Mid-range Asus ZenFone 5 smartphone with vertical dual camera setup sufaces online

Although an Asus ZenFone 5 handset arrived back in 2014 already, it seems that the multinational tech giant originally hailing from Taiwan is now ready to launch it once again. Obviously, the new handset has nothing in common with the 5-inch ZenFone 5 that used the Intel Atom Z2580 SoC, next to 2 GB RAM and 8 GB internal storage. That handset ran Android 4.3 Jelly Bean out of the box and the latest update it received was Android 5.0 Lollipop.

The new Asus ZenFone 5 is labeled X00PD and the images that have just surfaced online thanks to WinFuture show a rather large device with quite large bezels, especially considering the 5.7-inch display with an 18:9 ratio. The rest of the specs (obviously, yet to be confirmed by Asus) include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor, dual-SIM support, a microSD slot, a vertical dual-camera setup on the back, a battery with a capacity around 4,000 mAh. We could also bet on at least 3 GB RAM and 32 GB internal storage, but given the specs provided by other similar handsets like the Xiaomi Mi A1 or the Honor 7X, Asus will probably come up with at least a higher-end variant packing 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage. To match those two handsets we mentioned, a Kirin 659 or a Snapdragon 625 would also be a much better processor choice.

In addition to the details mentioned above, we should add the rear-mounted fingerprint reader and the pre-installed Android 8.0 Oreo firmware as well. Since most mid-rangers and even some of the low-end handsets that hit the market these days have unibody metal cases, this should not come as a surprise. 

All the above should be taken with a bit of salt for now since the ZenFone 5 X00PD might hit the market using a different name. When will that happen, remains to be seen, but we think that this event is very likely to occur in less than a month in Barcelona, at MWC 2018.