14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been working on its Project Tango for quite some time now and the latest smartphone to support the AR technology was announced back at CES in January. The Asus ZenFone AR was one of the highlights of this year’s first tech event, but the smartphone has yet to arrive on the market.
During this year’s edition of the Google I/O, the tech giant announced that the ZenFone AR would arrive this summer at Verizon. The US carrier will be the only carrier in the US to sell the smartphone, but the actual release date is unknown at this point.
Following Google’s announcement, Verizon released an official statement claiming that the ZenFone AR would be a Verizon-exclusive handset and that it would be both Tango-enabled and Daydream-ready upon release. Speaking of which, Verizon didn’t shed any light on the retail price, so we’ll just have to wait and see when the phone arrives.
The 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage variant will arrive at Verizon
Verizon has also mentioned that the ZenFone AR will come with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, together with Snapdragon 821, coupled with an Adreno 530 graphics processing unit. At the time of the announcement, Asus did say that it would provide a variant with 8GB of RAM, but it’s not the one that will arrive at Verizon.
A number of sensors give the ZenFone AR the capacity to track motion, determine depth perception and area learning. The 5.7-inch WQHD display makes it suitable for VR, while the phone also comes with enhancements for the 3D effect on the screen.
ZenFone AR comes with three rear cameras for motion tracking and depth perception, one of which is a 23MP Sony IMX318 sensor. The depth sensing camera has an infrared projector for measuring the distance to objects. Battery capacity is 3,300mAh. The ZenFone AR isn’t the first smartphone with incorporated Tango technology, as the Lenovo Phab Pro 2 which arrived last year also has this feature.