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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re2onance - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
nm, apparently that isn't correctmeacupla - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
ok, done deal for a protective case for this thing then.blzd - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
That's one of the issues with larger phones such as this.jjj - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Actually in many markets the top Zenfone does compete with the G3 , S5 and the likes on price. Asus isn't quite hitting the 300$ + tax price everywhere and older flagships do get cheaper. The currency drops in some markets are not helping them either. The 200$ model is better value but it competes with A53 based devices that can be plenty cheaper with similar specs In China the TLC Meme da 3S ( 5inch 1080p , SD615 , 2GB RAM , 16GB NAND , 13MP and 8MP cams ,3050mAh ,139.6x69.6x8.9mm ,130g) just launched at 799CNY and that's 129$. Differences aside, they do have to compete with such devices. For the 300$ device you also got the soon to arrive SoCs, spending 300$ on this now might feel like a mistake in a few months.Wish you had the 1.8GHz 4GB RAM and 2GB RAM versions (they do have a lower clocked 4GB version) to compare battery life. In browsing the 4GB of RAM might be what kills it so fast.
Always wanted to ask about the LTE battery test , how much of the time time is idle or each of the LTE power states. Or maybe even better, how much data is used per minute or hour or w/e. Americans can afford to use a few GB per month but most of the world uses 10 times less or worse. In any case, the daily average usage is from almost 0 to bellow 200MB so LTE is most of the time idle if not disabled. Knowing how much data you use in testing battery life would help understand the relevance of the test and maybe help you better calibrate it in the future. So any chance you can provide some (rough) estimate on data usage when doing that test? Right now we have no idea if it's 60MB per hour or 10 times less and that's a huge range.
menting - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Frankly, I don't think the difference in 4GB RAM and 2GB RAM should make that much of a difference. A difference of doubling the refresh rate in the DRAM, as well as the difference in idle power should be peanuts compared to to what the other components are pulling.Glock24 - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I'm also interested in knowing if there's any difference in battery life between the 1.8GHz 2GB and 2.33GHz 4GB version.Some people in forums are saying the 4GB version drains the battery faster, some say the high battery drain was due to some bug in Lollipop. Maybe this was already addressed in a system update? All those comments about poor battery life of the 4GB phone come from people using the TW or India version with factory software version (which I assume is older than that on the US version). But still, would be interesting to know for sure if the 2GB version has better battery life.
I've read some people complain about the phone overheating, but there's no mention about temperatures in the review. Does it get hot during heavy use? Does it become so hot it's not comfortable to hold?
In the review Brandon talks about preinstalled bloatware, but does not mention about any useful bundled software. For example, I've read in other reviews about a bundled app that gives the user granular control over which applications run in the background and which ones are allowed to autostart, without the need for the phone to be rooted.
Also Asus gives you 5GB storage in Asus's own service with each device. How well or bad does the Asus Cloud app work? Does it make automatic backups? Is it easy to setup or use?
Chinaphonearena - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
An outstanding review, man. Truly. I hope you don't mind me plugging my own of the 2gb/16gb/1080p model. It's not nearly as technical or thorough as this, but some may get something out of it.http://www.gizbeat.com/7449/asus-zenfone-2-full-re...
Also the tear down of the phone from a Taiwanese user, which shows some of the components Asus is using.
http://www.gizbeat.com/7622/take-a-look-inside-the...
ketacdx - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I have a TW 4GB model and its been getting 2 software updates a month fixing little things here and there on top of the ZenUI updates. I have not had any overheating or even it getting warm. My Nexus 5 from before this got way more hot. There is an Auto-start manager which is kind of neat but 80% of the preinstalled stuff is useless. Luckily most of it can be uninstalled and not just disabled which is cool. I don't know about the US model but the TW model gives me 100 GB's of free Google Drive storage for 2 years. I am in Canada and it enabled fine. I have never used to Asus cloud so I don't know how much they provide.Manch - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I'd like to see Windows Mobile loaded onto this and the benchmarks run again. Is that possible? MS said they would release a ROM that could be installed over android.Gich - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I think they made only a ROM for Xiaomi Mi4...