14 DAY TRIAL // There are some good and some bad news for Android fans in India who are still waiting for Asus to bring its Zenfone 5 smartphone in the country.
Exclusively available through Flipkart, Asus Zenfone 5 was launched in India last month and was briefly put on sale online, but it sold out pretty quickly.
It appears that the Zenfone 5 is very popular in India due to its low price, but Asus does not seem to be able to handle the high demand for this particular smartphone, just like Xiaomi is unable to meet the demand for its Mi3.
The good news is Asus has announced it will put the Zenfone 5 on sale at Flipkart once again on August 9, fonearena reports. The bad news is Asus has confirmed that only 10,000 units will go on sale tomorrow at Flipkart, which sounds like a joke considering the high number of customers looking to grab the handset.
It’s also worth mentioning that while Asus announced that the Zenfone 5 would sell for Rs 10,000 ($165 / €120) outright, the white version of the smartphone will actually be available for no less than Rs 12,490 ($205 / €150).
Unfortunately, there’s no telling how many white Zenfone 5 units will be stocked at Flipkart tomorrow, in fact we don’t even know if Asus will provide the online retailer with this particular version of the smartphone.
Either way, we are pretty sure the Zenfone 5 will sell in a matter of minutes, as Flipkart will only have around 10,000 units in stock. It’s also worth mentioning that Asus plans to fix the problem of low Zenfone 5 stocks in India, though we’re not sure when this will happen.
The company’s official statement reads, “In order to constantly cater to the growing demand, the company will be filling in the stocks on weekly basis.”
For those unfamiliar with the Asus Zenfone 5, here is a quick rundown of its specs. First of all, the handset runs the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system out of the box, though Asus has confirmed that a KitKat update will be released soon.
On the inside, the smartphone packs a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2560 processor, which is complemented by a PowerVR SGX544MP2 graphics processing unit and 2GB of RAM.
The Zenfone 5 comes with only 8GB of internal memory, but users can further expand storage up to 64GB via the microSD card slot. An additional 5GB of free cloud storage will be available as well courtesy to Asus Web Storage service.
Asus' mid-range smartphone sports a 5-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports HD (720p) resolution. Keep in mind that the Zenfone 5 offers dual-SIM capability, as well as 3G HSPA+, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.