Asus announces Zenfone 6 with a 48 megapixel flip-top camera, Snapdragon 855, and a 5,000mAh battery, starting at €499
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Asus is iterating on a familiar playbook: the Zenfone 5 and $499 flagship 5Z from last year already paired near-flagship silicon with a mid-range price, and the ZenFone 3 Zoom line established the 5,000mAh battery as a Zenfone signature. The Zenfone 6 keeps the €499 anchor and the big battery but swaps the notch for a flip-top camera module that serves as both rear and selfie shooter.
The flip mechanism is the differentiator in a market where Asus had been following iPhone design cues; the ZenFone 7 Pro would later carry the flippable camera forward at a much higher price, making the 6 the affordable origin of that design.
First-order effects
- Buyers get 2019's top Snapdragon 855, a 48MP camera, and a 5,000mAh battery at €499 — flagship internals at roughly half the price of comparable flagships, with no notch or punch-hole eating into the display.
Second-order effects
- The motorized flip camera lets Asus skip a dedicated front sensor entirely, pressuring notch-era rivals to justify their own display cutouts or answer with pop-up and flip designs of their own; the Zenfone 7 Pro's ~$950 price later shows the flip line drifting upmarket.
Third-order effects
- The value-flagship experiment ultimately didn't sustain a broad phone lineup: Asus's smartphone business narrowed toward ROG gaming devices like the ROG Phone 8 series, and the company has since signaled it will ship no new smartphones in 2026, with Taiwanese media reading that as an exit from the Android market.
The trend: Asus's Zenfone line spent a decade chasing flagship specs at mid-range prices before contracting to gaming-focused ROG hardware and an apparent smartphone exit.