ASUS Disrupts Our Zen With New ZenBook 3 & ZenFone 3 Series

We covered a number of gaming and component products from ASUS the other day, but on the mobile side, the company has announced even more. Those include a couple of products I am really excited about: ZenBook 3, and ZenFone 3.

After taking a look at the ZenBook UX305 last summer, I became a fan immediately. The notebook looked great, had enough power to get me by, and boasted great battery-life, too. Well… the ZenBook 3 promises to bring all of that, but just do all of it even better. I am going to go out on a limb and say that the ZenBook 3 is the most beautiful notebook I’ve ever seen.

The latest ZenBook shares similar design goals as the UX305, in that it’s meant to be as thin as possible without sacrificing important things. Unless those important things include USB ports, as thanks to a shaving of 0.4mm off of the thickness, the new ZenBook 3 follows in the footsteps of Apple’s MacBook by offering just a single USB-C connector. I am now in the process of trying to convince myself that that’s not a problem.

Other specs include: 12.5-inch size (1080p), 910g weight, 50% stronger surface, 0.4mm thick Corning Gorilla Glass, and a 7.6mm thick bezel. For hardware underneath, you can configure the ZenBook 3 to use up to an Intel Core i7 processor, up to a 1TB PCIe SSD, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and up to 16GB of DDR4-2133 memory. Oh – and notice that little square on the touchpad? That’s a fingerprint sensor that takes advantage of Windows 10’s Hello feature.

Last year’s ZenBook included a 45Wh battery, whereas the ZenBook 3 shaves that down to 40WH. That sounds like an obvious ‘gotcha’, but there’s more than meets the eye. The new battery is ‘special’ in that it can charge really quickly: 0% > 60% in 49 minutes is the promise, and at full charge, the notebook should last about 9 hours.

While I raved about ASUS’ ZenBook UX305 last summer, I likewise raved about the ZenFone 2 not long after. For its price, it just couldn’t be beat, with the biggest caveat being that its build quality couldn’t match – or even come close to – higher-end models. The ZenFone 3 looks to correct that.

ASUS isn’t just using Computex as the launchpad for a ZenFone 3; oh no. It’s also unveiling the ZenFone 3 Ultra and ZenFone 3 Deluxe. These are not just small variants of each other, as each is a completely different size. The standard ZenFone 3 comes in at 5.5-inch, like the ZenFone 2, while the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is slightly larger at 5.7-inch. The Ultra? Well, that’s a rather monstrous 6.8-inch, so it definitely targets a certain niche.

Of the three models, only the Deluxe uses a top-end Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, the 820 (@ 2.15GHz); the others use a 625 (base; 2.0GHz) and 652 (Ultra; 1.8GHz). Both models outside of the Deluxe will include at least 32GB of internal storage, with the Deluxe kicking things off at 64GB.

As with the ZenBook 3, every one of the new ZenFones sport a beautiful aesthetic, with the top two models featuring an “invisible antenna”, making for a more streamlined device.

ASUS hasn’t announced when either its ZenBook 3 or ZenFone 3 models will become available, but considering the previous-gen were both available last summer, we can hope that these new flagships will be available this summer. Pricing TBD.