The first phone with support for Google’s Tango augmented reality platform, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, was not well received when reviewers got their hands on it last week. Asus is hoping its ZenFone AR handset can shine a brighter light on the Tango technology that lets users scan and interact with their physical environment directly from their phones. The ZenFone AR also supports Google’s Daydream mobile virtual reality platform and is the first smartphone with 8GB of system memory, as far as we know.
The phone is powered is powered by Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 821 SoC. The 5.7″ Super AMOLED screen has a resolution of 2560×1440, which works out to a pixel density of 551 PPI. Asus says the ZenFone AR has a five-magnet speaker system, though we are not entirely certain how many speakers that represents. The operating system is Android 7.0 «Nougat» .
The Tango features in the phone use what Asus dubs a «TriCam» system consisting of a 23MP camera, a motion-tracking camera, and a depth-sensing camera. The company says the layout of its camera cluster allows for a slimmer profile compared to other Tango-enabled devices. The phone joins the small but growing ranks of phones compatible with Google’s Daydream mobile VR platform first announced at Google’s hardware conference back in October.<\/p>\n