Asus Zenfone 8 unboxing: a tiny but mighty flagship... By Mobile Tech Podcast

Welcome to another day, another unboxing, and what I've got here is the ASUS before 8. Yes, this is the small one, not the eight flip, so let's unbox it. This is what the box looks like. There's a nice little logo on top eight three, nothing in the back here other than some uh some details. So lets uh open this up, shall we're done nothing inside got divider got the phone got another divider with the charger and the USB cable. This is a c to c cable, as you can see, and the charger here is a 30 watt charger.

You can see the c connector the ASUS branding and here is all the specs you need to see. Now. This is the divider which has a sim removal tool, ooh a case and some documentation. So let's have a look. First, you got what looks like stickers, but they're blank, and then you've got what think is a manual and the case itself in search of incredible all right.

Let's have a quick look at this. This is what you get. You can see some diagrams of all the features and things and in the back just some more stuff. So this is the case. Let's have a look here.

We go, so we've got just a very basic semi-heart ASUS before branded case, nothing too special, but it's nice to have this included. So let's take a look at the phone now, shall we it show you how to put the sim card in there is no micro SD support on this phone and uh. Let's just slide it out, shall we so? Oh, bluish power lucky just like other ASUS phones? Oh, I guess it's been turned on all this time. No wonder the batteries are 20 nice little, eight logos animated behind before there. So that's the setup screen.

Let's actually turn it off, so we can restart it and see what the animation looks like powered by android ASUS, ooh, Qualcomm, snapdragon just popped up, before yeah, nice little animation. That's it folks, nothing much to write home about here. So let me walk you through the specs on this phone. So this is a very small phone. This is a 5.9 inch, 1080p display it's a 120 hertz, it's super AMOLED does have HDR 10 plus support 700, nits average 110 nits peak the hole punch camera has a little surround like a silver ring around it. I don't really like it when manufacturers do that.

The whole point of hole punch is that you want the front camera to disappear, not to be highlighted like that. You see the earpiece up there and the selfie camera is a 12 megapixel f over 2.5 1.22 micron sensor. So there you go: here's the earpiece there's not much of a chin at the bottom. It's nice! It is a flagship after all, right so you'd expect that it's also a flat screen which is really nice. Now, let's take a look at the edges, real quick, so we've got a volume rocker here on the right hand, side with the bluish power, lock key, as I mentioned, and then we've got on the bottom here, one of the two speakers, because this has stereo audio so speaker primary microphone, USB type c, sim slot for NATO sim, but no micro SD on the left-hand side, you don't really have anything, a bunch of antenna bands, that's about it.

On top, oh, you have a headphone jack and there's a secondary microphone in that antenna band right there, as you can see where my thumb is now before we look at the back, there's a little sticker back here, I'm going to just quickly remove and boom ASUS a zen phone there's a camera pod with two lenses and a LED flash and a third microphone. It looks like yep, so this is glass but Matt. It's very similar to the back of the galaxy s21 ultra the same kind of black, the same kind of matte finish the same kind of feel. Furthermore, it almost feels like aluminum, but it is glass and the cameras are interesting too. So you've got a 64 megapixel f over 1.8 0.8, micron main camera with is and phase detect, autofocus dual pixel. This is quad pixel binning to 1.6, micron and 16 megapixels. Then there's a 12 megapixel f of a 2.2 ultra-wide, which has 1.4 micron pixels, that's pretty decent size, pixels for an ultrawide and has autofocused PDF, so I presume you'll be able to use this to do macrophotography as well, which is exciting. So that's basically the gist of this camera system.

No telephoto here in terms of the innards. We have a snapdragon 888, and we have a pretty decent sized 4000 William hour battery. I say decent, because this is a small phone. I mean it could be a little bigger, but considering how small this phone is? It's not really too bad to have a 4000mah battery with 30 watt wire charging. Now it doesn't have wireless charging, that's one of the big negatives of this phone, no wireless charging, which I think is a big miss for a phone.

That's got a glass back. That's a flagship essentially right, a small flagship, but hey you can't get it all. It does have a headphone jack. It is ip68 water resistant. So you know that's not a bad thing.

It's got all the good things you need. I do wish it has wireless charging because I'm a big fan of it. So now in terms of storage and ram, it comes in a bunch of configurations, so you can get either six eight or 16 gigs of ram and either 128 or 256 gigs of storage, UFS 3.1. So that's a lot of options, and I'm not sure what they sent me. So I can't tell you, but that's basically it in terms of the guts another thing I wanted to mention real quick about the front that front-facing camera is no slouch.

It has autofocus, also dual pixel PDF, so that's pretty cool, that's rare on a selfie camera, and it does 4k 30 frames per second video recording, which again, it's kind of par for the course on iPhone and Samsung phones, but not that common on other android phones even flagships. So I'm kind of excited to see that and then there's an in-display fingerprint sensor under the screen here somewhere. Obviously, so that's it folks. This is the before 8, a tiny, tiny flagship. That's really only missing one thing in my opinion that really matters and that's wireless charging.

Of course, you could argue that it's missing a telephoto. I would have loved to see that, but with a 64 megapixel sensor, you can probably get 2 to 3x zoom with decent results, especially with a good ISP and a good lens and a good setup. Basically, the price is around 600 euros. It's eventually, hopefully going to come to the US, so stay tuned for that and uh yeah, that's it. I hope you liked.

My video like subscribe. Tell your friends, click the notification bell below tell me in the comments below, despite the lack of wireless charging, would you buy this phone because you, like small phones and there's, really no small flagships on android land right now? That is this compelling? Would you or would you wait for something smaller or better and hedge your bets I'd like to know? Let me know in the comments and then remember: this is a compliment to my podcast at the mobile tech podcast, so mobiletechpodcast. com we're on Google podcast, apple, podcast, Spotify and pocket cast amongst others. Please consider, subscribing and telling your friends if you want my thoughts on this you're going to have to listen to the podcast. So that's how it works.

You get the unboxing here and video, and you listen to the podcast for the review. That's it folks stay tuned I'll, have more content soon and until then cheers everybody.

Source : Mobile Tech Podcast