Asus ZenFone

» see zenfone.asus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ASUS was a motherboard to me long before it was ever a phone. In the forum years i kept a hardware list in my signature the way everyone on the Turkish boards did, and the brand sat in that list as a board and a chipset, a thing inside the case rather than a thing in your pocket. When ASUS announced a phone line in 2014 the reaction in that crowd was not excitement. It was the mild confusion of watching a component maker put its name on the finished product.

The first ZenFones were shown at CES in january 2014 and named after their screens, which is how a phone ends up being called the ZenFone 5 because it is five inches across. They ran Intel Atom chips, which almost nothing else in Android did. They were priced to undercut everybody. That was the pitch for the first several years: more phone than the money should buy, in a market where the money mostly bought Samsung.

ASUS kept swinging. The ZenFone 2 arrived in 2015 with 4GB of memory, before any other phone had it. The ZenFone 6 in 2019 had a motorized rear camera module that rotated up and over to become the front camera, so the screen carried no notch and no hole in it. That is exactly the sort of mechanism a company with nothing to lose ships.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the small one ~

The line found its actual identity in 2021 and it was almost an accident. The ZenFone 8 was 5.9 inches with a Snapdragon 888 in it, a full flagship processor in a body that had stopped existing everywhere else. Every other manufacturer had concluded that a small phone means a cheap phone. ASUS shipped the opposite and found an audience that had been shouting into the void for years.

The ZenFone 9 and 10 continued it, and for about three years the recommendation was automatic. If someone wanted a fast phone they could reach across with a thumb, there was one answer and it came from a Taiwanese motherboard company. That is a real place in the market, small but genuinely owned, and losing it is what people will actually feel.

~ the retreat ~

Then ASUS gave it up. The ZenFone 11 Ultra in 2024 was large and closely related to the ROG gaming phone underneath it. The word Ultra was doing the work that the word small used to do. The ZenFone 12 Ultra followed the same way in 2025. The one differentiator the line had spent three years building was retired by the company that built it, in favor of competing on the terms where it had never once won.

In january 2026 chairman Jonney Shih ended it at a company event in Taiwan, saying ASUS would no longer add new mobile phone models. No ZenFone 13, and no ROG Phone either. Existing handsets keep their warranty and their software support, which is more than most abandoned phone lines get. Shih did not use the word exit. The language he did use pointed at an indefinite stop rather than a pause.

~ the long tail ~

The reason is not mysterious and it is not really about phones. ASUS makes the boards and the cooling and the chassis that AI servers are assembled from, and that business is now large enough that a consumer handset line which never got to scale in twelve years is simply an expensive distraction. The same engineers are worth more pointed at a rack.

zenfone.asus.com no longer resolves. The support pages live on under the main asus.com tree, where a discontinued product line goes to be a driver download, and the compact flagship remains a thing exactly one manufacturer was willing to build.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »