5 Reasons Not to Buy the Asus Zenfone AR in India.

Asus the Taiwanese firm, is set to bring their new smartphone the Zenfone AR in India on 13^th July. They had been marketing it as India’s first 8GB RAM smartphone, though this title was recently claimed by the OnePlus 5. The Tango Powered Zenfone AR was launched at the CES 2017 and was showcased to the masses at this year’s Google IO.

So, if you are considering to buy Zenfone AR, here are a few reasons for why you shouldn’t go ahead with your decision.

Hardware

The Zenfone AR comes with a 5.7-inch, Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440) display, coupled with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor which itself is a pretty old processor considering that the market is now flooded with devices running with Snapdragon 835 inside.

To compensate all this, Asus has put in 8GB RAM, we’re still not sure if Asus will use a 256GB ROM or 128GB ROM at the time of launch.

Another thing to point out here is the presence of something called Vapor Cooling system, now this system can turn out to be just a gimmick used only for marketing just like Samsung did with the Liquid cooling in their last year’s flagship devices.

Our main concern is the heating, since this same chip(with less modification) is being used in the Google Pixel and while using Daydream the smartphone temperatures rise up to an alarming level.

Software

The ASUS ZenFone AR runs Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box with the new version of their ZenUI on top. The area where Asus has really worked is the ZenUI, they have managed to remove the Bloatware that it earlier had but it’s still very bulky. Having said that there is still quite of it left here and there and the sad part is that those apps cannot be uninstalled.

The UI is not well scaled to the display sizes and resolution. The only workaround is to install a 3^rd Party launcher or go with a custom ROM altogether.

Tango & Daydream

Zenfone AR is not the first device to be Tango ready but is the first one to have support for both Tango & Daydream. Google has been working on both the platforms for quite some time but they have not produced good numbers in terms of sale.

Both the platforms are still in their nascent stages though they have been around for more than a year. The lack of content availability has been the number factor for slow adoption in case of Daydream (lack of supported phones is also one of the cases).

Coming to Tango, the earlier product that tried this was the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and it failed due to the average performing hardware that it sported. Google has been pushing this notion that Tango phones rely on high performance and specially designed hardware to run the AR apps. But Apple has somehow managed to do all this using their existing hardware with the ARKit.

We would bet our money on Apple’s ARKit as it looks way more promising than Google’s Project Tango.

Lack of AR / VR content

This is one of the main concern that I have with this product. Though the Daydream has been there for a while now but the amount of content is still not up to the mark. This will be a huge let down for people who specially buy this product for the sole purpose for enjoying AR content.

When it comes to VR you can enjoy the 360 degree videos from YouTube or download VR apps from the PlayStore. For this Asus has cleverly made a product package that can be converted into a VR headset with the included lens. A lot of companies have done this in the past like Honor did with it’s recently launched Honor 8 Pro.

What would have been great is if Asus had included Google’s Daydream VR headset included with the product, since it’s going to be launched at a very steep price.

Pricing

Considering Asus’s previous pricing data it’s likely that Asus will price the smartphone above Rs 35,000. We won’t be surprised if the product is priced above the Rs 40,000 mark since Asus has a history of over pricing their products in India.

At this price you can easily grab a OnePlus 5 which comes with a great camera and updated processor or go with the recently launched Honor 8 Pro. If you are still into AR then we’d recommend to increase your budget a little bit and grab an iPhone 7 which will have a ton of AR experiments by the time iOS 11 is released in late September this year.