Google has put the Project Tango in the works for quite some time now and the latest smartphone to support the AR technology was announced back at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. The Asus Zenfone was one of the highlights of this year’s first tech event, but the smartphone has yet to arrive on the market.
In this year’s Google’s I/O, the tech giant announced that the ZenFone AR would arrive this summer at Verizon. The US carrier will be the only carrier in the US to sell the smartphone, but the actual release date is unknown.
After Google’s announcement, Verizon released an official statement stating that the ZenFone AR would be a Verizon-exclusive handset and that it would be both Tango-enabled and DayDream-ready upon release. Also, Verizon has not yet stated anything about the retail price, so it is just a matter of waiting.
Verizon has mentioned that the ZenFone AR will come with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, together with Snapdragon 821, coupled with an Adreno 530 graphics processing unit. At the time of the announcement, Asus did say that it would provide a variant with 8GB of RAM, but it’s not the one that will arrive at Verizon.
A set of sensors give the ZenFone AR the capacity to track motion, determine depth perception and area learning. The 5.7-inch WQHD display makes it suitable for VR, while the phone also comes with enhancements for the 3D effect on the screen.
ZenFone AR sports three rear cameras for motion tracking and depth perception, one of which is a 23MP Sony IMX318 sensor. The depth sensing camera has an infrared projector for measuring the distance to objects. Battery capacity is pegged at 3,300mAh. The ZenFone AR isn’t the first smartphone with incorporated Tango technology, as the Lenovo Phab Pro 2 which arrived last year also has this feature.
