Asus Zenfone Zoom, gimmick or the real deal?

Over a year ago Asus showed up their Zenfone Zoom prototype, a phone with a camera that would rival most compact camera's or even some DSLR. It took some time for the Zenfone Zoom to finally hit the market but now it's possible to get your hands on it. And that's exactly what I did.
Being a photography hobbyist, I've played around with a Honor 6 Plus, a mobile phone with 2 camera's. These are just normal 8MP mobile phone camera's placed next to each other allowing for some tricks such as adjusting focus after taking the photo and blurring of the background. When I first got this 6 Plus I was very much in to. However it turned into a gimmick that I barely used very fast. The limitations of this feature, such as the object having to be within 1.5m distance, and slow focus meant it wasn't really that useful. So when Asus came up with their Zenfone Zoom is was initially distrusting.

However, I was wrong. Very wrong. It's awesome. It's all I ever wanted of a camera in a phone.
I will spare you all the technical details, you can find those on the Asus website. Suffice to say that as a phone it has all the regular features you need; decent SoC, 4GB of memory, plenty of storage (64GB in my case), 4G, AC wifi, Bluetooth and NFC. It comes with Android 5.0 and in the short time it's been on the market it has received regular updates so it seems Asus is doing good support wise. But the main feature is the camera of course. The way they incorporated the lenses, horizontal instead of vertical means it doesn't really get that thick, not even when you zoom. The back of the phone is covered in a sort of leathery plastic that is the same as most grips on a DSLR. There is a hardware photo button on the side, precisely there where your finger is when holding it as a compact camera. (No more vertical taken photo's, yeah!).
The app is jammed full with features; HDR, Panorama, Selfie, Macro, Portrait and lots more. And even Manual where you can set all most every aspect including ISO. There's just so much to play with.
It comes equipped with laser focus which means the focus is very fast (and you can this neat ruler app). Dual tone flash is also on board for those photo's at night.
The main feature of the camera is the zoom function. Normal phones have digital zoom, which decreases the quality of the picture. The Zenfone Zoom has optical zoom, and it's just great. With a flick of your fingers or press on the volume buttons you can zoom in or out and the quality is amazing.

The Zenfone Zoom is basically what the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom should have been; a phone that isn't that much thicker than a normal phone but also has the power of a decent compact camera. (And not a compact camera that also can make calls). It's so much more than a gimmick. The Zenfone Zoom is available at multiple places in different configurations. I would like to thank Akafone for getting it to me quickly.