Snapdragon 821-powered ASUS ZenFone 3 Deluxe launches in Taiwan at a hefty price

The ASUS ZenFone 3 has become the world's first Snapdragon 821-powered smartphone to make it to the market. The model is now on sale in ASUS' homeland of Taiwan at the rather fortuitous price of near $800 (5320 Yuan). The ZenFone 3 Deluxe is sold in Silver and Gold finishes, and while the former will ship September 12, the latter is scheduled for September 23.

Interestingly, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe was also the first handset to be announced sporting Qualcomm's upgraded flagship silicon. This happened over two months ago, and in that time, no other manufacturer stepped forth to announce a competing handset and take advantage of ASUS's slow, but deliberate pace.

The ZenFone 3 Deluxe stands up to its name with a sprawling spec sheet that also includes a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED 1080p resolution screen, 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 256GB of fast UFS 2.0 storage memory, a 23MP Sony IMX318 camera (with OIS, laser autofocus, and RGB color sensor) and an 8MP front camera. Powered by a 3000mAh battery and featuring Qualcomm Fast Charging 3.0 support, the smartphone runs Android 6.0.1 skinned with ASUS' Zen UI 3.0. It also features dual-SIM connectivity and a fingerprint scanner.

Rated as around 10% more powerful than the Snapdragon 820, the 821 sees the original chipset's clock frequencies bumped up to 2.34 GHz and 2.19 GHz for each of the two pairs of cores (up from 2.15GHz and 1.59 GHz, respectively). The GPU is also clocked faster – 653MHz against 624MHz in the original. On paper, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is most powerful Android smartphone currently available – it will be so for a while.

source: GizmoChina