My views on Zenfone2

Disclaimer:
I do not own a Zenfone 2 of any models. These opinions and suggestions are formed by having a short 10 minutes hands on session in Challenger(not all variation, more to be explained in post), as well as some experience in using a Zenfone 5.
You may know more about my background from here.

Hi,

Zenfone 2 have promised a lot of hype for being the monster performance phone.

This claim is true for some of its higher models, but definitely not all models of the zenfone 2.

For that matter, i really do hope Asus name each and every model of their phones with different specs with different name. If they are of the same series, they can do it like Apple, with lower end phones being call iphone 5C, bigger screen iphone 6 plus, normal screen iphone 6, and enhanced versions called iphone 5s.

The cheaper zenfone 2(ZE500CL) is as good as their older siblings, with 2 gb of rams and 16gb of memory. Being priced at $249 makes it a good deal. But bear in mind that the camera is pretty trashy in my opinion. The phone would definitely suit normal usage, and the smaller screen size would mean easier to hold onto the phone if you have a smaller hand.

The ZE550ML is a pretty decent phone with good camera. Having played the camera in a well lit indoor shopping center, the camera is performing significantly better than its cheaper sibling. The pricing of $299 is the same as my Zenfone 5 16gb/2gb variant.

The monster performer promises 4gb of ram and costs $429 at 32GB. In my opinion, 4gb is grossly overkill. Will there be gaming apps that fully pushes such limits? If there is, then such apps would be a problem to cheaper phone variant and thereby flop in the apps store, as many phones would not be able to support it. Future proofing also doesnt make sense as the price difference is pretty huge.
But the cost difference is due to the memory as well and that is true.

While all zenfone allows external memories, and it might seemed stupid to pay a good 50sgd more for memory when SD cards are so much cheaper, there is a good reason behind it.
According to this article, SD card failure will cause the performance of the phone to suffer. And there are several apps that does not allow the phone to store data on external storage. Hence, having more internal storage does make sense if performance matters a lot to you, while external storage can be purely for storing your videos and photos.
So the justification of the additional storage would have to be decided by your usage pattern.

My conclusion is, skip the monster phone, get the mid range, and i think you would be happy about the phone. OF course i would not be a fair judge until i have tried both phones and used it for a short period of time, but thats my opinion of the zenfone 2 series.

Regards
Benjamin Chai