Asus aims to travel miles ahead of the competition that rules the smartphone market with its latest commercial launch. The Taiwanese company has made the first ever smartphone to be powered by the Snapdragon 821 available for sale in its home country. The smartphone in question is the newest version of the Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe, touted to be the most powerful handset in the world courtesy of its Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 821 processor. In Taiwan, the Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe will come at a price of TWD 24,990 (INR 52,000, approx).
The Zenfone 3 Deluxe featuring the improved processor was unveiled by Asus at an event in July this year, shortly after Qualcomm announced its next generation Snapdragon processor, making it the first smartphone with the upgraded unit to be announced. Qualcomm says that their Snapdragon 821 processor will be 10 percent more performance efficient than the 820, with its increased frequency levels. While those on the former have been boosted up to 2.34 GHz, the same on the latter were clocked up to 2.15GHz.
At the same launch event, Asus had also unveiled a variant of the Zenfone 3 Deluxe that came with the previous generation Qualcomm processor. Most of the features on the two variants remain the same, except their powering unit and the accompanying memory.
The Snapdragon 821 variant of the Zenfone 3 Deluxe lives up to the hype surrounding it with a very impressive set of specifications. The smartphone features a whopping 6 GB of RAM and 256 GB of internal storage. In comparison, the Snapdragon 820 powered Zenfone 3 Deluxe comes with two different storage options- one with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage, and the other with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB storage.
Other key specifications of the Zenfone 3 Deluxe with SD 821 are a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display with a pixel resolution of 1080 x 1920, a 23-megapixel primary snapper with OIS, laser autofocus, and RGB colour sensor equipped with a dual-LED flash, and an 8-megapixel secondary camera. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11, Bluetooth v4.2, GPS and Type-C USB, v3.0 among others. The dual-SIM smartphone also features a fingerprint scanner like most other heavy-hitters in the business. The Zenfone 3 Deluxe runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Asus’s Zen UI 3.0 on top.
The smartphone is certainly a looker, with its slim 4.2 mm aluminium alloy unibody free from antenna lines at the back. It will come in two colour options, Glacier Silver and Shimmer Gold. The former will be shipped from September 12 onwards, while the latter will begin on the 23rd of the same month.
