<p><em>Asus’s ZenFone 2 Laser offers a lot including a decent fast camera for Rs 9,999<br><br><strong>By Mala Bhargava</strong></em><br><br>Barely a year ago, if you wanted a half-decent camera on a smartphone, you would have to be prepared to pay upward of Rs 30,000 for the device. There were a handful of great camera phones, and the rest were terrible. There are still only a handful of really good camera phones, but those have got better at what they do while the truly terrible ones have become fewer in number and have also gotten better at taking pictures.<br><br>The Zenfone 2 Laser from Asus is meant to be the best camera phone in the company’s growing Zenfone 2 series. Right at the outset, I would say it’s not as great as one might imagine, but for the mere sum of Rs 9,999, it gives you a pretty good shooter — the laser stands for laser auto focus — for everyday Facebook-style photography.<br><br>The review unit that came to me was a Ferrari red. The front is straightforward enough, with a nice stylised chin, but the back is a startling red with a rich sheen to it. That back panel is made of a soft synthetic material and can come right off, letting you get at the 3,000mAh battery, two SIM slots and a memory card slot. That’s already rather a lot for a budget phone.<br><br>The 5.5-inch screen makes this a big phone, so anyone who still has a problem with the larger phones more prevalent today should think twice. The screen is a 720x1280, not the best by today’s standards, but very workable. Colours, angles, sunlight-friendliness, are all pretty good. Again, a while ago, a budget phone would have come with a truly compromised screen, looking every bit as cheap as it was.<br><br>The screen comes on when you tap it twice. That’s one of the gestures that are part of the “ZenUI” interface that includes other tricks like drawing a C on the screen to open up the camera, or an E to get to email. The actual power button is on top of the phone, in a nicely awkward place, so it’s a good thing the double tap wakes up the phone. It’s a feature borrowed from LG, as is the volume button placed on the back of the phone.<br><br><img alt="" src="http://bw-image.s3.amazonaws.com/Asus-Zenfone-2-Laser2-lrg.jpg" style="width: 650px; height: 384px;"><br><br>The Home, Back and Multitasking buttons on this phone are not backlit, which I find a huge annoyance as I do the fact that the back button is on the left.<br><br>It’s too broad to be a one-handed phone, but there are software workarounds should you insist on using it that way. But I’ll say this again, we’re so accustomed to paying heavily for good phones, it’s a wonder to be getting full functionality for under Rs 10,000.<br><br>One thing you get a little too much of though, are the apps preloaded by Asus, which you can’t remove. I think the beauty of Android is that you can customise as much as you like and it’s most annoying when a phone is taken over by a company to take away all your options as a user.<br><br>The ZenFone 2 Laser performs very well on its 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 13MP rear camera, 5MP primary camera, 2GB RAM, dual SIM, memory card slotQualcomm Snapdragon 410 1.2GHz quad-core processor with 2GB RAM and 306 Adreno graphics. It runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop. It works smoothly has good battery life as well. It’s 4G capable and has good call quality and reception — when Airtel allows it.<br><br>The centre piece on this phone is obviously the camera. There’s a 13MP on the rear and a 5MP in front. The camera opens up nice and quick when you draw a C on the sleeping screen. It also shoots fast specially in Auto mode. You could get highly saturated colours in that mode, but it varies widely with the light conditions. You can choose to go Manual and use the settings to tinker with white balance, ISO, etc., but I’m guessing that those who know what these will do to images will end up spending more on a better camera. There are many other modes to play with such as an HDR that mostly darkens the picture and a selective focus mode that allows you to get some depth of field into the image. The camera also takes 1080p video, but stabilisation works at 720p resolution.<br><br>Overall, the ZenFone 2 Laser isn’t a bad deal at all and would have been brilliant if there weren’t other options, such as the Moto G, to choose from.<br><br>mala.bhargava@gmail.com<br><br>(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 19-10-2015) </p>
