 So there's this hilarious typo in Asus's PR materials for the Zenfone 2 that I think perfectly captures my biggest gripe with this product. I'm sorry, available for purchase when? Yes, the most annoying thing about the Zenfone 2 was the fact that it took so very long for Asus to deliver the $200 smartphone that they showed off at CES this year. But is the delay a big deal? Has the competitive landscape really changed so much in three months that it's significantly less market-shaking? I guess we'll find out. Strap in, folks. The Corsair HX1200i power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet, efficient power and Corsair Link Digital for advanced monitoring and control. Click right here to learn more. Oh Asus, I love those guys dearly, but they really are a PC company at heart, and it really shows through sometimes. The Zenfone 2 actually comes in two flavors, a 16GB storage version with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM and an Atom Z3560 for $200, and a 64GB storage version with 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM and an Atom Z3580 for $300. I mean, RAM and storage we've seen before, but changing out the CPU? Who does that with phones? Anyway, other than those core speeds and feeds, both models of the phone are the same. Starting at the front, we've got a 5MP selfie camera, a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS display covered in Gorilla Glass 3, fixed off-screen buttons above a circular finished metal chin, then around the bottom a micro USB port and microphone, on the sides a whole lot of nothing, at the top a second mic for noise cancellation, a 3.5mm audio jack, and the quite disappointing lock button. The position makes it kind of hard to press without really mushing the phone into your finger, and the tactile response is marshmallow-like to put it kindly. Around the back we've got a two-tone flash next to the 13MP rear camera, volume up and down buttons that can also be used for the camera shutter, and a rear-facing speaker that I would describe as... functional. But it's under the brushed finished plastic backing where things actually start to get pretty interesting. Micro SD expansion is one feature that's been trending towards extinction in the industry, but ASUS has gone ahead and included, and dual micro SIM slots, something pretty uncommon here in North America, are also present back here. Very nice. Oh, and we can't really show this, but if you were to dig in further you'd find wireless AC and LTE chipsets, as well as the Soryeux Not User Replaceable, and it doesn't charge wirelessly, but it does support Qualcomm Quick Charge 3000mAh battery. So those are some pretty impressive specs, am I right? But what's it like to actually hold the thing? Well, the screen isn't the best or brightest IPS display I've ever seen, and I'm not a huge fan of the 5.5 inch form factor, but I've got to give it to ASUS. It handles pretty well. Their reviewers guide, however one-sided its representation of the facts might be, makes a point that I've made multiple times about the awkwardness of a flat-backed versus a curved-backed device. And other than that, physically, wow, I guess there's really not much to say. It's a PHONE, depending on who it is you ask. So let's talk the make or break of any Android device. The Android 5 lollipop-based ZenUI skin. And this is going to be a tough one here, folks, because ZenUI does some things very right, and some things very wrong, and some in between. So let's start with the former. Responsiveness is solid, although it should be, given that the Zenfone 2's Atom CPU performs similarly to a Snapdragon 801, according to this Tom's article. Quick settings are customizable and available for pretty much any phone setting you could possibly want, and on the subject of settings, there is some fan-diddly-tastic stuff buried in the settings menu. Separate user profiles, including a kid mode that allows time limits and locks down certain apps. Some super smart do-not-disturb settings, like ignoring a call from someone the first time, then accepting it the second, since it's presumably urgent. Automatic phone call recording, although you'll want to check on the legality of this in your area before activating it. The auto-start manager that lets you force apps to wait for your permission to launch and do anything in the background. Customizable gestures, like double tap to wake and sleep. And double volume tap to wake to camera, and even the ability to tweak the saturation and color temperature of your display, or save your screenshots as a PNG instead of a JPEG, I mean, who even thinks of that? But for every yin there is a yang, for every up there is a down, and for all the positive things I found about ZenUI, there were definitely some others that irked me. First up, in real talktime, Asus, what is up with the incredible number of pre-installed apps? Some of them, like Flashlight, I guess we need, but everyone else just does this through the quick toggle directly, so I don't get why it needs to launch an app on the Zenphone 2. And some of these things are just inexcusable, what the chuffing hell is ZenCircle? Are you a social network company now, Asus? Why is the fact that it comes with trend micro-nonsense on it considered a selling point in the reviewer's guide? Even Samsung has finally figured this out, if a feature is useless to 99% of your users, make it an optional download, don't pack your device full of junk that nobody cares about. Which leads to complaint number 2, the overall polish. The Asus launcher wasn't configured with notification access by default, causing my lock screen to never display my new alerts. The app that lets you use your phone on the desktop, actually super handy, very cool, but also kind of janky. The phone actually locked up outright twice on me during the time I was using it, including a startling full power off while I was writing an email with 15% battery showing on the meter, and then when I went to turn it back on, it told me the battery was dead. And on the subject of battery life, I've confirmed with Asus that I'm running the latest firmware, but I haven't been able to get past 8pm without topping up the battery. Now, in their defense, I am a bit of a power user, all the radio's on, all the time is my policy, I got like smartwatches and stuff, but with a 3000mAh battery capacity, I should be easily making it through the day, so I suspect software. Whether it's one of my usual apps that disagrees with ZenUI, or some of the stupid bloat that Asus preloaded, I think there's something stealthily draining battery in the background, but unfortunately my usual battery meter apps are not picking up on it, so I'll try and post in the video description when and if I figure out what it is. Which leads to the other make or break smartphone feature these days, the camera. I'm torn on this one too, on the one hand, the manual mode is great for camera geeks, and using the super resolution like multi-exposure merging mode, and the low light 4 pixels acting as one for higher sensitivity modes, result in some shockingly good photos, albeit with a higher processing time cost, and or a lower resolution cost in both ideally lit and poorly lit situations. On the other hand, while the Toshiba sensor behind the F2.0 lens might be okay, it's not very feature rich with a max video resolution of 1080p and no slow-mo support whatsoever, it lacks optical image stabilization, the camera launches quite slowly, and the auto photo mode, the one most people will usually use, is just not very good, with smeary noise reduction processing artifacts eliminating a lot of the detail. From even photos that are taken under pretty good conditions. But, this is a $200 smartphone off contract for the base model, and even for the $300 one, you get more than a token increase in storage, with CPU and RAM upgrades being thrown in, along with a quadrupling of your storage. Not to mention that Asus has committed to allowing bootloader unlocking, and the thing even includes a quick charger, something HTC couldn't be bothered to do on a smartphone that costs over twice as much. So here's the conclusion. While it's not perfect, at the price. The bottom line is Asus, you're going to have a lot of **** to clean up when the Zenfone 2 is done kicking all the **** it's going to kick out there in the market, and you can quote that on the box if you want to. Speaking of kicking a lot of ****, Crunchyroll is the site created by anime fans, for anime fans. They offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan, like Kuroko's Basketball 3, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and a large collection of the most popular anime series like Naruto and One Piece. With the bonus being that all the content is professionally subtitled. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus, and sign up for a 30 day trial of Crunchyroll Premium. So that's completely ad free, you get 1080p streaming, you get new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and you're able to stream anytime, anywhere on a variety of devices like your phone, tablet, game console, Roku, whatever the case may be. And if you decide you like it, continue your Premium membership for only 7 bucks a month. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus, and check them out. So I think that pretty much wraps it up. Guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this, preferably on our forum, which is linked in the video description, also linked in the video description. A place to buy a cool t-shirt like this one, a place to give us a monthly contribution, and a place to change your Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate codes. Whenever you buy phones or watches or whatever it is you buy on Amazon, we get a small kickback. That helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe.