My Zenfone Selfie

Hi,
Disclaimer:
I am not a professional phone reviewer. So dont bother if you want those hardcore technical reviews. you can easily find it online. i am sharing a more personal review. read on and you will understand.

While everyone is hardcore to get their Apple product, i was damn excited that Zenfone Selfie came.

And if you have been reading my blog, which i doubt anyone does, i wrote a short review about the Zenfone 5 . You will think i am a spendthrift to buy a phone within a short period of time, but its not true.

Apparently the Gorilla Glass is that Zenfone 5 came with is just a pretty name, and it has nothing to do with being able to withstand a Gorilla attack. I didnt even attack it. It fell from my pants pocket, approximately less than a meter(im only 1.7m short, and im pretty sure my legs are short), and tada!

What's more interesting is that no repair shop is willing to repair it in Singapore (talk about reduce reuse recycle), and in Malaysia, it costs a whooping $60sgd to repair the screen despite SGD to MYR is 1:3. To put into perspective, this exact new model is going for $199sgd now, and a Iphone screen maybe cost less than $100 to repair in Malaysia.

I wanted to let Asus repair it since my set is still under warranty.
But their Global support don't seemed to be friendly(ask them got trade in, say no, ask them got price range, say dunno), and their service center is really FARRRR.

OKAY, enough of my whining about my destroyed phone.

Zenfone Selfie
Price: $379 (some promo now due to launch in sg)
Freebies: Free lolliflash and 16gb OTG from sandisk
Bought from: AMK Hub Challenger (you spend above $60, free $8 AMK hub voucher)
Bought on: 27 Sept

Apparently, despite their launch on 26th, nobody actually cared about the phone. There are display sets in some stores but most of them told me they dont have stock. Newstead at Jurong Point is selling at Original price of $399. Jurong Point Challenger have stock. But all other shops like Harvey Norman, Best Denki, all no stock.

When i buy on 27th (sunday), they had a hard time keying my order.
This is because stock came on a Saturday and nobody have time to key it into system nor unload it. So the set i bought was the first Selfie AMK Challenger sold.

My next challenge is to get Accessories for the phone. Screen Protector and Case. NO SHOP HAVE STOCKS FOR ZENFONE SELFIE AT ALL. I tried buying from Challenger and all main retailers, they say they dont have either.

Free Lolliflash when Selfie have flash for front and back camera. I RATHER THEY GIVE ME A HANDPHONE CASE.

Just a little tips for buyers:
if you are a Challenger Member,

This itself makes it worth the $30 to be member, since my reason of changing phone is due to a destroyed screen. Of course, since i have yet to test their service to see if it is really no cost replacement or not, i shall not comment more on this free warranty. Maybe its free material but you pay labour etc. Well, lets hope Gorilla Glass 4 is better.

The phone is a bit laggish when you first use it, but after awhile, it stabilizes, or i gotten used to it.
but no big concern here. The camera is as good as they tell you. please play around a sample set if you are a person who cares a lot about camera.
I loved the zen touch the most.
I have customised to swipe "W" on a sleeping screen to open whatsapp immediately, and "Z" to show instagram.
Its a fun, albeit "can do without" function.

My Chiwawa likes the function too.


The smart battery saving thingy is pretty irritating too. I on it to optimize my battery. but every time it sleeps, it will off my 3g, which means no Whatsapp Call and Whatsapp Web will go offline. Once i wake the phone up, the 3g is reactivated again!
Ended up, didnt use that either.

Calling is a bit irritating. Since it have a big selfie camera, the speaker is slightly placed on the right, which sometimes dont fit my ear.

Verdict
I would strongly recommend this phone if you are on a budget, and is okay with the severe lack of choice for accessories. The camera and functions are really decent for its price tag, and despite destroying one Gorilla glass previously, i really think the phone screen colour is pretty and nice to fondle. Its like a Phablet, so i dont really like the size of the phone since i prefer a smaller phone. But well, the screen is really pretty.

I liked Zen UI, despite it having more bloatware and trash installed as compared to Zenfone 5. Maybe its Lollipop that i liked, but nevermind.

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

The 20SGD pacer

Hi,

Priced at $19.99, the Mi Band is touted to be a direct competitor of FitBit and Jawbone. While the other 2 are in the range of $100+, I only have the budget to buy a Mi Band and play with it.

Looking at its specs published on its official site, Mi Band is supposed to last 30 days. It is supposed to trace your daily movement and track your sleep. But I guess the most important part of it is that it vibrates when you have an incoming call! This particular function would ensure that no more phone calls are missed!
http://www.mi.com/sg/miband/

Basic Information
Mi Band from Xiao Mi
Asus ZenFone 5 2GB ram 16GB memory

To go into more details,

Battery Life

Upon using it for 6 days, the battery life is still healthy at 79%. If we do the math, its 21% for 6 days, which means it should last for approximately ~30 days.

The issue here is that, although the Mi Band battery does well, your hand phone battery wouldn't last if you just leave your bluetooth on all day to sync automatically.
And you would require your Mi Band synced to get the band to vibrate when there is a phone call.

Sleep Tracking

One interesting stuff the Mi Band does is sleep tracking. I have no idea how it does it, but the main issue here is, so what if you know about your quality of sleep? How can you improve it or what can you do with these information? Well, for myself, I guess the answer is to sleep more, and to exercise more so you can sleep better.

And for how accurate it is?

Can't prove it either! 

But it is pretty cool to post it on facebook, and people will start asking what app are you using to get these data. So if you are an attention whore, get this before the craze die down!

You will get many comments regarding your sleep pattern!

Fitness Tracking (pacer)

This is the main function of it. To trace how much have you walk. I tried shaking the device hopefully it detects a step taken. But apparently, it is pretty well calibrated and only count a step when one is really taken. The calories burnt was pretty depressing, given that I did walk 10000 steps a day.

But oh well, I do know this thing won't produce enough motivation to make me feel like walking more!

Good or Bad?

It is an inexpensive toy to play with. However, some considerations are required.

Firstly, despite being an English app, there pretty much stuffs still in chinese, albeit being not really important.

Secondly, it is pretty useless, apart from it being able to vibrate when there is a call and being a wearable alarm clock. The vibration would not be enough to wake up a sleeping log (me), and it doesn't vibrate for long since touching it would disable the vibration(my pillow touches it and it stop vibrating) 

So if you do not have many people calling you(foreveralone people like me don't really need it), and the alarm feature is not useful to you, this is not a product for you!

Thirdly, its support for IOS. It is built to compliment the MiUI or XiaoMi phones. So naturally, for IOS, there is only a Chinese app for it. You better be able to understand chinese before buying this.

Fourth, DO NOT LOSE YOUR USB CHARGING CABLE. I have no idea where can I get a replacement and apparently XiaoMi don't sell them either. So i guess you dump the whole set if you lose the charging cable. TAKE GOOD CARE OF IT!

Personally, it is just an inexpensive toy that i wear in hope to motivate me to do more sports. Granted, I have fewer missed calls, but I don't really have much calls to begin with. Wearing it for long time also makes you uncomfortable if you are not used to it. It causes my phone to die faster due to the bluetooth being on. It doesn't really affect me since i hide in office or home with power plugs charging my phone constantly.

Lastly, 6 days of usage doesn't give a very good insights of the product.

So i guess if i could be disciplined enough to wear it for 30 days, I would post another review on this!

20SGD? can buy and play lar. But not a necessity, and not really that awesome.

It's more of the uselessness of the use case, less of the product. I must say the product quality is good!

Update: 22/03/2015
I bought a total of 4, one for personal use and 3 other for other people. Of these 4, 3 are required to be sent back to service center due to being unable to connect. I must say, i am deeply disappointed with the quality. But hey! its only 20 dollars and it have 1 year warranty!
And as of today, my band is broken(the little hook that allows u to slot it in), and to buy a replacement, it costs me $9.90sgd at Comex, or $3.90 from some Carousell seller.
Battery life is godly. 25days and its at 70+%. seemed like if you do not check the damn damn every other seconds, its damn good!

Best Regards

Benjamin Chai

Asus ZenFone 5 LTE (2GB Ram/16GB memory)

Hello,

Just before I start talking about my new buy, I would like to share my history of smartphones.

Iphone 4 (2011-2013)
Samsung S4 (2013-2014)
Asus ZenFone 5 LTE (2014)

I am definitely no supporter of Apple product, but I must say, I chose the iphone 4 back then was because all other phone were crap during the time of my purchase. Back then, its either the Iphone or Samsung S2, while stuffs like HTC, LG and Nokia were pretty in the slump. But Iphone 4 being the innovation of the late Steve Jobs, its pretty awesome and i really liked it a lot at that point.

However, Iphone 5 did not impress me at all and therefore I made a switch to Android and never looked back.

Now, after spending some time with my ZenFone 5, I must say I am pretty happy with it, given its price tag.

Just a quick comparison
Iphone 4 32GB - $600+ with plan (back in 2011)
Samsung S4 16GB 4G - $500+ with plan (back in 2013)
Asus ZenFone 5 LTE 2GB/16GB - $299 WITHOUT plan

A quick comparison on phone arena would tell you that S4 is superior. (ignore the LTE comparison)
http://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Samsung-Galaxy-S4,Asus-ZenFone-5/phones/7597%2C8279

But as a basic user who plays games(FIFA 2015 and Brave Frontier) and uses whatsapp, facebook, instagram, G+ and email. This phone is pretty snappy and decent! Its camera is not as good as S4, but I can live with it since the difference to my eyes is actually quite minimal.

S4 is a good phone. It have a series of functions that I would never use, stuffs like eye scroll, no touch etc. ZenFone doesn't. But as a user, i find that both phone are pretty similar and that making the switch doesn't make a big difference to me.

The look and feel do look good, but as I am only in the 1st week of using this phone, I might face more problems along the way and I hope I will remember to do updates here!
But hey! Its one of the cheapest LTE phone around!

And of course, 2GB ram costs more! There are several same model, different specs of ZenFone 5.
If you don't need LTE, the price is even lower!

I just hope my time with ZenFone 5 will be a smooth sailing and fun one. And hope that it will help me remove the stereotype of only Samsung and Apple are able to make decent phones.

Regards
Benjamin Chai


Edit:
(25/12/2014)
After more than a month of using this phone, I am still pretty happy with it.Since it is still new, the battery life is still pretty healthy! But the camera is really lousier than S4, which is something i have difficulty getting used to. So if you want an awesome camera phone, this isn't for you. But that being said, the camera isn't totally trashy. It is just that S4 is better.

Update: (22/3/2015)
The battery life of the phone is pretty good. Despite bluetooth permanently on to connect to MiBand, it can still last for about a whole day basic usage!
Hope to win the Asus Zenfone 2 review set!