Asus Zenfone Selfie review: Vanity light

Capable gallery with MiniMovie and collages

The Asus Zenfone Selfie comes with a custom Gallery app. It defaults to a view of your folders and the camera roll is highlighted over the top. The Gallery also supports events and people views, plus it can display images from various cloud services including ASUS, Omlet, Facebook, OneDrive, Google Drive, Google+ and Flickr.

Standard gallery views

You get the Asus MiniMovie app, which lets you select a bunch of images and turns them into a short video of sorts, with music, transitions and the lot, which you can customize, of course. A handy collage feature is also on board, and it's pretty comprehensive, with a host of aspect ratios, templates and backgrounds. Asus has upped the maximum resolution to 2,560 x 2,560 which is now usable for a bit more than social-media sharing.

Collage feature • MiniMovie

The available features when viewing a single image are pretty standard - set image as wallpaper/contact image, share it, delete it, enter edit mode or just get more info. You also get quick shortcuts for rotation and additional information. The integrated editor offers various effects, frames, tools (crop, mirror, straighten, rotate, fisheye, doodle) plus light adjustments that let you bring out the shadows or the highlights.

Editing an image

The Zenfone Selfie's video player is part of the Gallery, there isn't a dedicated app. There are no premium features or particularly striking video decoder support. Its interface is very simple, too - just a playback scrubber and a play/pause button, alongside a sharing button at the top. The most advanced feature is picking up playback from where you left off the previous time.

The player has severely limited codec support and refuses to play most formats. WMV, DivX and MOV files don't start at all, some XviD and x264 files play fine - others don't, AC3 audio is a no-go.

Poor video player

Capable music player

The Asus music player does decently in terms of functionality, covering all the basics. The interface features the usual set of panes for artists, songs, and genres, music stored on various cloud services can be pulled as well, different color themes can be applied to the interface, too.

Music player

There's a large Now Playing window with prominent album art, and also has integrated bass boost and surround sound options, although both of those only work with headphones. An equalizer is also available with multiple presets and a single custom setting. That's in addition to the system-wide AudioWizard sound enhancement software.

Now playing interface • controls in notification area and lockscreen • AudioWizard

FM Radio with RDS

A useful FM radio app is available on the Zenfone Selfie. The search function automatically stores all available stations. It has RDS and can retrieve the stations' names. You can set up to 5 favorite stations but they are displayed with their respective frequency, instead of the names.

FM radio app

Impressively clean audio output

The Asus Zenfone Selfie did a great job when connected to an active external amplifier. The scores it got were excellent top to bottom and it matched them with above average volume for one of the better performances across all phones, let alone mid-rangers.

Plugging in a pair of headphones causes very little harm - with the stereo crosstalk taking a very minor hit and the other readings remaining just as great. The loudness drops a bit too, but it's still a solid showing that would put much more expensive phones to shame.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response, dB	Noise level, dBA	Dynamic range, dBA	THD, %	IMD + Noise, %	Stereo crosstalk, dB
Asus Zenfone Selfie	+0.02, -0.09	-92.1	92.0	0.0030	0.011	-92.5
Asus Zenfone Selfie (headphones attached)	+0.08, -0.02	-91.9	91.9	0.0032	0.034	-72.4
Sony Xperia C5 Ultra	+0.17, -0.02	-92.1	93.5	0.0088	0.013	-88.7
Sony Xperia C5 Ultra (headphones attached)	+0.80, -0.03	-92.3	93.2	0.010	0.416	-60.8
HTC Desire Eye	+0.02, -0.10	-95.6	95.1	0.0012	0.015	-91.3
HTC Desire Eye (headphones attached)	+0.08, -0.04	-95.3	93.8	0.0035	0.016	-72.2
Oppo N3	+0.03, -0.14	-93.2	93.2	0.0036	0.058	-93.7
Oppo N3 (headphones attached)	+0.45, -0.10	-93.6	92.3	0.021	0.385	-53.4

Asus Zenfone Selfie frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.