Asus Zenfone 2 review: A balancing act

Capable gallery with MiniMovie and collages

The Asus Zenfone 2 ZE551ML comes with a custom Gallery app. It defaults to a view of your folders and the camera roll is highlighted over the top. The Gallery also supports events and people views, plus it can display images from various cloud services including ASUS, Omlet, Facebook, OneDrive, Google Drive, Google+ and Flickr.

Standard gallery views

You get the Asus MiniMovie app, which lets you select a bunch of images and turns them into a short video of sorts, with music, transitions and the lot, which you can customize, of course. A handy collage feature is also on board, and it's pretty comprehensive, with a host of aspect ratios, templates and backgrounds. In the end however, the output images are capped to 1080pixels in the longest dimension, so they're only good for social media.

Collage feature • MiniMovie

The available features when viewing a single image are pretty standard - set image as wallpaper/contact image, share it, delete it, enter edit mode or just get more info. You also get quick shortcuts for rotation and additional information. The integrated editor offers various effects, frames, tools (crop, mirror, straighten, rotate, fisheye, doodle) plus light adjustments that let you bring out the shadows or the highlights.

Editing an image

The Zenfone 2 video player is part of the Gallery, there isn't a dedicated app. There are no premium features or particularly striking video decoder support. Its interface is very simple, too - just a playback scrubber and a play/pause button, alongside a sharing button at the top.

It wasn't able to play anything but MP4, plus the occasional AVI. DivX, Xvid, MKV, WMV and MOV are a no go, as is the AC3 audio codec. If you need a video player to open anything besides your camera roll videos, you'll have to opt for one from the Play Store.

Poor video player

The music player does the job

The Asus music player does decently in terms of functionality, covering all the basics. It has a large Now Playing window with prominent album art, and also has integrated bass boost and surround sound options, although both of those only work with headphones. An equalizer is also available with multiple presets and a single custom setting. That's in addition to the system-wide AudioWizard sound enhancement software.

Music player

FM Radio with RDS

A useful FM radio app is available on the Zenfone 2. The search function automatically stores all available stations. It has RDS and can retrieve the stations' names, but interestingly enough, only displays them when the current station is playing. You can set up to 5 favorite stations but they are displayed with their respective frequency, instead of the names.

FM radio app

Crispy clean audio output

The Asus Zenfone 2 demonstrated above average volume levels in the first part of our test - the one where it works with an active external amplifier. Its output was very clean too as testified by its excellent scores.

Plug in a pair of headphones and you get a tiny bit of extra crosstalk with no other damage to the output. Impressively clean indeed and with volume levels still above average this rounds up one of the best performance in this class.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Asus Zenfone 2 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.