Asus has today added a new budget member to its smartphone portfolio with the launch of Zenfone Lite L1. The phone comes with a price tag of Rs 5,999 and it will be exclusively available on Flipkart. We got the chance to spent some time with the new budget device and there are our first impressions.
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Design and Display
Asus Zenfone Lite L1 comes with a standard design, you get plastic unibody design at the back, which is omnipresent in this price range. However, the plastic comes with a metallic finish that makes it look not cheap. We got the black variant of the review and it sure looks good, though if you place it on the table, many would mistake it for a different smartphone. That said, the device is quite comfortable to hold with just 140 grams it is surely one of the lightweight devices found in this price segment.
Giving brief about placements of ports, the front panel houses a front-facing camera at the top along with an earpiece, while at the base, there are on-screen navigation controls. The right houses volume rockers and power on/off button, while the left houses SIM tray that offers two SIM slot and a dedicated microSD card slot. You will find a 3.5mm Audio Jack at the top, while the base features Micro USB port flanked between two speaker grilles. The back comes with a single camera unit and Asus branding.
Coming to the display, the Asus Zenfone Lite L1 is equipped with a 5.45-inch HD+ display with a screen Resolution of 1440 x 720 pixels, 18:9 aspect ratio. In our initial testing, we found out that the display gives decent view angles and the colour reproduction was good as well. We will talk about this in our detailed review.
Hardware and Software
Coming to the hardware front, the phone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 Processor with Adreno 505 GPU. It is backed by a 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 256GB via microSD card slot. The phone is powered by an older Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 chipset, while its competitor like Redmi 6A and Realme C1 are offering MediaTek Helio A22 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 Chipset respectively at a similar price point. The processors new and comes with better computing power as compared to the Snapdragon 430 SoC.
Moving to the software front, the Zenfone Lite L1 runs on Android 8.1 Oreo with ZenUI 5.0 running on top of it. The company has cut down alot of bloatware, which was earlier present in the previous generation ZenUI. The user interface comes with minimal bloatware and it looks more refined than its predecessor. We will talk more about this in our upcoming review.
Camera
On the camera front, the phone is equipped with a 13-megapixel rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, 1.12-micron Pixel size, PDAF and LED flash. For the front, there is a 5-megapixel shooter with f/2.2 aperture, 1.12-micron pixel size and LED flash. The camera user interface is quite simple and it comes with a host of interesting modes like Auto, beauty, Pro, Panorama, Time Lapse, Portrait and HDR.
In our initial testing, we found out that the rear camera was able to take some good shots with a decent amount of detail, though colours look a bit faded. The selfie camera does a good job while using the Portrait mode and it properly highlights the subject in the foreground and blurs out the background.
Battery and Connectivity
On the battery front, the Asus Zenfone Lite L1 is backed by a 3000mAh battery and the company has bundled a 10W charger with this one. On the connectivity front, you get 4G VoLTE, GPS, GLONASS, NFC, dual-SIM, 3.5mm audio jack and micro USB port.