Asus Zenfone 3 Deluxe with Snapdragon 821 Launches in Taiwan

Last month, we got to know that Qualcomm is releasing Snapdragon 821 and the ASUS ZenFone 3 was the world's first Snapdragon 821-powered smartphone to make it to the market. The model is now on sale in ASUS' homeland of Taiwan at the rather fortuitous price of near $800 (5320 Yuan). The ZenFone 3 Deluxe is sold in Silver and Gold finishes, and while the former will ship September 12, the latter is scheduled for September 23.

Interestingly, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe was also the first handset to be announced sporting Qualcomm's upgraded flagship silicon. This happened over two months ago, and in that time, no other manufacturer stepped forth to announce a competing handset and take advantage of ASUS's slow, but deliberate pace.

The processor is just one of the things that makes the phone stand out. In addition to Qualcomm’s 2.4 GHz quad-core processor, the top-tier version of the Zenfone 3 Deluxe has features that include:

• 5.7 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel SUper AMOLED display
• 6GB of RAM
• 256GB of storage
• microSDXC card slot for up to 2TB of removable storage
• 3,000 mAh battery with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 support (60 percent charge in 39 minutes)
• USB Type-C
• 23MP rear and 8MP front cameras
• 24-bit/192 kHz audio
• 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, dual SIM 4G LTE support (one SIM card slot is also the microSDXC card slot)

The phone also has a fingerprint sensor and IR port. One odd thing about this premium phone? It has a mono speaker.

Rated as around 10% more powerful than the Snapdragon 820, the 821 sees the original chipset's clock frequencies bumped up to 2.34 GHz and 2.19 GHz for each of the two pairs of cores (up from 2.15GHz and 1.59 GHz, respectively). The GPU is also clocked faster – 653MHz against 624MHz in the original. On paper, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe is most powerful Android smartphone currently available – it will be so for a while.
Source : Best Buy | B&H Video | NewEgg