Nokia’s 2017 competition’s gonna be tough – Asus Zenfone 3 with 5000mAh battery!

When we heard Nokia was officially coming back to smartphones, one of the (many) things we had wished for was better battery in today’s smartphones. I’ve been spoilt recently by an interim phablet I was using that had a monster 5000mAh (albeit strapped to a 7 inch screen). It was a dream having a phone I use all day and have charge to run the same constant use the next!

ASUS have squashed in 5000mAh on this 5.5″ device. The screen is ‘only’ 1080p but that would probably help the battery life go even further. Moreover it uses a very battery friendly Qualcomm 625 with Adreno 506 GPU. Not exactly blistering speeds but 2GHz Quadcore should be more than ok. It would be great to see someone pair up a beefy flagship with a huge battery. This phone should be one of the most battery friendly phones out there just short of those candybar Nokia handsets but it sort of feels like a slight bit of compromise going for the lower res screen and the ‘weaker’ qualcomm offering.

Dimensions on this thing was difficult to find on a quick google search but GSM Arena states this is 7.83mm. That’s only 0.63mm thicker than my X2 which spreads the whole contents over a 7″ screen + bezels! The zoom bit isn’t like the old zenfone zoom with 3x optical. Instead it uses a similar trick ala iPhone 7, dropping down to 2.3x zoom over 2 lenses.

Also interesting is Zenfone AR. 8GB RAM. 8. E.I.G.H.T.!

Unapologetically iPhone like set up there.

ASUS – I really love this brand as a technology company. They always usually bring out something that’s pretty cool.  The ZenFone 3 was originally quite interesting given that Lumia 1020 esque look and also going for that zoom photography.

Learning points from this announcement, Nokia and HMD. Amidst all the hoo-haa about specs of these devices, what will the general public remember? What will they care about? (Remember the first 41MP Nokia phone and instead of most being in awe, the misguided public were like, oh it’s not all about MP, even though Nokia did acknowledge that themselves….remember again what a poor launch and terrible marketing can do).

Beyond the big battery, there’s nothing really that exciting. Though I’m sure for that alone, it would make a great daily driver. Seems to have a lot of good enough specs, cameras might be quite ok and as long as it handles most tasks well, then with that mental battery capacity, it would be a big win.

Seriously, not having to worry about plugging in or having to bring portable chargers, or having a fright when you come home from work and wake up and realise you forgot to charge your phone…it’s something that the smartphone market is currently not focused on and it’s missing out on such a big trick. Actual end user usefulness.

It’s all about how you convey this to their market. Will HMD/Nokia bring 1) something different that we can 2) focus on.

In other news on the GSM arena front page, Nokia are supposedly bringing out 6-7 smartphones in total this year. Well we heard of 2 for MWC and there was a set of news later suggesting 4 more by summer. That leaves a potential 1 left for the rest of the year. Hopefully at least one of those will be worth talking about.

Category: Nokia