14 DAY TRIAL // The ASUS Zenfone 2 is a great value smartphone offering great specs at an affordable price that ranges between $199 / €179 and $299 / €269. For this amount of cash, customers can get a device equipped with up to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which is pretty impressive.
The phone ships out with Android 5.0 Lollipop and ASUS ZenUI on top. The company also preloads the handset with a lot of apps both from ASUS and third parties, which is highly annoying.
So what are those who carve a cleaner experience going to do? Install a custom ROM, of course. The only problem is that they’ll void their warranty in order to be able to take advantage of its perks.
Some ROMs like SuperZen and Zenitude are available for the Zenfone 2, but the community developed around Cyanogen is also working on a port of CyanogenMod 12.1 for the device. It’s currently a work in progress, so be prepared to encounter a few bugs.
CyanogenMod 12.1 is based on Android 5.1 Lollipop and offers an experience similar to that delivered by a Google Nexus phone. Xda-developers forum member Ansebovi has posted a tutorial in which he explains how to install the custom ROM on the device.
Developers actively working on CyanogenMod 12.1 for ASUS Zenfone 2
However, you need to keep in mind that this is an early, unofficial build, so not everything will work perfectly. Still, performance is said to be pretty great and RAM management is also acceptable.
The coolest aspect of the build is that it brings no bloat into the equation. On the downside of things, gaming performance is apparently a little bit worse than before, with 3D games like Asphalt exhibiting a little bit of stuttering.
For the time being, the custom ROM can be installed only on the ZenFone 2 ZE551ML, but compatibility will probably be expanded further on.
This particular model arrives with a 5.5-inch display with 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution and is offered with either an Intel Atom Z3580 chip with 4GB of RAM or an Intel Atom Z3560 fitted with 2GB of RAM.
So if you’re the owner of one of these versions, you might want to take into consideration CyanogenMod 12.1.
