The Asus ZenFone 2 will be sold unlocked in Canada beginning tomorrow, May 19th, starting at $249.
The Taiwanese computer and tablet manufacturer is for the first time bringing its devices to North America with its latest product, as part of a growing collaboration with Intel. The two companies are promoting Intel’s newly-released Atom chipset, powered by low-powered x86-based Silvermont cores and a beefy PowerVR GPU.
Starting tomorrow, the ZenFone 2 will be sold at Newegg, NCIX, Canada Computers and Memory Express in two configurations: a quad-core 1.8Ghz version with 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage, for $249 CAD; and a more powerful 2.3Ghz quad-core version with 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage, for $379 CAD. Both variants will be sold unlocked.
Both models share the same 5.5-inch 1080p panel, 13MP rear camera sensor, 5MP front-facing shooter and 3,000mAh non-removable battery.
The ZenFone 2 is a dual-SIM device, one of the first for wide distribution in Canada, and comes equipped with LTE band access for all carriers, as well as AWS-based HSPA+ on Wind, Mobilicity, Videotron and others. It uses LTE-Advanced for speeds up to 250Mbps in the downlink.
Android 5.0 is standard on the phone, too, with Asus’ ZenUI on top. We’ll dig deeper into the features in our upcoming review. And at 10.9mm thick and 170 grams, the high-end ZenFone is not particularly lithe, but it does pack quite a lot of power.
Customers will be able to purchase both variants of the device in red, black, and gray and silver.
Update: Here are the bands for the device:
- GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
- UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz)
- LTE (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 20)
As you can see, it does support AWS on HSPA+, so Wind users are in luck.
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