The ASUS ZenFone 2 Review
by Brandon Chester on May 26, 2015 8:00 AM ESTNAND Performance
While it's not disclosed by manufacturers, the speed of NAND on a smartphone is a very important aspect of overall smartphone performance. It has an impact on how long cameras can do burst capture, and how well the phone performs when apps are running both in the foreground and the background. To evaluate the NAND performance of the ZenFone 2 I've run it through both of our internal storage benchmarks. Because our iOS benchmark only supports a single IO thread, we'll be using our older storage benchmark alongside the newer Androbench 4.0 test for the foreseeable future.
In our original single threaded storage benchmark the ZenFone 2 is decidedly average in its performance. In every case it's either slightly above or below the median result on our charts. It's important to keep in mind that this test puts devices like the Galaxy S6 with its UFS storage at a disadvantage, as its NAND can make use of several IO threads due to the use of a command queue.
In our newer AndroBench 4.0 storage test we see that the ZenFone 2 ends up falling farther behind the other devices that we've run through the test. In the sequential read test it's not the slowest device, but that's only due to the Nexus 6 being extremely far behind every other device as a result of Google's full disk encryption. In the sequential write and random read tests it's comes behind the HTC One (M9), although to a very small degree in the latter test. Random writes are where it really stumbles, with a speed that's less than half of the next slowest device.
I'm not sure whether I can attribute it to the enormous amount of RAM that the 4GB version of the ZenFone 2 can use as a cache, but I never noticed any issues with performance as a result of IO operations being run either by the app I was using or by another application in the background. Even when updating applications, performance remained consistent.
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tipoo - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
File system metadata structures in HFS+ have global locks. Only one process can update the file system at a time. The benchmark that only uses one IO thread isn't artificially limiting the iPhones, it's using exactly what it can. In the future, may as well use the newer multithreaded one for Androids even if the iPhones is single threaded, imo.soccerballtux - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
videos of this 'smoothness' in the ZenUI and app animations you spoke of would have been cool. I don't notice it [desensitized] like I used to, but Android has very...uncomfortable...transition animations.blzd - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
Android does? Are you sure you're not thinking of Touchwiz or some other poorly implemented manufacturer skin?Android 5 (Lollipop) has very smooth animations. Heck even Kit Kat did. Nexus and Motorola devices (stock android) have been 100% smooth for 2 years or more now.
Sammaul - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
Very smooth animations. Camera is.....ok. But as I am coming from a Mate 2, it's actually an improvement for me lol. Been using the phone for 3 days now, and have seen no stutter, no jittery animations. Everything loads quickly and smoothly. The 2 channel ram is very nice imoCory Yalowicki - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
I'd like a review that compares this phone with the Alcatel Onetouch Idol 3.Seems like that is this phone's closest competitor.
tipoo - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
That performs pretty bad in games from what I saw in video comparisons, GPU is much weaker than this one. The 8 A53 cores are dumb too, the 4 slightly higher performing ones in the Zenfone 2 are preferable. The Idol 3 has better battery life.vision33r - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
For $300 I think the G3 is a better phone. You get a QHD display, very good camera, performance is usable, removeable battery and micro SD. The QHD Display looks very sharp and clear. The Asus is a good phone but I can't use a smartphone with a horrible camera in 2015. G3 has optical focus and shoots great videos too. I don't get one thing is how bulky the Asus looks but yet the battery is not user replaceable. The ASUS TF series has really spotty QC such as bad batteries I can't trust relying on Asus hardware.blzd - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
Where is the G3 $300? I know the G2 is around there now, G3 is still about $500 from what I can see.Sammaul - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
G3 at $300? Where? And please don't say Swappa, or any other resale site. Personally I refuse to buy used phones.YB0006 - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
i got a asus phone days ago from dhgate.com and it feels very good till now!