Asus ZenFone Lite (L1) ZA551KL

ZenFone Lite looks similar to its brother, ZenFone Max, sharing much of the design features. Priced at Rs. 5,999, it is a low-range phone looking to pierce the budget market captured by the likes of Xiaomi.

ZenFone Lite is quite an average phone. It does not have a great processor, nor does it come with a good camera. There is no saving grace in the handset, making it a poor recommendation even for a budget user.

Asus ZenFone Lite is a plastic build which is quite average and looks cheap. However, it is quite light at 140g. The phone is easy to hold, and the corners of the display can be reached without stretching the fingers too much. It has thick bezels and does not have the 2.5D curved glass that ZenFone Max arrives with. The distinction between the ZenFone Lite and the ZenFone Max could be also be spotted when you flip it over. The ZenFone Lite does not come with a fingerprint scanner, unlike the ZenFone Max. The back of ZenFone Lite is quite minimalist with just a single camera, flash and the Asus logo in the centre. It comes with the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack placed on the top and the Micro-USB and loudspeaker placed at the bottom.

ZenFone Lite has a 5.45-inch screen with an 18:9 aspect ratio. It comes with an HD+ resolution and the 18:9 aspect ratio helps to give an immersive experience. The display is quite bright, and the colour accuracy is satisfactory. The phone has decent viewing angles, and so if you tilt the phone, there is little dimming of the display. However, the screen does have bezels which limit the screen space. On the whole, considering the price, the phone has a capable display.

Asus ZenFone Lite has a dated Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 which is the same as ZenFone Max M1. It is an octa-core chipset, with all the cores running at 1.4Ghz. Plus, it is partnered with a 2GB RAM which is quite small for the market. Redmi 6A is the direct competitor of ZenFone Lite and it sports are more recent MediaTek Helio A22 processor. Benchmark tests put ZenFone Lite’s performance at 55,690 points which is quite low from Xiaomi Redmi 6A score of 61,053 points. As a result, games like PUBG takes time to load and can only run appropriately at low settings. The display is slow, and there can be stutters during gameplay. The battery also drains at a high rate. Apps running in the background can result in a slow-down. ZenFone Max M1, despite having the same chipset, performs better due to better RAM.

ZenFone Lite has a 13MP rear camera which is similar to ZenFone Max. The photos captured with the ZenFone Lite is average. Landscapes shots might appear decent, but there is a fine grain when the shots are zoomed in. During macros, the phone failed to detect and lock on a subject, decreasing the photo quality. HDR can be used for shooting bright scenes, and it does improve the quality making it decent, though not as good as ZenFone Max. In low light, the camera performance drops further. It fails to focus, capture little details, and the images turn out to be quite noisy. While the app tries to reduce the noise, it is very aggressive resulting in a filter-like effect in the output.

Selfies taken by the Zenfone MP selfie camera is decent for the price. It is handy when it comes to dark environments due to the selfie flash and can produce decent pictures which can be used for social media. Portrait mode is present in both primary and selfie camera but the edge detection is not good, and the blur effect is too aggressive making the photos appear artificial.

While Video recording is maxed out at 1080p, there is no stabilisation, and so you could expect jerky video footage. Videos taken with the ZenFone Lite L1 are average at best.

ZenFone Lite comes with a 3000mAh non-removable battery, which is quite decent for the screen. An HD video loop test found the ZenFone Lite L1 could last for 9 hours 10 minutes which is quite less than ZenFone Max M1 since ZenFone Max M1 comes with a hefty 5,000 mAh battery. However, the phone was capable of staying alive through the day with moderate use like playing games and using WhatsApp.

The Asus ZenFone Lite is quite a dated phone with an old Snapdragon chipset paired with a poor RAM that bottlenecks the performance of the phone. The display is good, but not exceptional, and the cameras turn out to be disappointing. Looks-wise, ZenFone Lite looks similar toe ZenFone Max. All in all, there is no specific aspect of the phone that stands out. The flagship rival of this phone, Redmi 6A is a much better handset due to its decent and new processor, though if you can put in more money, ZenFone Max M1 and Realme C1 are reasonable choices.