 The Asus Zenfone AR phone is the AR phone that you've been waiting for for about six months now. Except it's already almost obsolete. This is the Asus Zenfone AR. It looks like a lot of other Android phablets out there right now except it's a little bit different. It's called the Zenfone AR because it supports Google's Tango AR platform, which means it has special software and special hardware built right into it that lets you experience advanced AR right through the frame of your phone. There's only one other Google Tango phone out there on the market right now and it's the Lenovo Fab 2 Pro, which you might remember I reviewed late last year and you might also remember it because it is ginormous. Asus meanwhile has managed to cram all the capabilities of Tango along with Google Daydream, which is VR, into this pretty normal looking phone. But considering this cost between $600 and $700 depending on the configuration that you get, it actually gets edged out by other Android phones in the same price range and I would say that the AR and the VR aren't totally realized yet. It has a 5.7 inch display. It's a nice bright AMOLED display. It doesn't have the curved edges that a lot of higher-end phones are starting to have but it's still for all intents and purposes a pretty nice display. The phone has aluminum sides. It has this faux leather back to it. In general I'd say it's a pretty luxurious looking phone except when it comes to this plate back here. This is a necessary evil because this is where all of the Tango sensors live but it's an eyesore let's be honest and just after a couple days of using it it already started to get scuffed and scratched at the top here. It's a nice thin phone. It's not quite as thin as the Samsung Galaxy S8 which is kind of a standard in this category but once again relative to the Lenovo Fab 2 Pro I'll give Asus bonus points. It charges via USB-C. There's a fingerprint sensor built into the physical home button and yay this phone has a headphone jack. It ships with Android Nougat and runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor and an Adreno 530 graphics chip. With regards to the processor it's a step up from the Lenovo Fab 2 Pro but it's still not the best mobile processor you can get but it does ship with either 6 gigabytes or a whopping 8 gigabytes of RAM and you're gonna need all that power because of Tango and Daydream. To back it up a little bit Tango is Google's AR platform and Daydream is its VR platform and very few devices out there run both and this one does so this is what's supposed to make this phone special. Let's talk about Tango AR apps first. We've seen some of these before and in a lot of ways they haven't changed much. I do think that the performance of some of these apps was better on this phone but I ended up running a lot of the same applications. There are some games, some educational apps but a lot of them are just about measuring the space around you or trying out furniture in your home and seeing how it would work or in some cases maybe trying on clothes in AR and seeing how they might look but there's a strong sort of commerce angle to a lot of these you know buy me essentially. I didn't have a lot of experiences where I felt that the AR apps worked their way naturally into my daily workflow it was more just me playing around with AR apps. Daydream on the other hand is a dedicated VR experience. You're going to have to have the Daydream headset and you're gonna have to strap this thing to your face in order to experience apps in 360 degrees and there were still some quirks using Daydream as well. I mean for example it comes with a little handheld controller but there were still times I found myself having to take the phone out of the headset to navigate something in the Daydream app to do the thing I wanted to do because for whatever reason the controller wasn't working or the interface wasn't super intuitive but you can see where this is all going. I mean right now if you want a really good VR experience for the most part you have to be tethered to a PC. This is a fully mobile experience and you're getting kind of cool applications for 360 degree video so I would almost say even though this phone is called the AR phone that Daydream VR ended up being more of a draw for me. But not surprisingly all of that AR and VR activity is going to do a number on your battery life. This phone has a 3300 milliamp battery which in theory should get you through the day but definitely not if you're using Tango and Daydream. On the upside the camera is pretty great. It's got a 23 megapixel rear-facing camera, it captures video in 4k, it focuses quickly, did pretty well for me in low-light and it has an 8 megapixel front-facing camera so that's one of the upsides. But another downside it's not water resistant. But back to the AR and the VR. Here's my advice to you. Don't buy it because of the AR. I mean yes it's cool that there's now another Tango phone out on the market finally and that it has both AR and VR capabilities built into it and that's great but AR is about to become a lot more mainstream and a lot more accessible to people and I know we've been hearing this for a while but it's really happening now and that's partly because Apple is rolling out something called AR Kit which is going to make advanced AR possible on regular iPhones without all of these sensors and I wouldn't be surprised if other companies started making AR that much more accessible as well. So it's a cool phone, buy it for the phone, don't buy it for the AR. But if you've been using AR and VR all day and you expect to be able to take a photo of the eclipse and blind yourself later you are gonna be out of luck because this drains your battery like no other. Forget about it. I'm just kidding. Moving on.