Asus Zenfone Selfie’s two 13MP cameras rival HTC Desire Eye

Asus is taking on the HTC Desire Eye with its brand-new Zenfone Selfie smartphone. Announced today at Computex 2015, the phone will have two 13-megapixel sensors with a dual colour, dual LED Real Tone flash. The rear camera will also have a f/2.0 aperture lens and laser autofocus technology to help improve low-light shots, while the front camera will have a f/2.2 aperture lens and 88-degree field of view for 140-degree selfie panoramas. 

The Zenphone Selfie will also have a 5.5in screen with a 1,920×1,080 resolution, but Asus says it should feel more like a 5in phone in the hand thanks to its compact chassis. With a pixel density of 401ppi, the Zenphone Selfie won’t be quite as sharp as the Desire Eye, which has a pixel density of 424ppi, but the large screen should provide plenty of room for tweaking your photos onscreen. The display also uses Asus’s TruVivid technology to help make images appear more vibrant, and it has tough Corning Gorilla Glass 4 to help protect it from scratches and accidental drops. 

Of course, no selfie phone is complete without the inevitable Beauty filter, and Asus’s ZenUI Beautification mode lets you soften facial features, slim down cheeks and enhance your skin tone in real-time. Combined with its new aforementioned Selfie Panorama mode, this should make the Zenphone Selfie much more flexible than HTC’s outgoing rival. 

Powered by a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor – made up of a quad-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex A53 and quad-core 1.0GHz A53 chips – the Zenphone Selfie should have plenty of speed. Asus has yet to announce how much RAM it has or the size of the battery, but we should hopefully see pretty decent battery scores thanks to the processor’s big.LITTLE architecture. This should help keep power consumption to a minimum, as the processor will switch between the four faster cores for high-performance tasks and the four slower cores for low intensity tasks.

Asus didn’t announce a price or release date for the Zenphone Selfie either, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for UK details in the coming weeks.