ASUS ZenFone 3 Laser 5.5-inch Glacier Silver [ZC551KL] Laser auto-focus, 13MP Rear / 8MP Front camera, IPS FHD display, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage

This review is for the 5.5" Zenfone 3 Laser, since there seems to be some confusion about which product people are reviewing. I bought this phone to replace a Moto G 4G (XT1045). This phone is a great deal at the $200 price point, and I have not found any major issues with mine.- SoftwareBefore I received this phone I was ready to write off the stock ASUS apps as worthless bloatware, but I'm happy to have been proven wrong. There are actually some usefull apps included stock that were not included with my previous phone Moto G, such as a file manager, flashlight app, laser ruler, and sound recorder. The Mobile Manager app is actually useful for managing battery and performance, keeping other apps in check. The battery drain notification is especially useful since it can let you know about an offending app early, instead of suddenly finding that your battery is in the red and you have no idea why. I haven't looked at any of the stock social or support apps yet. Some people have complained about wanting to remove stock apps, but I personally don't see much point. They don't auto-run so they aren't using any battery, and with 32GB of internal storage + 128GB uSD I am not exactly short on space. Note that this phone does not appear to support 'adoptable storage'. I'm not sure why they removed that feature from stock Marshmallow, but fortunately I didn't plan on using it anyway.- UII wasn't really sure what to expect from ZenUI having not been hands-on with an ASUS device before buying this one. Every vendor seems to be obsessed with differentiating through their UI, for better or worse. I figured worst case I could flash this phone over to Cyanogenmod in the near future if I hated the stock skin. However, I am happy to report that ZenUI looks and feels a lot like stock Android. People who are used to Samsung's TouchWiz may not like it. After using the Moto G for 2 years I had no trouble at all switching to this. I like that the flashlight and calculator are accessible from the pulldown menu on the lock screen without having to enter my passcode. However, I baffled that Power Boost (kills backgrounded apps to save memory) and Auto-start Manager (controls which apps can auto-start) are also accessible in this manner, as these are not apps that I would want a stranger to mess with. That's my only complaint about the UI.- BuildThis is my first phone >4.5". I'm a fan of the larger screen when using it, but definitely not a fan of trying to bend over to pick things up while this is in my front pocket. With that said, the phone is very lightweight for its size. It is definitely lighter than my wife's Moto G 3rd gen despite having a larger screen and higher capacity battery. That does give me some concern about long-term durability, but so far I have no had any issue. External case material is metal, though I suspect this is just a shell over plastic since it does not feel or sound solid when tapped on with a fingernail. The ends of the phone contain the antennas and are encased in plastic. I generally hate phone cases and do not use them, but in this case the phone is slippery enough that I opted for a low profile rubber case from CoverOn. I definitely recommend this case to add some protection without adding much size.- ScreenThe screen looks amazing. It is bright and sharp. 1920x1080 is absolutely enough pixels for a screen this size. I have no complaints about this aspect of the phone.- CameraThe camera is great compared my Moto G, although I guess that isn't saying much. It's not like I'm looking for a replacement for my SLR, so to be honest my expecations weren't very high. I'll upload a few photos at a later time, but I'm sure you can find many other sample images in reviews elsewhere.- SoundThe phone has a single speaker on the bottom end. It would have been nice to have a second speaker on the top end for stereo in landscape mode, but that's asking a bit much for this price point. I see some reviewers have complained about it being quiet, but that has not been my experience. I keep my phone volume set 1 or 2 clicks up from silent and can easily hear it ringing on my desk from across the office at work. I suspect that those reviewers received defective units. The headphone jack, earpiece, and Bluetooth output are all in-line with what I experienced from my Moto G. I also have not had any trouble with lag during music playback like other users have reported. I use the phone every day to listen to music from the uSD card and it works great.My only complaint here is actually with the vibration; it is too subtle to work as a notification on its own. My Moto G would vibrate loudly enough that I didn't really need a notification tone. With this phone that is not the case.That's all that comes to mind for now. If I think of anything else, or if my experience changes significantly, then I will update my review accordingly.

I got this phone to replace my Sony Xperia Z1 Compact after it begun to have battery life problems with the Lollipop OS upgrade. I wanted something with a bigger screen and similar performance to the Z1C as I watch a lot of video and listen to a lot of music. My overall impressions with the phone are positive- it performs well, the fingerprint scanner works great and it's just great to use.However, as a music buff I had to ding it for 2 stars as it has a couple of issues I deem to be pretty serious:- Playing music off of the SD card is pretty much a no-go. Sometimes it worked fine, but most of the time I'd experience serious lag. 10-20 seconds of no response from commands to pause/change/stop tracks. It was infuriating enough that I wound up uploading all 5,000+ of my songs to Google Play Music, as for reasons beyond my comprehension my songs play faster/more reliably from Google's servers than off a local microSD card. It's a known glitch ASUS has not fixed. For me, fortunately enough I have Wi-Fi everywhere I go- work, home, the gym- so that is an option. Another workaround is loading to internal memory if the 32GB it has (I think it's really mid 20s after all the base apps) is enough for you- for me it isn't, and the 64GB version costs double the price.- Headphone output is pretty low. If you look up the PhoneArena volume benchmark (as I should have before I bought this) it is near the bottom of the rankings. Thankfully this can be mostly bypassed with a pair of Bluetooth headphones, but that leads to another issue....- Bluetooth connectivity with Pandora is a bit choppy. Thankfully I mainly listen to my own music, but my wife uses my phone to listen to Pandora in our home gym while she works out, and it was really choppy. I didn't have any problems with the same dongle and Google Play Music the day before, so I'm hoping it's just a glitch with Pandora. I know it's Bluetooth only though as it worked fine out of the headphone jack.I don't mean to be so negative about the phone, because just as a phone it works great. The 1080p screen is nice, it's really responsive, it feels good in the hand and the controls make sense. But as a musician/producer/general audio geek and just someone who listens to about 6-10 hours a day of audio in various conditions, after just about a week of use this thing is falling short. The real test for me will be Bluetooth performance on my headphones at my work gym.... if that is no good I'm going to have to send it back and do more research with its replacement.Long story short, if you are not nitpicky or demanding about audio quality and Bluetooth connectivity this is an excellent phone for the money. I don't know if ASUS cut corners on its SD card buses + headphone amp + Bluetooth antennas to keep the cost under $200, but for me it's just a bit much, forcing workarounds and compromises that really take the joy out of what's an otherwise awesome and high value phone.*EDIT* A few months in and things are still mixed. Bluetooth performance/connectivity is great now, no complaints... may have just needed a firmware update. However now the headphone jack is going bad. It works, but the detent inside seems to be damaged so the jack does not hold the plug. For listening to podcasts at my desk it's fine, but when my Bluetooth headphones die at the gym and I need to connect by cord it's a nightmare. And while it's still covered under warranty I have to go that long without a phone.

Absolutely disappointed! I guess I got a refurbished one. Very slow and it freezes if more than one application is open. I would give a minus star if it would be possible!

This was my primary day-to-day phone for three years, and by the time I got a new phone, I was more than happy to retire the Asus Zenfone 3 Laser. The name is a mouthful on its own, but it's hardly the worst offender.Despite the marketing, the Asus Zenfone 3 Laser is really a budget phone from Asus. At just $230 CAD, you cannot by any means expect flagship or "luxury" level quality with a phone sold this cheaply. You do get what you pay for—and what you pay for is wishing that you would have spent more on a better phone.The phone's chassis is cool and metallic, although somewhat slippery. This is easily remedied with a phone case, which I bought at the same time I got the phone. Alas, the rear part of the phone, just underneath the camera, got an irreparable dent for seemingly unknown reasons a few months after using the phone. It's not clear how this occurred, but it would suggest that the build quality isn't particularly stellar.You should not expect the best colour accuracy with the screen if you plan on doing any colour accurate work on the phone, but for movies and for scrolling through your vacation photos, it gets the job done. The screen gets quite hard to see in bright environments, often leading me trying to shade the screen with my hands. This is particularly aggravating when using the camera outdoors.Speaking of the camera, this is what the phone was seemingly marketed for. It claims to use lasers for snappy autofocus, and if you look at the front of the camera while it's focusing, you'll see a pulsing red laser indicating that the phone is doing just that. However, while it's flashy, it's hardly a noticeable improvement over non-laser phone cameras using regular contrast-detection autofocus. Autofocus was perhaps a little better over my previous Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, but not by much.The camera only goes downhill from here, sadly. Colours are poorly reproduced and are often muted, resulting in unnatural looking images. Photos are often noisy, especially those in low-light—the low-light mode in the camera app doesn't seem to do much, mostly resorting to aggressive ISO and comically slow shutter speeds. The laser perhaps affords it a little bit better autofocus in the dark, but the photo is so blurry and noisy that missing focus is the least of your worries. Perhaps my biggest complaint about the camera app is how it became utterly unusable after upgrading the phone to Android 7.1: the camera app is so slow and unresponsive that it can cause the entire phone to hang, forcing a hard reboot. I had to use the OpenCamera app in order to take pictures from then on.As for slow and unresponsive, those are the adjectives that perhaps best describe this phone: slow, and unresponsive. Opening an app takes several seconds. Tapping a button may not register any feedback for several seconds. Interface animations are generally smooth, but delayed. Tapping the home button takes ten seconds to bring me back to the home screen—this results in me mashing the home button impatiently because I can't be sure if the phone actually got the memo. The phone's paltry 2 GB of RAM means that I can barely juggle three apps at once before one needs to be killed, making multi-tasking more of a dream than a possibility.There is one thing that the phone absolutely excels at, and that is battery life: even after three years of use, the phone can survive days before needing to be recharged, barely sipping any power when on standby. This is, however, a double-edged sword, as the phone accomplishes this by means of absurdly aggressive app optimization. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger may not sound notifications for new messages for several minutes to a few hours after they are sent, and in many cases I never got notifications until I woke the phone. Great battery life doesn't sound so great if your phone transforms itself into a practical brick to do this. If you need to stay on top of things, this isn't the phone for you. And who doesn't use their phone to stay on top of things?At the time of the phone's release, the iPhone SE was about $200 to $300 more expensive, but would do circles around the Asus Zenfone 3 Laser, being better at just about everything except battery life. There may be other, better budget phones from the time period that I am not immediately aware of. All in all, the Asus Zenfone 3 Laser isn't a bad phone for its price—it's just a bad phone, with maybe a gimmicky camera autofocus system and preserving battery life by making your background apps useless being its only bragging points. It joins the fate of other budget Android phones that were made to be forgotten.

Good quality phone for the price. Excellent construction and premium feel. Feels light, yet sturdy with aluminum construction. As others have noted, this particular model comes with only 2Gb of RAM so multitasking abilities are limited but OK for a light user who is not looking for a great camera or flagship features. The phone does look 2017 with small bezels and fingerprint sensor on the back.The only issue so far is when the phone is locked it may take up to 3-5 seconds for it to bring up the lock screen when you press the power button after upgrading to Android 7.1.1. Likely due to the limited RAM. I hope ASUS addresses this via a software update. It does come with ASUS's own touch of the OS so make sure you take a look and make sure that's something you are comfortable with.Shipment was super-quick

Phone started to act up within days of purchasing it. It freezes a lot and was moving really slow. I had to by a new phone a week ago, because I couldn't continue using this. I bought a samsung galaxy s9. It makes more sense buying a more expensive phone if you can afford it. less headache really.

Everything looks good on the paper but the phone is really laggy. Everything takes so much time to execute (camera, google maps, messenger,....). It's really frustrating !!!I don't recommand