**Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe Review: A Bloaty but Feature-Packed Smartphone**

The Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe comes pre-installed with a handful of Asus zone bloatware applications, although the experience can feel cohesive and bloaty. While it's not all bad, there are some features that are useful such as double tap to wake and sleep, a one-handed operation mode, and an integrated theme store that has a fairly good selection of themes to let you change the look and feel of the OS.

One of the standout features of the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is its battery life. It boasts a decently sized 3000 milliamp hour battery with support for quick charge 3.0, but in my experience, it can leave a lot to be desired. If you're a lighter user, you might be able to get away with using the phone for a full day without needing to recharge. However, if you're someone who likes to game or watch YouTube for several hours a day, don't expect it to last all day.

Gaming on the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is particularly demanding, and I noticed that gaming drains the battery significantly faster than many other phones I've tested. In fact, gaming on this phone can leave it needing a charge in as little as eight to nine hours off the charger, which is a good three to four hours less than what I normally expect from a smartphone. While this might not be a deal-breaker for everyone, it's certainly worth noting if you're someone who spends a lot of time gaming on their phone.

The camera on the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is perhaps one of its strongest features. It comes with a 23 megapixel camera on the rear with f/2.0 aperture and optical image stabilization, as well as laser autofocus on the front for selfies. The camera app itself is packed with a ton of features, including 20 different shooting modes such as beautification, low-light, depth of field mode, time-lapse, and more.

However, despite its impressive feature set, the actual experience of using the camera on this phone is underwhelming. The images lack detail and sharpness, even in daylight shots, and the shutter speed slows down drastically in low light. The optical image stabilization doesn't seem to help much, either, with noticeable noise and blooming in the highlights. Overall, while the camera has a lot of potential, it falls short in terms of image quality.

The ZenFone 3 Deluxe also comes with Android Nougat as its operating system, which is a decent starting point for many users. However, Asus's UI overlay, known as ZenUI, can sometimes feel overwhelming and cluttered, especially if you're not used to it. Additionally, the phone feels expensive at $500, which is comparable to other high-end smartphones like the Axon 7 and the new OnePlus 3T.

In conclusion, while the Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe has a lot of features and a beautiful metal design, it falls short in many key areas that make it stand out as a truly great smartphone. If you're looking for a bloaty phone with a lot of features but are willing to overlook some of its shortcomings, then this might be the phone for you. However, if you want a more streamlined experience and better image quality from your camera, you may want to consider other options.

**Specifications:**

* Display: 5.5-inch Full HD display

* Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor

* RAM: 4GB of RAM

* Storage: 64GB of internal storage (expandable up to 128GB)

* Rear Camera: 23 megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture and optical image stabilization

* Front Camera: 8 megapixel shooter with AF/2.0

* Battery: 3000mAh battery with quick charge 3.0 support

**Conclusion:**

The Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe is a feature-packed smartphone that comes with a lot of perks, including double tap to wake and sleep, one-handed operation mode, and an integrated theme store. However, its bloaty UI and lackluster image quality from the camera bring it down as a truly great smartphone. If you're looking for a more streamlined experience and better image quality, you may want to consider other options.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys lon here from Android Authority and a soos made quite the splash a couple of years ago with the zenfone 2 mostly because it offered some rather impressive specs at an extremely low price point but nowadays phones with high in specs and good build quality at an affordable price are a dime a dozen so what does a Seuss's latest flagship do differently to make it worth considering this is the zenfone 3 deluxe there's a lot better phone has to live up to especially when it uses a word like Deluxe in its name and in most aspects the zenfone 3 deluxe does deliver just like you would expect from a flagship phone the build quality is fantastic it's an all metal unibody design that both looks and feels great you have chamfered edges going around the front and back a sloping curve back and rounded corners and sides that all combine to give this phone a very smooth and comfortable feel in the hand it's fairly thin at seven and a half millimeters giving it a very sleek look but the most impressive part about this metal build is that it's completely metal all the way around so no seams or breaks you won't find any plastic antenna lines that you typically would on most phones made of metal Asus claims that this is the first metal phone to be able to achieve this and it doesn't seem to in any way inhibit the phone's ability to pick up a wireless signal it makes you wonder why we haven't seen this sooner especially from much larger companies but hopefully this will be a trend we see with other manufacturers going forward like previous design phone devices you'll notice a Seuss's signature concentric circle patterns on the top and bottom chin and along the power and volume buttons which are both located on the right side it does indeed have a headphone jack which is up top and on the bottom is the USB type-c port and a single bottom firing speaker it sounds fine and gets decently loud but it's not going to compare to a phone with stereo or front-facing speakers and like all bottom firing speakers it's very easy to cover up with your hands when holding the phone in landscape on the left side is the SIM card slot which has dual SIM support or you can use the secondary slot to expanding phone's memory with a microSD card it uses capacitive keys for all your Android navigation needs but unlike the majority of recent Android flagships that use capacitive keys the home button here doesn't double as a fingerprint sensor instead the fingerprint sensor is on the back and it's got this odd rectangular pillars shape and not a circle or square that were typically used to seeing it's very accurate and unlocks the phone every single time but the speed at which it unlocks doesn't feel quite as fast as some other fingerprint sensors and I ran into a couple instances where it took a good two to three seconds from when I put my finger on the sensor to the phone waking up and unlocking I'm also not a fan of the fact that it doesn't have any haptic feedback or vibration so there's no way to tell that you're actually unlocking your phone when you're just doing it blindly on the front you have a large 5.7 inch Super AMOLED screen with 1080p resolution it's not going to stack up to a quad HD screen in terms of sharpness especially for VR since the resolution is being stretched out on such a large screen but it's perfectly fine for everyday purposes and looks really great for a 1080p AMOLED display it's very colorful vibrant has excellent viewing angles and great contrast with the deep blacks that you'd actually get from an AMOLED screen it's a perfect size if you love playing a lot of games watching YouTube or movies and it comes with some handy features that are starting to become more common like a blue light filter and the ability to tweak the colors of the display to how you want the screen to look having fewer pixels to push on the display also helps out a lot with the phone's performance but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's ooh skimped out on any of the specs it's got the Snapdragon 820 processor that virtually every flagship shipped with this year and it's got a massive 6 gigabytes of RAM it's very safe to say that performance on these end phone 3 deluxe has not been an issue whatsoever it's extremely quick with everyday tasks like launching apps or web browsing has excellent touch response and it's no surprise that this phone is very capable of multitasking with a ton of apps open in the background including a couple of games without ever showing any signs of slowing down despite a soos is very heavy skin on top of Android it still manages to provide a very fluid experience a soos is Nui sits on top of Android marshmallow and while a lot of companies have gone the way of trimming down and streamlining their user interfaces a soos has gone in the opposite direction the Zen UI changes a lot of the Android experience and comes jam-packed with a ton of features some of which you may or may not find to be all that useful and if you prefer a more simplistic experience this can feel a little overwhelming some of the elements also feel slightly outdated like the app drawer for example still houses all the widgets which we haven't seen on stock Android since the Ice Cream Sandwich / jellybean days the out-of-the-box experience is very animation heavy and while they do look pretty and flashy some of the animations are quite long and can make something as simple as opening an app from a folder take more time to do you do have the option to change some of these animations like a home screen scroll effects and folder animations to something more standard and shorter but you stick with these longer animations it will make the experience feel a lot slower the Zen UI is very reminiscent of samsung's touchwiz from a few years back it's very bright colorful has a lot of very cartoonish looking icons and comes pre-installed with a handful of Asuza zone bloatware applications although the experience can feel in cohesive and bloaty it certainly isn't all bad there are some features that are useful such as double tap to wake and sleep a one-handed operation mode and an integrated theme store that has a fairly good selection of themes to let you change the look and feel of the OS inside it's got a decently sized 3000 milliamp hour battery with support for quick charge 3.0 and battery life in my experience has left a lot to be desired it can most likely last a full day if you're a lighter more casual user but if you're someone like me who likes a game and watch YouTube for several hours a day on their phone don't expect it to last all day gaming can drain any phone's battery rather quickly but I noticed that gaming on the zenfone 3 deluxe drains the battery significantly faster than many other phones that I've tested and used on a daily basis like the s7 edge 1 + 3 T and Google's pixel I always found myself charging it at least once during the middle of the day and the phone would typically only last eight to nine hours off the charger before having to be plugged back in which is a good three to four hours I of what I would normally expect in order to get a full day's worth of use with the camera you're looking at a 23 megapixel camera on the rear with f 2.0 aperture optical image stabilization and laser autofocus on the front you have an 8 megapixel shooter also AF 2.0 and if you're entertaining selfies it works pretty well for that and it has a bunch of beautifying settings that can hide glum is change your skin tone widen your eyes or thin out your face to help you take better selfies just like the Zen UI itself the camera app is packed with a ton of features and comes with 20 different shooting modes such as beautification low-light a depth of field mode time-lapse etc so there is a lot you can do here with this camera the built in manual mode is surprisingly very well fleshed out you've got the typical controls for white balance exposure ISO shutter speed and focus but it also features a built-in histogram and a horizon leveler so you can get a perfectly straight shot every time with 23 megapixels you might expect these photos to be very well detailed but that just hasn't been the case it's got good color reproduction and pretty good dynamic range but the images lack a lot of detail and sharpness even in daylight shots they look fine if you're looking at them as a whole but once you zoom in you can really see the photos starting to break down and everything just appears rather soft in well-lit situations the shutter is nice and fast but once you're in low-light it slows down drastically the image quality really starts to fall apart and despite having optical image stabilization it doesn't seem to help out a whole lot here there's a lot of noticeable noise and blooming in the highlights and again the overall image is just soft and lacking any sort of detail or sharpness it takes a good 2 to 3 seconds for the cam to capture a shot in low-light and because of how long it takes it became really difficult to get a shot that was in focus there were several instances where I took a photo brought the camera down to look at it in the gallery thinking that the camera was done taking the shot only to wind up with a completely blurry photo simply because the camera was still in the middle of trying to capture it it's a great camera in terms of all the features and shooting modes that it offers but the actual experience of using the camera is a little underwhelming to say the least the zenfone 3 deluxe will run you five hundred dollars should you decide to pick one up which isn't a bad price tag but there certainly are several other smartphones out there like the axon 7 and the new one plus 3t that undercut this price and offer very similar experiences it's got a beautiful metal design a great looking display and comes with a ton of features but so do a lot of other smart phones and the zenfone 3 deluxe just fall short into many key areas to really make it stand out as always thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope you enjoy this review of these and phone three deluxe and if you did please give a thumbs up down below and also subscribe to the channel which is also down below if you haven't already and check us out on social media instagram twitter snapchat google+ all that good stuff will be linked down below and feel free to follow me on social media as well and as always check the website for more in-depth coverage and Jory calm your source for all things Androidwhat's up guys lon here from Android Authority and a soos made quite the splash a couple of years ago with the zenfone 2 mostly because it offered some rather impressive specs at an extremely low price point but nowadays phones with high in specs and good build quality at an affordable price are a dime a dozen so what does a Seuss's latest flagship do differently to make it worth considering this is the zenfone 3 deluxe there's a lot better phone has to live up to especially when it uses a word like Deluxe in its name and in most aspects the zenfone 3 deluxe does deliver just like you would expect from a flagship phone the build quality is fantastic it's an all metal unibody design that both looks and feels great you have chamfered edges going around the front and back a sloping curve back and rounded corners and sides that all combine to give this phone a very smooth and comfortable feel in the hand it's fairly thin at seven and a half millimeters giving it a very sleek look but the most impressive part about this metal build is that it's completely metal all the way around so no seams or breaks you won't find any plastic antenna lines that you typically would on most phones made of metal Asus claims that this is the first metal phone to be able to achieve this and it doesn't seem to in any way inhibit the phone's ability to pick up a wireless signal it makes you wonder why we haven't seen this sooner especially from much larger companies but hopefully this will be a trend we see with other manufacturers going forward like previous design phone devices you'll notice a Seuss's signature concentric circle patterns on the top and bottom chin and along the power and volume buttons which are both located on the right side it does indeed have a headphone jack which is up top and on the bottom is the USB type-c port and a single bottom firing speaker it sounds fine and gets decently loud but it's not going to compare to a phone with stereo or front-facing speakers and like all bottom firing speakers it's very easy to cover up with your hands when holding the phone in landscape on the left side is the SIM card slot which has dual SIM support or you can use the secondary slot to expanding phone's memory with a microSD card it uses capacitive keys for all your Android navigation needs but unlike the majority of recent Android flagships that use capacitive keys the home button here doesn't double as a fingerprint sensor instead the fingerprint sensor is on the back and it's got this odd rectangular pillars shape and not a circle or square that were typically used to seeing it's very accurate and unlocks the phone every single time but the speed at which it unlocks doesn't feel quite as fast as some other fingerprint sensors and I ran into a couple instances where it took a good two to three seconds from when I put my finger on the sensor to the phone waking up and unlocking I'm also not a fan of the fact that it doesn't have any haptic feedback or vibration so there's no way to tell that you're actually unlocking your phone when you're just doing it blindly on the front you have a large 5.7 inch Super AMOLED screen with 1080p resolution it's not going to stack up to a quad HD screen in terms of sharpness especially for VR since the resolution is being stretched out on such a large screen but it's perfectly fine for everyday purposes and looks really great for a 1080p AMOLED display it's very colorful vibrant has excellent viewing angles and great contrast with the deep blacks that you'd actually get from an AMOLED screen it's a perfect size if you love playing a lot of games watching YouTube or movies and it comes with some handy features that are starting to become more common like a blue light filter and the ability to tweak the colors of the display to how you want the screen to look having fewer pixels to push on the display also helps out a lot with the phone's performance but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's ooh skimped out on any of the specs it's got the Snapdragon 820 processor that virtually every flagship shipped with this year and it's got a massive 6 gigabytes of RAM it's very safe to say that performance on these end phone 3 deluxe has not been an issue whatsoever it's extremely quick with everyday tasks like launching apps or web browsing has excellent touch response and it's no surprise that this phone is very capable of multitasking with a ton of apps open in the background including a couple of games without ever showing any signs of slowing down despite a soos is very heavy skin on top of Android it still manages to provide a very fluid experience a soos is Nui sits on top of Android marshmallow and while a lot of companies have gone the way of trimming down and streamlining their user interfaces a soos has gone in the opposite direction the Zen UI changes a lot of the Android experience and comes jam-packed with a ton of features some of which you may or may not find to be all that useful and if you prefer a more simplistic experience this can feel a little overwhelming some of the elements also feel slightly outdated like the app drawer for example still houses all the widgets which we haven't seen on stock Android since the Ice Cream Sandwich / jellybean days the out-of-the-box experience is very animation heavy and while they do look pretty and flashy some of the animations are quite long and can make something as simple as opening an app from a folder take more time to do you do have the option to change some of these animations like a home screen scroll effects and folder animations to something more standard and shorter but you stick with these longer animations it will make the experience feel a lot slower the Zen UI is very reminiscent of samsung's touchwiz from a few years back it's very bright colorful has a lot of very cartoonish looking icons and comes pre-installed with a handful of Asuza zone bloatware applications although the experience can feel in cohesive and bloaty it certainly isn't all bad there are some features that are useful such as double tap to wake and sleep a one-handed operation mode and an integrated theme store that has a fairly good selection of themes to let you change the look and feel of the OS inside it's got a decently sized 3000 milliamp hour battery with support for quick charge 3.0 and battery life in my experience has left a lot to be desired it can most likely last a full day if you're a lighter more casual user but if you're someone like me who likes a game and watch YouTube for several hours a day on their phone don't expect it to last all day gaming can drain any phone's battery rather quickly but I noticed that gaming on the zenfone 3 deluxe drains the battery significantly faster than many other phones that I've tested and used on a daily basis like the s7 edge 1 + 3 T and Google's pixel I always found myself charging it at least once during the middle of the day and the phone would typically only last eight to nine hours off the charger before having to be plugged back in which is a good three to four hours I of what I would normally expect in order to get a full day's worth of use with the camera you're looking at a 23 megapixel camera on the rear with f 2.0 aperture optical image stabilization and laser autofocus on the front you have an 8 megapixel shooter also AF 2.0 and if you're entertaining selfies it works pretty well for that and it has a bunch of beautifying settings that can hide glum is change your skin tone widen your eyes or thin out your face to help you take better selfies just like the Zen UI itself the camera app is packed with a ton of features and comes with 20 different shooting modes such as beautification low-light a depth of field mode time-lapse etc so there is a lot you can do here with this camera the built in manual mode is surprisingly very well fleshed out you've got the typical controls for white balance exposure ISO shutter speed and focus but it also features a built-in histogram and a horizon leveler so you can get a perfectly straight shot every time with 23 megapixels you might expect these photos to be very well detailed but that just hasn't been the case it's got good color reproduction and pretty good dynamic range but the images lack a lot of detail and sharpness even in daylight shots they look fine if you're looking at them as a whole but once you zoom in you can really see the photos starting to break down and everything just appears rather soft in well-lit situations the shutter is nice and fast but once you're in low-light it slows down drastically the image quality really starts to fall apart and despite having optical image stabilization it doesn't seem to help out a whole lot here there's a lot of noticeable noise and blooming in the highlights and again the overall image is just soft and lacking any sort of detail or sharpness it takes a good 2 to 3 seconds for the cam to capture a shot in low-light and because of how long it takes it became really difficult to get a shot that was in focus there were several instances where I took a photo brought the camera down to look at it in the gallery thinking that the camera was done taking the shot only to wind up with a completely blurry photo simply because the camera was still in the middle of trying to capture it it's a great camera in terms of all the features and shooting modes that it offers but the actual experience of using the camera is a little underwhelming to say the least the zenfone 3 deluxe will run you five hundred dollars should you decide to pick one up which isn't a bad price tag but there certainly are several other smartphones out there like the axon 7 and the new one plus 3t that undercut this price and offer very similar experiences it's got a beautiful metal design a great looking display and comes with a ton of features but so do a lot of other smart phones and the zenfone 3 deluxe just fall short into many key areas to really make it stand out as always thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope you enjoy this review of these and phone three deluxe and if you did please give a thumbs up down below and also subscribe to the channel which is also down below if you haven't already and check us out on social media instagram twitter snapchat google+ all that good stuff will be linked down below and feel free to follow me on social media as well and as always check the website for more in-depth coverage and Jory calm your source for all things Android\n"