Mid range Smartphone : Asus Zenfone 5

Asus has been released new smartphone with their new Zenfone series. The new series is available with 4 screen sizes. So here is some review about the Mid range Smartphone : Asus Zenfone 5.

How about the Design ?

Asus has done a great job in the look and built for this Zenfone 5. The Zenfone 5 is built mostly of plastic for retaining a premium look and feel, also it has a simple candy bar design and the covers are changeable. The ports and buttons have good tactile feedback and the placement is pretty ergonomic.

Asus Zenfone 5


Zenfone 5 comes with metallic power and volume keys, and also with a side metal cover that looks great. Overall the Zenfone 5 is well built and designed, many will appreciate its simple aesthetics.

What features that Asus Zenfone 5 have ?

Zenfone 5 comes with HD Display and a 5-inch IPS, the screen is also got a scratch resistant. The colours from the display is quite vivid and fairly punchy. Zenfone 5 also gives you an app for changing the colour temperature of the display to suite your needs.

*Zenfone 5 Zen UI Review

The Zenfone 5 runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean with Zen UI skin, but Asus has promised it will launch Android 4.4. Kitkat Update as soon as they can. The new theme feel refresh, for all the icons its follow a flat look, which is the trend these days. In Zenfone 5 you can customize the lockscreen with three customisable application shortcuts, there is also app called "What's Next"notification for your upcoming event in the calender when you lock the screen.

Zen UI
The notification view looks very clear and there are a customiseable Quick Settings and each one is use an attractive round icons, also a brightness slider or even you can enable the auto-brightness feature. Zenfone 5 comes with a lot of pre-installed apps, some of them can be either uninstalled or disabled.

What's inside the Asus Zenfone 5 ?

The main processor of Asus Zenfone 5 is Dual Core Intel Atom Z2560 which running at 1.6 GHz for each core. The phone also has 2 GB of RAM which is pretty big for most smartphone now. The phone also have 8 GB and 16 GB of Internal storage for each variants and support Expandable storage for microSD up to 64 GB. With antutu benchmark, most of the test that we found on the net is shown the score 20.000 - 23.000 which is a great score for this Asus Zenfone 5, here is one of the screenshot.

Antutu Benchmark from hardwarezone.com

For connectivity Zenfone 5 support dual-sim function, 3G and 2G, also for Wi-Fi it has support for 'n'. Bluetooth v.4.0 also included on Zenfone 5, also with GPS and GLONASS. The Zenfone 5 Camera is 8MP and with an camera sensor features an aperture value of f/2.2 which is manage to capure low-light shots. The interface is still easy to get around. Below is the full specs for this phone.

Specification



  • Processor: 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2560
  • Display: 5-inch capacitive multi touch with Corning gorilla glass 3 protection, 1280×720 pixels
  • RAM: 1GB
  • Memory: 8GB internal, expandable up to 64GB micro SD
  • Camera: Rear 8MP with LED flash/ Front 2MP
  • SIM: Dual with dual standby (micro SIMs)
  • OS: Android 4.3 Jelly Bean with Zen UI
  • Connectivity: 3G HSPA+, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS
  • Battery: 2110mAh
  • What's about the battery life ?

    The battery is 2110 mAh, it came out after 8 hour battery test with quite some juice to spare, stand by time is about 353 hours with 3G, and 18 hours 30 minutes talk time with 3G. Overall the battery is deliver a long battery life and this is great advantage for the Zenfone 5.

    Conclusion

    Zenfone 5 is a superb phone, when you consider the feature-set from this phone it seems like unbeatable. The performance ? Well all we can say is the performance is at High-End Device level. It's very recommended to buy this Asus Zenfone 5.

    ODROID-C1 : Low Price, High Quality Quad Core Computer only for 35$ !

    ODROID-C1 a Low Price, but a High Quality Quad Core mini Computer only for 35$ by HardKernel ! 

    Don't put up with the slow single core computer anymore because there is ODROID-C1 a powerful ARM devices with ultra low cost and it's available for only $35 !, ODROID-C1 is called as a as a replacement for the Raspberry Pi. The ODROID-C1 has many advantages, it has processor S805 1.5 Quad-core Amlogic ARM® Cortex®-A5(ARMv7) 1.5Ghz quad core CPUs, 1GB of RAM, It has 2x ARM Mali 450 MP2 GPU @ 600MHz.
    ODRIOD-C1 Top
    The ODROID-C1 ships with microSD card slot that support 8GB and 16GB UHS-1 cards that are said to be accessible at double speed than a standar flash card. There is an optinal eMMC storage modules socket for even faster access, eMMC is stated as an alternative to microSD.

    ODROID-C1 Bottom
    The size is nearly the same size as a Raspberry Pi, Size of ODROID-C1 is about 3.35" x 2.2", but ODROID-C1 offers more faster CPU performace. Now, the ODROID project is once again it's sight for the Raspberry Pi users with an almost compatible expansion connector. You need to provide your own storage because the ODROID-C1 doesn't come with any storage, also WiFi and Bluetooth you will need to connect a USB dongle just like on the Raspberry Pi. For some futher information here is the comparison table between ODROID-C1 and Raspberry Pi Model B + :

    Odroid-C1RPi Model B+
    CPUAmlogic S805 SoC 4 x ARM Cortex-A5 1.5 GHz ARMv7 Architecture @28nm waferBroadcom BCM2835 1x ARM11 ARMv6 core @ 700MHz ARMv6 Archiceture @40nm wafer
    GPU2x ARM Mali 450MP @ 600MHz1x VideoCore IV @ 250MHz
    RAM1GB 32bit DDR3 792 MHz512MB32bit LP-DDR2 400MHz
    Flash storagemicroSD UHS-1@100Mhz/SDR50 or eMMC storage optionmicroSD @50MHz/SDR25, without eMMC storage option
    USB2.0 Host4 ports4 ports
    USB2.0 Device/OTG1 port for linux USB gadget drivernone
    Ethernet10/100/1000 Mbps10/100 Mbps
    Video outHDMIHDMI and Composite RCA
    Audio outHDMIHDMI / 3.5mm jack
    Camera InputUSB 720pMIPI CSI 1080p
    40-pin I/O expansion40-pin (GPIO/UART/SPI/I2C/ADC)40-pin (GPIO/UART/SPI/I2C/I2S)
    Dimensions85 x 56mm85 x 56mm
    Weight40g (1.41 oz)42g (1.48 oz)
    Price$35$35

    ODROID-C1 is the first Odroid board that based from Cortex-A5, Four cores of Cortext-A5 is much
    faster than the RPi's 700MHz ARM11-based BCM2835, as indicated by the benchmarks which show a 8x advantage over the Raspberry Pi. The program that uses to benchmark is a popular benchmark tools called Unix-Bench (5.1.3).

    Hardware Details Video for ODROID-C1

    The RPi was clocked at 800MHz using Sandisk UHS-1 8GB SDCard running on the Debian Wheezy OS. The ODROID-C1 was clocked at 1.5GHz using 16GB eMMC. Here is the Benchmark result Comparison Table :

    Benchmarks(Index Score)RPi Model B+ODROID-C1Ratio
    Dhrystone-2 using register variables162.11262.87.8
    Double-Precision Whetstone56.2439.67.8
    Execl Throughput61.6489.47.9
    File Copy 4K bufsize, 8000 maxblocks187.9778.44.1
    Pipe Throughput164.1610.43.7
    Pipe-based Context Switching62.7467.07.4
    Process Creation68.2371.85.5
    Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)117.2874.47.5
    Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)106.2853.88.0
    System Call Overhead290.51999.76.9
    Total Index Score109.8622.35.7

    The result is ODROID is 8 times faster that the Raspberry Pi !

    Some of a video that test the ODROID-C1 :

    Performance Test