Asus Zenfone 2 Laser Review: Is This the Best Buy in the Rs. 8,000 Price Segment?

Asus Zenfone 2 is among the most sought after smartphones in the market today. Various variants of the Zenfone 2 have been doing well, to put it mildly, and they have certainly helped the Taiwanese company establish itself as one of the top smartphone brands going around.

In this post we are reviewing one of the least pricey members of this priceless (adjective intended) smartphone series – the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser ZE500KL (Z00ED) 8 GB mobile. When it comes to smartphone nomenclature you can trust Asus to confuse the living daylights out of you! Maybe that’s what you get when you have an electrical engineer for a CEO.

More from iSpyPrice: Order your Asus Zenfone 2 Laser ZE500KL 8 GB mobile today

Electrical engineering aphorisms aside, let’s examine what the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser is made of, other than the material that completes it.

Specifications – Asus Zenfone 2 Laser

This variant of the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser has a 5 inch display with a pixel density of 294 ppi. It has a 1.2 GHz Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 MSM8916 processor and an Adreno 306 graphics unit. The phone comes with a 2 GB RAM and an 8 GB internal storage capacity. This storage capacity can be expanded up to 128 GB via a microSD card slot. This is a dual-SIM smartphone and supports 4G connectivity along with all the other standard connectivity options.

More from iSpyPrice: Check out our latest Asus Phone Price List

The Zenfone 2 Laser boasts of a 13 megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front facing camera. The battery on the phone is a 2070 mAh Li-Polymer unit. The device is powered by the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS.

Now that we have taken a quick glance at the specs let’s delve a little deeper into the nitty-gritty of the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser.

Display and build quality

The display on this device is a 5 inch IPS display with a screen resolution of 720×1280 pixels. It comes with a 10 Finger capacitive touchscreen, Corning Gorilla Glass 4, and a 178 degree viewing angle. The design and build of the Zenfone 2 Laser is identical to that of its more fancied cousin with the same name – the Zenfone 2 – and its namesake variants.

The build quality of this phone is pretty impressive. I have been using this unit for about a month now and have managed to drop it thrice, each time unintentionally of course, but it has passed the test of accidental damage as far as I am concerned. I have haven’t put it through a hammer test though so don’t call me out if you drop it from the twenty first floor and can’t make out which part fits where. If that sounds like you, go buy a Moto X Force instead.

Camera

The 13 megapixel rear camera and the 5 megapixel front facing camera on the various Zenfone 2 Laser variants are one of the best camera combinations among the mid-range smartphones. The rear camera comes with LED flash and the phone is capable of recording videos up to 1080 pixels at 30 fps. The camera on the Zenfone 2 Laser has an f/2.0 aperture, a 5-element lens, auto focus, and dual color flash functionality.

For a phone that’s priced Rs. 7,999 the camera on the Zenfone 2 Laser is good enough to give some of its more expensive competitors a run for their rupees. While the camera on this device isn’t exactly at par with the Asus Zenfone Zoom, it is still a very good camera sans the 3x optical zoom hullabaloo.

Here are a few pics clicked by the Zenfone 2 Laser’s rear camera.

And here are the customary selfies from the front camera.

Performance

This variant of the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser didn’t emerge as a top performer when we benchmarked it to compare its performance to its competitors. Having said that these benchmark scores are reflective of results obtained from a small sample size and are not indicative of what a smartphone is truly capable, or incapable, of. If you are still curious here is the benchmark score that the phone notched up when we put it through an AnTuTu benchmark test.

While this score put this device out of the top 10 phones list on the AnTuTu benchmark ranking, it certainly does not imply that it is a poor performer. If one compares these scores to other phones in Zenfone 2 Laser’s price segment our device emerges as one of the better performers based purely on numbers.

Numbers aside, the average user determines a smartphone’s performance based on intuition and there is little number crunching involved in an opinionated response to “How is your new smartphone performing?”

“This is a spectacular performer. The CPU notched up 18724 points this morning while I was playing Lara Croft: Relic Run”, said no grandma ever. So for a change let’s take a more intuitive approach to assess the Zenfone 2 Laser’s performance. It runs every application you throw at it. Well, almost every application. Then again, if you were planning on designing the Hyperloop you should have known better and bought a high-end Elon Muskish custom PC instead of the Zenfone 2 Laser.

More from iSpyPrice: The Lara Croft Tomb Raider series awaits you on a Dell Alienware 13 Laptop

Speaking of Lara Croft, the Zenfone 2 Laser experienced no lag when I played Square Enix’s latest entry in the Lara Croft series – Relic Run.

Simply put, the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser is a lovely little performer and will get you through the day without hindering your internet, gaming, and selfie routines. It also gets you through the day because it has a pretty good battery unit.

Value for money

At iSpyPrice, we take the pricing of products very seriously. We analyze products and their pricing strategies all week long and draw informed conclusions derived from the intelligence we gather from our own price comparison product and our distributed price informant network. So unlike Tom from abcd gadgets who suggests that you should go and buy that phone because he liked it, we recommend a product only if it passes our internal pricing metrics. For Rs. 7,999 this variant of the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser is a “best buy” in its price segment.