Asus launches six ZenFone 4 dual-camera phones with the flagship ZenFone 4 Pro, Selfie and Selfie Pro for selfie enthusiasts, and budget-range Max and Max Pro
Aloysius Low / CNET :
Context & Ripple Effects
The ZenFone 4 family is Asus doubling down on a bet it made earlier in 2017 with the ZenFone 3 Zoom, which went on sale at $329 with rear wide-angle and optical-zoom cameras: that dual cameras could differentiate mid-priced hardware. This launch stretches that thesis across six SKUs at once — a ZenFone 4 Pro flagship, dedicated Selfie and Selfie Pro models for front-camera buyers, and Max and Max Pro battery plays at the budget end.
What follows in the corpus is a steady narrowing: the Zenfone 5 and $499+ 5Z arrived in 2018 chasing the iPhone X's notch-and-glass look, then Asus pivoted to a single signature idea — the motorized flip camera of the Zenfone 6 at €499 and later the ~$950 ZenFone 7 Pro. The six-wide 2017 lineup is the high-water mark of the scattergun approach.
First-order effects
- Asus now fields a phone at nearly every price tier with dual cameras as the common pitch, forcing buyers to choose between the ZenFone 4 Pro's flagship specs, the Selfie pair's front-camera focus, and the Max pair's battery-first value.
Second-order effects
- The Selfie/Selfie Pro split treats the front camera as its own product category rather than a spec line — a segmentation rivals' single-flagship-per-year cadence doesn't match, and one Asus itself abandons within two generations in favor of the flip-camera concept.
Third-order effects
- If the arc holds, wide multi-SKU camera segmentation proves unsustainable for a second-tier Android vendor: Asus's chair Jonney Shih has since said the company will release no new smartphones in 2026, with Taiwanese media reading that as an exit from the Android market — the endpoint of a line that once launched six phones in a day.
The trend: Second-tier Android makers are retreating from broad multi-model camera-segmented lineups toward either a single differentiated flagship or out of handsets entirely.