Newsletter
The ASUS Zenfone 5z Android flagship is expected to debut in the U.S. soon and is already listed on the company’s official website. The listing also mentions a starting price for the device, which isn’t exactly in the neighborhood of its pricing seen in other markets where the high-end phone already debuted. The webpage dedicated to the handset has gone live prior to an official announcement along with a price tag of $1,999, nearly four times larger than the handset’s European pricing. The Taiwanese company introduced its latest flagship in Europe a couple of weeks back with a starting price of €500 (~$580) for its base variant with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, making it the lowest-priced smartphone in the region to sport a Snapdragon 845 chipset.
Mentioning a significantly higher price on its official website could be one of ASUS’s marketing tricks, or it could simply be a plain typo or an oversight on the company’s part. Either way, the absurdly high price tag of $1,999 will most certainly not end up as the phone’s retail price, with the company possibly already working to fix the listing. Having said that, the Zenfone 5z was introduced at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February as the company’s most premium Android smartphone offering for 2018. Since then, it has been released in Europe and Japan, with its debut in India being scheduled for next week.
The ASUS Zenfone 5z is one of the first phones from the company to sport a notched display in the form of an IPS panel measuring 6.2 inches diagonally with an FHD+ resolution. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 SoC, the device offers up to 8GB of RAM, 256GB of on-board storage, and comes running Android 8.0 Oreo-based ASUS ZenUI 5.0. A dual-camera setup sits on the phone’s glass back where a fingerprint scanner can also be seen, placed centrally. The dual-SIM phone has a hybrid card slot, a 3,300mAh battery with fast charging support, and a USB Type-C port.