The Asus Zenfone 8 is now official, and unlike what many reports suggested, there was no “Mini” branded phone launched by the company. The vanilla Zenfone 8 is, in fact, the “Mini” phone that was being rumored about for months. It is not just another flagship phone from Asus but rather a flagship with a compact form factor, something which is rare these days. With its 5.9-inch display, this is a perfect one-handed phone. It is not as compact as the iPhone 12 Mini, but that phone could be way too small for many, so the Zenfone 8 strikes a perfect balance between compactness and a pretty good display area.
Design-wise, the Zenfone 8 looks pretty plain. There is no flipping camera module that we saw last year on the Zenfone 7 and also on the Zenfone 8 Flip that launched alongside this phone. The Zenfone 8 has a normal-looking design that includes a display with a hole punch on the top left corner and a rectangular camera module with only two cameras in it. The power button is placed on the right side, which gets a different paint job as well. The back panel is made of glass, and it has an Anti-Glare Frosted-glass finish.
The Asus Zenfone 8 is also IP68 rated for protection against water and dust. For Audiophiles, there are stereo speakers and also a 3.5mm headphone jack, something the company removed from last year’s Zenfone 7. So that’s a welcome move.
Speaking of the specifications, Asus Zenfone 8 has a 5.9-inch AMOLED panel by Samsung with Full-HD+ resolution, 1,100 nits peak brightness and Gorilla Glass Victus. Under the hood is the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SOC paired with LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage. The battery is just 4,000mAH, and there is support for 30W fast wired charging. Despite having a glass back, there is no support for wireless charging.
The dual-camera setup on the rear includes a primary 64 Megapixel Sony IMX686 sensor, which is paired with a 12 Megapixel Sony IMX363 sensor for ultrawide shots. This ultrawide camera can shoot macro photos as well. The primary 64MP unit has OIS as well and can shoot 8K videos. On the front, there is a 12 Megapixel Sony IMX663 sensor with a 1.22-micron pixel size. 4K 30/60fps video recording is there is for all the cameras, i.e., the two rear cameras and also the front camera.
Finally, Android 11 based ZenUI 8 runs out of the box, and it is a clean stock Android experience with useful features added on top. Speaking of the pricing, here are the prices for the European market –
- 6GB + 128GB – EUR 599
- 8GB + 128GB – EUR 669
- 16GB + 256GB – EUR 799