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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speconomist - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Brandon, could you comment on the speaker?I have read somewhere else that it's not really good, I would welcome your objective comments (or even subjective too).
Brandon Chester - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Unfortunately I don't have any means of objectively evaluating the speaker which is why I didn't really comment on it. It doesn't sound any worse than the speaker on the iPhone 6 or Galaxy S6 really, but it's definitely not BoomSound, and it's not as good as you'd expect considering the speaker grille is so large.speconomist - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Thanks, sounds like good enough.thegeneral2010 - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
i heard it was running android 5.0.1 in 32bit and after upgrading to 5.1 its 64bit got activated is this true?ketacdx - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
The Zenfone 2 is on 5.0. In CPUZ you can see it is an x86-64bit kernel so it is correctly 64bit by default. Ive read this elsewhere as well but its definitely a 64bit kernel.MeganKnight - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
thats greatseh1984 - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
Is this a review for the 2GB or 4GB model? If the 4GB model, can we get the benchmarks for the 2GB?tipoo - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
They have the 4GB one, as noted in review. The Z3560 has about 80% the CPU performance of the Z3580, and GPU performance is the same between the two.JackF - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
I just got my new ZenFone 2 yesterday. I finally broke down and made the switch from my iPhone5s which I like but wish it had a bigger screen, I doesn't seem as big as I thought it would be - it fits in my front jeans pocket with no problem. After reading the reviews, I am being super careful not to drop it. I routinely drop my iPhone but I have a rubberized type case to cushion the impact.So far I am liking the phone - after using it non-stop all morning (surfing, installing apps, playing games) my battery did get down to 40%. With the same usage tho, My iPhone 5s would probably have been close to zero. I am due for a upgrade in October, so I will see how this goes.
re2onance - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link
I ordered one myself and I'm coming from a iPhone 5 which is supposed to have really good web browsing battery performance, so I'm wondering how it will work out. I'm probably going to try to root the phone and run something like greenify to wipe all the crap I don't want on it which comes pre-installed. Hopefully that and updates will improve the battery life on the device, although I'm skeptical.