Low-end ZenFone 3 possibly spotted on GFXBench, ZenFone Zoom now up for pre-order

If you’re looking for the specs of the highest-end (and likely most popular) ASUS ZenFone 3, I don’t have anything for you. But a couple new benchmarks appeared on GFXBench recently, and they might be showcasing some specs for two of the upcoming phone’s lower-end variants. The model numbers are ASUS Z010DD and ASUS Z012D, and they seem to be closer to the budget realm rather than being this year’s refresh of the 4GB RAM beast that we saw last year with the ZenFone 2…

The first phone seems to have a 1280 x 720 5.9-inch display, an octa-core Snapdragon 615 system-on-a-chip, a Qualcomm Adreno 405 GPU, 3GB of RAM, and an odd 24GB of flash storage. This device also has a 12MP rear camera, a 5MP front camera (both with full HD video recording), and the standard array of sensors. The second device has as higher-resolution 1920 x 1080 5.5-inch screen, an undefined hexa-core Snapdragon system-on-a-chip, an Adreno 510 GPU, and 3GB of RAM. Notably, if these are ZenFone 3 phones, this is a departure from using Intel processors as ASUS did—at least initially—with the ZenFone 2.

Both phones unsurprisingly run Android Marshmallow according to the benchmarks, which is good news considering that Android 6.0 is barely gaining any momentum. In fact, the numbers from last month show that Google’s Android Lollipop from 2014 is gaining more ground than Marshmallow, and probably will be for the foreseeable future.

While rumors and speculation about the ZenFone 3 are now picking up, it wasn’t until just recently that the ZenFone Zoom, which ASUS showed off at CES in early 2015, finally went up for pre-order (just as expected). You can find the phone in all its glory over at B&H right now for $399 shipped. The camera on the ZenFone Zoom features optical zoom, meaning the lenses within actually move forward and backward physically to offer 3x zoom without losing image quality.

The ZenFone Zoom has a 5.5-inch full HD IPS, an Intel Atom Z3590 processor (clocked at 2.5GHz), and 4GB of RAM to keep everything running smoothly. It has 64GB of expandable internal flash storage to store all of your beautiful pics, a 3,000mAh battery, and a 13MP rear camera sensor with f/2.7-f/4.8 aperture, dual flash, laser auto-focus, 3x optical zoom and optical image stabilization. Read more about the phone here.