Asus staged its comeback in the Indian smartphone market with the launch of ZenFone Max Pro (M1) and ZenFone 5Z earlier this year and the plan to aggressively target direct rivals seems to have worked out in its favor. The company has seen great success with those two phones and now it has stepped up its efforts in the budget segment. We already reviewed the ZenFone Max M1, the first piece of this play, and now’s time for the cheaper ZenFone Lite L1.
Though the ZenFone Max M1 comes in a simple blue box, the ZenFone Lite L1 is packed inside a cardboard box with triangular patterns in orange and yellow on top that does look appealing on the outside. Here’s everything you get in the box:
Instead of diving head first into my experiences with the device, let’s first take a look at the specs sheet for the Zenfone Lite L1. There’s not much changed here as compared to ZenFone Max M1, except for the configuration, i.e 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage. You can check out the key specs here:
Design and Build Quality
Just like its slightly pricey counterpart, ZenFone Lite L1 sports a polycarbonate build with a metallic finish and the black or dark great color we have looks pretty good with a silver Asus logo printed on the rear.
Finally, you also get a micro-USB charging and data transfer port at the bottom and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top side, along with a notification LED in the top bezel.
Display
Moving to the front, the ZenFone Lite (L1) sports a 5.45-inch HD+ IPS LCD screen with an 18:9 aspect ratio and a 1440 x 720 pixels display resolution. There’s considerable top and bottom bezels without a notch here, but it shouldn’t hinder the overall experience.
If this is going to be your first smartphone, well, you would surely want to have a decent set of cameras on board. The ZenFone Lite L1 offers a single 13MP (f/2.0) sensor on the rear and a 5MP (f/2.2) selfie camera, which I found to be decent enough for the price bracket. Let’s check out the camera samples in different lighting conditions:
Daylight/Good Lighting Conditions
In daylight and good lighting conditions, the ZenFone Lite L1 shines and produces some detailed shots with good color reproduction, highlights, and even shadows. The device manages to blur out the background on ‘tap to focus’ to make the subject pop and that’s awesome to see on a sub-Rs 6,000 device. But the phone lacks good dynamic range and tends to produce saturated colors in some scenes.
Night-time Conditions
The ZenFone Lite’s camera suffers the most in low light and instead of trying to illuminate the scene with an adequate amount of light, it either under or over-exposes the scene and the images look as under.
Selfies and Portrait Shots
ZenFone Lite L1 packs quite a capable selfie camera, as you can see below. The selfies or portraits captured with the device during daytime look quite good, with impressive color reproduction, however, when you turn to artificial or low-light conditions and the front sensor falls apart. The colors look washed out and detail is lacking.
As for the videos capabilities, ZenFone Lite L1 enables you to shoot up to 1080p (Full-HD) videos at 30fps and they look quite good for the Rs 5,999 you’re shelling out. The videos may look a bit shaky but that’s because of the lack of any form of stabilization. Check out our sample video recording right here:
Software
Though I would have loved to see almost stock Android on this affordable ZenFone device, similar to the ZenFone Max Pro M1, we have to settle with Asus’ own ZenUI 5.0 skin on top of Android 8.0 Oreo. My experience, however, has been surprisingly good and I’ve got almost nothing to complain about.
Just like the pricier ZenFone Max M1, Asus’ lower-end ‘Lite’ variant has been powered by the Snapdragon 430 processor, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. We didn’t have a completely satisfactory user experience with the Max M1 and one may think that the lesser memory would create a bottleneck here, but that wasn’t the case.
The ZenFone Lite L1 runs quite smoothly in light usage scenarios, like calling, texting and watching videos, but it certainly isn’t made to handle heavy workloads perfectly well. The device finds it difficult to handle more than 5-6 apps in the background and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a budget device in the sub-Rs 6,000 price range.
And since benchmark numbers are something a lot of users want to know and care for, then you can find attached our Geekbench and AnTuTu results in the screenshot below:
On the connectivity front, the ZenFone Lite L1 offers you almost everything that you would demand from an affordable sub-Rs 6,000 phone. My favorite is the inclusion of a triple slot tray which allows you to keep using two nano SIM cards and a microSD card (up to 256GB) at the same time.
Asus has included a single bottom-firing speaker on the ZenFone Lite L1 and it gets quite loud – just like the ZenFone Max M1 but the audio starts to crackle and sounds a bit tinny and lacking at full volume. One can choose to toggle the ‘Outdoor mode’ feature that’s been integrated into the media controls but that only further bumps up the volume and it lacks bass and clarity.
As for telephony, I have been using the ZenFone Lite L1 with my Reliance Jio SIM for close to a week now and I haven’t any issues. I’ve been able to hear the recipients pretty clearly during calls, with decent noise cancellation even after the lack of a secondary microphone.
The ZenFone Lite L1 packs a smaller 3,000mAh battery as compared to the ZenFone Max M1, which has a huge 4,000mAh battery and still feels super light. The battery pack rendered me close to 5 hours of screen-on time with medium to high usage, and that’s plenty to watch videos on YouTube, text colleagues and listen to music during the metro rides.
That’s about everything you’ll need to know about Asus’ latest attempt at dethroning its fiercest rival, i.e Xiaomi, in the entry-level segment. The ZenFone Lite L1 checks a lot of right boxes for me and it’s a sturdy and powerful device in the sub-Rs 6,000 price segment.
ZenFone Lite L1 offers a solid Snapdragon processor, good-looking metallic body, capable-enough cameras, a great user experience in the budget category, and a long-lasting battery. But, I know, you must be itching to know whether you should buy the ZenFone Lite L1 or not?
Cons:
SEE ALSO – ZenFone Lite L1 vs Redmi 6A: Threatening Xiaomi’s Dominance
Asus now has a well-defined strategy to recapture lost ground in India and the ZenFone Lite L1 clearly explains what the Taiwanese giant strives to achieve. It’s looking to strike a balance between offering a feature-packed smartphone and aggressive pricing.
