14 DAY TRIAL // ASUS unveiled the ZenFone 2 flagship back at CES 2015, but it took the Taiwanese device maker a few months to actually start offering the handset to customers.
The phone is a pretty impressive piece of gadgetry and is actually the first to arrive in the wild with 4GB of RAM. But even as the new handset is barely reaching some territories, word of the next-gen ZenFone flagship has already surfaced online.
Speaking with Yuga Tech during the regional launch of the ZenFone 2 in Jakarta, Indonesia, ASUS’ Chief Executive Officer Jerry Shen revealed some key aspects regarding the company’s flagship strategy.
We know that the current ZenFone 2 is powered by a quad-core Intel Atom Z3580 processor clocked at 2GHz, which is complemented by a PowerVR G6430 graphics processing unit.
ASUS will drop Intel for Qualcomm
As it turns out, come next year, ASUS is going to ditch the services of Intel and use a Qualcomm silicone piece for its purposes. But it’s not going to be the Snapdragon 810 or the Snapdragon 820. According to Shen, ASUS’ next-gen ZenFone will be drawing power from the mid-range octa-core Snapdragon 615 instead.
He also mentions that ASUS smartphones will follow a naming convention similar to that of Apple, which means the company’s upcoming flagship will most likely be called ZenFone 3. Last but not least, we’re also told that ASUS plans to release a flagship every year, with incremental updates in between.
So the ZenFone 3 will probably come at CES 2016, although the Snapdragon 615 might prove to be an outdated choice until then.
This isn't the first time we’re hearing about the ASUS ZenFone 3 though. Last month, word surfaced online that ASUS was planning to follow the footsteps of other notable handset makers and add fingerprint recognition technology inside its device.
The current hearsay claims ASUS will have some sort of biometric scanning technology embedded into the phone, although details about the matter are pretty sketchy at the moment.
For example, we don’t know if the scanner will be placed on the back or on the front, and whether it will resemble anything we see on the Samsung Galaxy S6 or iPhone 6. Only time will tell.