Asus ZenFone AR, the World’s Second Tango-Powered Smartphone, Is Coming to the US in July

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 30 May 2017

Asus unveiled the world’s second Tango-powered smartphone — the ZenFone AR — almost six months ago. And now, the company has finally revealed when the handset goes on sale in markets across the world. 

The Asus ZenFone AR will go on sale in Taiwan from mid-June, with a US launch on the cards at the end of June or early July. Pricing for the handset is not yet known, but Asus’s CEO Jerry Shen confirmed that the company “wouldn’t dare” to charge more than the Galaxy S8 Plus for the handset.

Asus was not sitting idle in the last six months though. Since then, as per Engadget and the company, it has worked on making the existing 100+ Tango AR apps work smoothly and stably on the ZenFone AR. As things stand right now, about 40-50 Tango apps now run without any issues on the handset, with the number expected to grow when the Nougat update hits the handset. The number of Tango apps is also set to grow to more than 1,000 by next year, with Asus working closely with Google in holding AR developer conferences across the globe.

The faster internals inside the ZenFone AR and the updated codebase for the Hexagon 680 DSP allow the ZenFone AR to run Tango AR apps more smoothly than the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, the world’s first Tango capable smartphone.

[Via Engadget]