The new Asus Zenfone Ares is a sleeping high bang-for-buck device

Asus has unveiled its latest device, the Zenfone Ares, without much fuss. The device is far from a mainstream one, as it’s designed to be an Augmented Reality-oriented offering. The company took to making devices for this demographic with the launch of the Zenfone AR last year, and the Zenfone Ares appears to be a cheaper variant of that device. 

The Zenfone Ares sports a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED QHD display. Like the older Zenfone AR, it’s powered by a Snapdragon 821. This was the same SoC used on devices like the OnePlus 3T and first-gen Pixel. It’s undoubtedly outdated at this point but as a last-gen SoC, it still offers slightly better performance than the Snapdragon 660.

The device features just the one 23 MP rear camera, although it comes with bells and whistles like motion tracking and depth sensing for a better 3D experience. The selfie shooter is an 8 MP sensor. Like the Zenfone AR, the Ares features 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. It’s powered by a 3300 mAh battery and runs on Android Nougat.

The Zenfone Ares is exclusive to Taiwan at the moment and comes with a price tag that translates to about US$330.