Today is press day at CES, which is when most of the major announcements will be happening, before the show officially starts. Event space around the city is booked up and Asus this morning descended upon Caesar’s Palace to announce the ZenFone 2.
The ZenFone series was introduced at CES 2014 and ran on Intel’s Clovertrail architecture. This year’s ZenFone 2 runs on a 64-bit Atom Z3580 clocked to 2.3 GHz along with a whopping 4GB of RAM. It’s got a 5.5-inch 1080p display, a 13MP camera in the back and a 5MP sensor in the front.
The whole show is powered by a 3000mAh battery with fast-charging technology that promises to get you back to 60% with only 39 minutes of charge time. On the software side you’re looking at a Android 5.0 Lollipop with a brand new version of the Asus ZenUI running on top.
When the ZenFone 2 does launch, it will be available in grey, black, red, white, and gold. Asus advertised a starting price of $199 but that’s presumably on-contract pricing. On that note, the company hasn’t specified geographic availability either. Despite the dollar pricing, Asus admits that this phone hasn’t been authorized as required by the rules of the FCC. It’s likely the ZenFone 2 will follow in the footsteps of the last generation of ZenFones. Those were announced at CES last year, again with dollar pricing, but never made it to North America.
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
