The IT Nerd

I reviewed a bunch of phones this year, but the ASUS ZenFone 4 Pro stood out to me because of the camera. I took it into an environment where it had to deal with a variety of lighting conditions which was the new Line 1 extension of the Toronto Subway System. And it passed that test with ease. That’s important because every phone these days is fast and capable. So it has to have something that makes it stand out from the pack. ASUS has it in the form of the camera. It’s a total winner if you want a flagship phone with a great camera. To add to that is battery life of close to two days. All for a sub $900 price tag unlocked. This makes the ZenFone 4 Pro a worthy winner of the IT Nerd Award for best smartphone of 2017.

I’ve reviewed a number of ASUS phones over the years. But the ZenFone 4 Pro has to be their best effort. It mostly ticks of the boxes on what a flagship phone should be. Thus it is worthy or your consideration. Here’s why.

Before I get to the phone. Let me talk about the box. When you open the box, you don’t see anything but a bunch of boxes inside. The phone actually folds out in another compartment. Which is a rather cool way to package it. The box itself is magnetically closed. I have to admit that this was one of the cooler unboxing experiences that I’ve lately.

ASUS has put a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 resolution AMOLED display on the ZenFone 4 Pro, which gives it a pixel density of 401 ppi. It is covered in Gorilla Glass 5 for protection. Here’s the catch, With the fingerprint sensor on the bottom, and two big bezels on the top and bottom, my first thought was that this was an iPhone clone. ASUS may want to go with an edge to edge display for their next phone just to avoid that comparison. But in any case, it looks very good and is visible in most lighting conditions that I used it in.

Under the hood, ASUS has this on offer:

• 8 core CPU
• 6GB RAM
• 64GB Of Storage
• Dual SIM capability, or use the second SIM slot to expand the memory.
• Android Nougat
• USB-C
• 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
• Bluetooth 5.0
• NFC
• 4G LTE
• Headphone jack

The phone itself feels solid. But it’s a full-glass smartphone with some metal on the frame. That means that if you drop it, you risk cracking the glass. Let’s face it, glass is slippery and fragile, which are definitely two things you usually don’t want in a smartphone. But tell that to everyone buying an iPhone X. Regardless a case is mandatory as it is an all glass phone. Having said that, it wasn’t the fingerprint magnet that I was expecting it to be. The volume rocker and power button on the right side of the phone, with the USB-C port, 3.5mm headphone jack, and speaker at the bottom. The left side houses the SIM and microSD card slot/second SIM slot. The phone is fast and didn’t bog down regardless of what I tossed at it. The skin that ASUS uses won’t annoy users. Plus the included software adds value to the ZenPhone 4 Pro rather subtract from it.

But the real star of the show is the camera. The rear camera is a dual camera setup which features a 12-megapixel main sensor and then a 16-megapixel secondary, telephoto sensor. That’s kind of different as you usually don’t see that kind of setup. It worked well when I tested it by going to the brand new Line 1 extension of the Toronto Subway System. The extension comprises six new stations and is the first extension of Toronto’s subway system in 15 years. Here’s a look at the six new stations which comprised a variety of lighting conditions:

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The camera of the ZenFone 4 Pro is insanely good. The autofocus is fast and the camera recycles quickly. If you want a great camera, this is it. It’s easily competitive with anything else that is out there. One note, you can run it in auto mode, or put it in pro mode so that you can control every aspect of the camera’s function. It also has a portrait mode that I tested by by taking a couple of pictures of a strap on a subway train. One has portrait mode, the other doesn’t:

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Video functions are just as good as it will do up to 4K resolution. Take this example which for best results, you should set to full screen and 4K:

For what it’s worth, The front facing camera is a 8-megapixel shooter. Regardless, the camera setup front and back really rocks.

Finally, the battery on the ZenFone 4 Pro is pretty impressive. There is a 3600mAh battery pack inside. That gave me almost two days of battery life. Thus if I can’t drain it in a business day, neither will you.

The ASUS ZenFone 4 Pro goes for $899 CAD unlocked. It’s easily the best phone that ASUS has made to date. And given all that it has, especially on the camera front, I say that this easily should be on your list if you’re in the market for a new phone.

I will say right up front that if you want the best performing router possible, the router that you are about to read about is the one to get. And that router is the ASUS ROG Rapture AC5300. I’ll get the elephant in the room out of the way and address the looks:

Now it looks like the RT-5300 that I tested last year with an ROG logo added onto it. Thus that means that like the RT-5300 it takes up a lot of real estate and looks like something out of a Transformers movie. Which means it will be polarizing to potential buyers. But besides that and one other piece of criticism that I will share later, this review will be overwhelmingly positive. Starting with this:

The front panel is pretty low key and doesn’t attract that much attention. Which given the overall looks of the router is kind of surprising.

There are three buttons on the side that turn off the front panel LEDs, allows you to use WPS to pair devices to the router, or a button that kills WiFi entirely which would be handy for parents who want to get their kids to bed. But here’s one of the reasons why this router is extremely cool:

There are EIGHT gigabit Ethernet ports on this thing (compared to the four that come with the RT-5300). The first two you can set up to have priority over all other ports, or you can bond them together to get 2 gigabits of throughput. Only a handful of routers have this many ports and your next LAN party will benefit from that. The two USB ports that you see are USB 3.0 which again is a rarity. You can use them for storage like USB hard drives or even for an 4G Internet dongle.

Another reason why this router is cool is what is under the hood:

• 1.8GHz Quad-Core Processor

• One 2.4GHz 1000 Mbps band

• Two 5GHz 2167 Mbps band

• 256 MB Flash

• 1024 MB RAM

• MIMO support

All of this conspires to make this one fast router. How fast? I have gigabit Internet access at home and it’s predecessor which was the Linksys WRT32X only managed to get a top speed of 798 Mbps over 802.11ac WiFi when I was five feet from the router. Now that’s nothing to sneeze at. But the ROG Rapture AC5300 beat that with a average speed 841 Mbps which is the fastest 802.11ac score that I have ever seen. Plus, it’s range is impressive. I was able to get a decent quality signal in areas of my condo where most routers struggle to get to. On top of that, throwing every device at this router from my Roku to my security cameras to all the computers didn’t slow things down all that much, if at all. YouTube, Netflix, whatever I threw at it worked without stuttering or buffering.

But things don’t stop there. Unlike the aforementioned WRT32X which to some degree relies on you having networking hardware from Killer to get the best performance, the ROG Rapture does this without that reliance in three ways:

• Game Boost: This is a a quality of service (QoS) system for prioritising gaming traffic.
• Game Radar: This provides server locations and ping status for a number of different game servers, allowing you to see which is the best to connect to so that you can get the best performance.
• WTFast: This is a worldwide game network service that aims to optimize your connection to game servers. Usually you install their software on your PC. But because the router has this feature, everything on your network can leverage this.

On top of all that you get the protection of Game IPS which is powered by Trend Micro. It can stop external attacks from reaching into your network. That way you don’t get pwned by hackers while pwning your competition. And from my testing, I didn’t notice any slowdown in terms of playing any online game while using it.

Gripes? The only gripe that I have is the user interface. While the router is insanely easy to configure via one of the best wizards that I’ve seen in a router lately, once it’s configured, all the options that the user interface presents to you can be daunting. Though all those same options allow you to tweak this router to death. The only people who are going to love this user interface are nerds like me, control enthusiasts, and gamers. Joe Average user however will be heavily intimidated by this user interface. But then, this isn’t the router that Joe Average will be buying. Although they should be for reasons that I will get to in a moment.

Now all of this doesn’t come cheap. The ASUS ROG Rapture AC5300 is $500 CDN which makes it expensive. But, here’s why you want to spend $500 for one:

1. It’s fast for everyone.
2. It’s highly secure.
3. You can plug lots of devices into it.
4. It’s highly configurable.

Quite simply, this is currently the best performing router that money can buy. Some would argue that this router is complete overkill for most people. I would disagree. Given the four points above, I would say that it is the best value out there when it comes to routers that are designed for performance. If you have a house that has lots of devices with a thirst for data, this is the router that has to be at the top of your list.