in daytime conditions, slightly worsens the picture in the room, and at night it is very difficult to achieve acceptable quality.

Autofocus is slow enough, so take a picture on the go will not work. We'll have to "aim" and only after that take a picture. Shooting text as well as in macro mode is not completely bad. The phone has the ability to take a panorama, but it turns out not to be of very high quality, more precisely - the size of the photo makes it impossible to see the details. Instead, it is better to use poster mode, it is longer (creating a photo for about a minute), but clarity and sharpness are at a very high level. HDR mode implies that the photograph will be more visible nuances of transitions between colors, but in fact the phone selects the settings are very crooked,the quality is poor.

The video on the main camera can be shot in FHD with 30 frames per second. Medium quality. The camera can be rated on the top three on a five-point system.

Conclusion

Zenfone Live is a phone for people who do not want to get serious stuff and want nice phone with a good build. The device is quite standard by the standards of inexpensive devices, has several interesting photo modes, bright colors, good build, good display. Autonomy at a decent level. Performance leaves much to be desired. The reviews on the model are good, but again, you need to clearly understand for what tasks it will be used.

Asus zenfone live