Zenfone 8 review: Asus' small but mighty phone is a winner By CNET

Our small phones here to stay ASUS is betting. They will stick around with the new before 8, its new mid-range flagship, billed as the ultimate compact android phone hi, everyone, I'm Serena, and I've been using this phone, the before 8, which ASUS just launched for maybe a week now, so I'm going to do a review. Video on this and I'm going to start off by covering uh the design. Then move on to display uh the camera battery and performance then wrap up with an overall summary on the device. Now this phone should be releasing in Europe soon, if it hasn't already, and it will start at 599 euros. A US launch is also in the cards, but pricing there might vary from 599 dollars to 799, though that price is not confirmed now for some housekeeping for those tuning into my videos.

For the first time, for the sake of transparency, know that ASUS sent me the before 8 ahead of its official launch, but don't worry that won't affect my analysis or opinions on the phone compared to ASUS bold effort. Last year, with before 7, the company went down a much safer path with the before 8. So don't expect to turn heads with this one. This year, the camera bump does not flip the bump houses, two cameras, a flashlight and a microphone flip. It around and you'll see a crisp 5.9 inch AMOLED panel, rounded off with a punch, hole camera on the upper right on the right side. There's a volume rocker and a power button that can be customized to access system features and apps on the bottom.

There's a dual sim card slot a notification light, and on the top there is a headphone jack with dimensions of 148 by 68.5 by 8.9 millimeters. The before 8 is certainly small for today's phone standards, and it's probably one of the most compact 5g phones around. It's also lightweight weighing 169 grams, but it's still slightly heftier than the iPhone 12 mini, either way as someone who otherwise prefers to use a large phone, it was great to be able to tuck the phone into my back pocket without it sticking out too much. The before 8 is slim and lightweight too weighing just 169 grams, so one-handed use was comfortable, at least for me. Asus said the before 8 is the most durable phone it's built yet, partly thanks to the gorilla glass, victor shielding and ip68 rating for water and dust resistance.

Let's talk about the display. Now the before 8 features a flat 5.92 inch OLED panel from Samsung that was visible in various lighting scenarios, thanks in part to high peak brightness of 1100 nits. In addition, the before 8 has full quad HD plus resolution, that's 2400 by 1080, pixels and 120hz display, which can be dialed back to 90hz or 60hz to preserve battery life. Most phones have refresh rates of 60 hertz, which means the screen refreshes 60 times in a second 120 hertz displays can look a lot smoother by comparison. That's also the same speed seen across Samsung's latest galaxy s21 lineup, including the 1200 galaxy s21 ultra, as well as Xiaomi super lux me, 11 ultra phones.

In practice, the display was super, responsive and there's also an in-screen finger reader, which worked like a charm. Taking all this into consideration, I can say the before 8 has a fantastic display for its price range and even though it's not the highest resolution one around, I still think it's one of the before 8's most attractive features. Now. Moving on to the cameras, the before, 8's rear camera module consists of a 64 megapixel main sensor and a 12 megapixel ultra-wide sensor, one less than last year's pricier models, which featured a third telephoto lens in front. There's a 12 megapixel selfie shooter in general.

The rear cameras produce solid images, whether I was clicking away in bright indoor and even dark environments, because there is no telephoto camera on this device know that all zoom is digital and that the digital zoom maxes out at eight times now. Here's the zoom in action, starting with the ultra-wide shot all the way up to eight times zoom. You can see how it gets blurry when zoomed in fully now for some shots at night. These are pictures of Hong Kong's, iconic skyline. I think the photos look pretty good, but they aren't true to life.

The sky was gray, but, as you can see on the photo, the sensors captured a bluish sky. I don't really mind it because I was happy with the end result now for selfies the front facing camera struggled to capture detail in lower light environments. Sometimes images turned out whitish like this one, I'm not a selfie aficionado, so I don't mind but for reference, take a look at the same picture. It's much warmer and this one was taken with 2018's iPhone 10s max on the spectrum of smartphone cameras. This isn't the best camera I've ever used, not even close, nor is it the best phone camera for its price range, but I think that's forgivable, because the camera isn't the main selling point of the before 8, nor is it marketed to be, and I think pictures turned out respectable in most lighting environments.

Let's talk about battery and performance. Now, from my experience, the before 8 battery lasted me roughly 25 to 26 hours with what I would describe as medium use. That means I didn't use the phone for power intensive games. Instead, I use it for things like reading the news or emails making a few short phone and video calls or scrolling through my social media feeds and taking photos. Of course, I'd expect less than a day's worth of battery life when you're gaming or using the phone for more intensive tasks.

But if you want the charge to last longer, you can take advantage of a suite of battery care tools tucked away in the settings. Menu. Before 8 has five different system modes that you lets you optimize battery life, depending on your needs for demanding tasks. You can crank the system all the way up to high performance mode when juice is running low. The phone intelligently switched to ultra durable mode to preserve as much power as possible.

When I eventually ran out of juice, I used the bundled 33 watt charger to replenish the 4 000 William hour battery took about an hour and 20 minutes to hit a full charge, but I needed just 30 minutes for the battery to get refilled more than halfway powering. The before 8 is the top of the line. Qualcomm snapdragon 888 chips along with 8 gigs or 16 gigs of ram in the most expensive model, with 256 gigs of storage, the pricier Samsung Galaxy s21 ultra also has 16 gigs of ram, but this isn't just a bunch of numbers. When I put the phones through paces, the before 8 was peppy and fast and handled everything I threw at it without a hitch in the benchmark tests, I performed the before 8 performed somewhere between the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 12 lineup signaling. This phone is nothing short of a powerhouse.

I wasn't able to get an overall score for 3d slingshot, unlimited, which didn't output an overall score, because the phone was apparently too powerful, but the before 8 doesn't have everything. Of course, ASUS removed the micros slot for expandable storage and last year's before 7 lineups had expandable storage of up to two terabytes there's no support for wireless charging either. Now, based on my experience with the before 8, I think ASUS achieved exactly what it set out to do, guided by its design, anthem of building a phone that was big in performance, but also compact. I mean it: crafted a durable phone with a stellar display, respectable battery life, dependable cameras and very powerful internals, and all that is crammed into a small and lightweight device. So that's pretty much all I have to say on the before 8, but if you enjoyed this video feel free to like and subscribe for more.

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Source : CNET