The Asus ZenFone 2 has officially rolled out in its home market in Taiwan in the middle of March. A few weeks later, it has already made it to other key Asian markets like China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
It is expected to make it to France anytime soon while it is to be launched on the retail market in India in the last week of April. Initial reports have it that the Asus ZenFone 2 will also get to the Brazilian retail market in June.
There is still no specific roll out dates for the other global retail markets but the flagship smartphone from the Taiwanese tech company is expected to make a splash in each one of them.
Although Asus ZenFone 2 has yet to complete its global retail market rollout, the Taiwanese company is already talking about its successor, the Asus ZenFone 3 this early. The third edition of the highly-acclaimed and widely-praised ZenFone will most likely make it to the market next year still.
Fingerprint recognition technology
In a recent interview with a Chinese newspaper, Asus CEO Jerry Shen said that the Asus ZenFone 3 will feature the company’s fingerprint recognition technology. That was the only thing that Shen said about the company’s next generation flagship smartphone.
However, realizing that the revelation has sort of put a damper on the Asus ZenFone 2, Shen also announced that the Taiwanese tech company is planning to introduce a refreshed version of their latest flagship smartphone in the second half of this year that already has the fingerprint sensor feature on it.
Either way, the statement from Shen has compromised the Asus ZenFone 2 as it was just starting to be rolled out in some retail markets. There is a chance now that prospective buyers of the Asus ZenFone 2 would decide on waiting it out for the refreshed version of the smartphone since it already has the add-on fingerprint recognition technology.
The fingerprint sensor is to be one of the edges of the Asus ZenFone 2 and ZenFone 3 on some of its flagship smartphone competitors although the big smartphone makers like Samsung and Apple already have such feature in their latest mobile devices.
Several variants
The Asus ZenFone 2 that rolled out in Taiwan two weeks ago had two major variants with the base 5-inch model, considered as the entry-level variant, coming out with a very affordable price of $158. It is powered by a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom processor.
However, the higher version featuring a 5.5-inch display with 1080-pixel resolution, a 4GB RAM and a 32GB storage came out with a remarkable price of $285.
It is expected that the prices of the Asus ZenFone 2 will increase a bit higher when it more or less completes its global roll out, particularly in the western markets where it seems to have established its own niche among smartphone users.
The Taiwanese tech company is also reportedly planning to release a much higher 64GB version of the Asus ZenFone 2 which it intends to launch during its rollout to the western markets.
Asus has already featured the 64GB variant in its website and the Taiwanese company has also released a video of the Asus ZenFone 2 which has all the trimmings of another blockbuster smartphone.