It wasn't until just recently that the ZenFone Zoom, which ASUS showed off at CES more than a year ago, finally went up for pre-order. Now, you can buy the phone outright in all its leather-backed glory over at B&H for $399 shipped. The main feature that sets this phone apart is its camera with optical zoom, allowing the lenses within to actually move forward and backward physically to offer up to 3x zoom without losing any image quality.
The ZenFone Zoom has a 5.5-inch full HD IPS display, an Intel Atom Z3590 processor (clocked at 2.5GHz), and 4GB of RAM to keep everything running smoothly. It has 64GB of expandable internal flash storage to store all of your beautiful pics, a 3,000mAh battery, and a 13MP rear camera sensor with f/2.7-f/4.8 aperture, dual flash, laser auto-focus, 3x optical zoom (as mentioned) and optical image stabilization.
Sadly, ASUS isn't exactly known for keeping their devices up to date on the software side. The ZenFone Zoom runs Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box rather than 6.0 Marshmallow. One can hope that a phone that's launching two months into 2016 will at some point in the future get 2015's software via an over-the-air update. Read more about the phone here.
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