The Taiwanese electronics company has let the ZenFone 2 storm run long enough. After releasing five different versions in Malaysia and spinning-off too many devices under the ZenFone name to count. Their flagship smartphone has been on the market for a year already and these benchmarks imply that we’re going to see a new generation of ZenFones pretty soon.
Labelled ASUS Z010DD and Z012D, it seems like two versions with different specs went through GFXBench recently. Surprisingly, both seem to be carrying Qualcomm chipsets – indicating that the manufacturer may ditch Intel SoCs that they have dearly utilised in the past.
In the past, ASUS used the model numbers Z008 and Z00AD on their ZenFone 2s and the current numbers shown aren’t that far off to assume they represent their upcoming smartphones.
Out of the two model numbers, the one that appears to have better specs is the Z012D. The device in question is listed with a 5.5-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) display and a Hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 processor (clocked to 1.7GHz). Based on the benchmark, it’ll have Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage.
For the lower-spec Z010DD, it also runs Android Marshmallow but only has an HD (1280 x 720) screen that oddly is bigger at 5.9-inches. It’ll run an Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset clocked at 1.5GHz mated to 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage.
Surprisingly, the listing for Z010DD has camera-specifications. There will be a 12-megapixel shooter on the rear and a 5-megapixel sensor on the front.
ASUS is likely to pursue more Qualcomm chipsets due to their battery-life woes. This switch might help and users should welcome this news with open arms.
We won’t know for sure where these two devices will sit in ASUS’ lineup and there’s a possibility that both of these are the lower end models not a part of the ZenFone 3 series. Only one thing will be for sure, they’ll release a dozen phones with the same name.
