ASUS Reportedly Shuts Down Zenfone Division, No More Compact Flagships

According to a report from Technews Taiwan, ASUS has shut down its Zenfone division responsible for making some of the best compact Android flagships on the market. The reason is due to "internal restructuring." Employees in the Zenfone division are being moved over to the ROG Phone team and other parts of the business. Android Authority reports: The report further asserts that the Zenfone 10 will be the last phone in the Zenfone series. Since the team no longer exists, there is unlikely to be a successor to this phone. The report follows other incidents around Zenfone. Earlier in the month, ASUS stopped allowing bootloader unlocks for Zenfone owners. The company maintained that they are not stopping the possibility of unlocking, just that the tool is currently unavailable.

A few weeks ago, community members also spotted that ASUS had removed older Zenfone firmwares from its website. Community moderators responded that ASUS no longer provides previous firmware versions or downgrade packages to ensure users remain on up-to-date firmware. Both of these incidents do not directly point to the shutdown of the Zenfone division. But they add the value of hindsight to the report, and we can't help but wonder if the writing was on the wall all this time.

Migrated from LG to Zenfone, now this

[bainjohn]

I guess I need to find another Android phone maker that doesn't build stupidly large phones and fill them with bloat.

Re:

[pipatron]

Please let us know when you find one. I'm also looking. Bonus points if it runs LineageOS [lineageos.org]. In my world, any area of the screen you can't reach with the thumb on the same hand you're holding the phone is wasted space.

Re:

[snookiex]

Take a look at the Google's Pixel [google.com] line. Particularly 4 and 5 can be found cheap, they are compact, the camera is pretty good (the 4 even has a radar [google.com]) and they run barebones Android by default, but you can also effortlessly install LineageOS, e/OS [e.foundation], GrapheneOS [grapheneos.org], CalyxOS [calyxos.org], or, if you are into it, shady ROMs from XDA.

Re:

[smithcu]

The Sony Xperia is a reasonable alternative, and the 5 series is small although a bit tall, but it has a convenient one-hand mode if you are not able to reach the very top of the screen. I have been fairly satisfied, so far, although I miss the FM receiver and IR blaster of my old Xperia ZL and V20

Re:

[Shadow of Eternity]

Zenfones weren't any less problematic. The 8 had a widespread issue with getting bricked due to the ramdump issue, and none of their phones followed the android standard for handling background processes instead of constantly killing things like alarm clocks or VPNs.

Re:

[mjwx]

I guess I need to find another Android phone maker that doesn't build stupidly large phones and fill them with bloat.

Have you had a look at Nokia's range? They're a bit on the large side but vanilla Android so pretty bloat free.

Re: Migrated from LG to Zenfone, now this

[AvitarX]

Even the Zenfone was larger than I wanted.

I was going to switch to iPhone mini and deal with the migration, but that's been cancelled too. And no more Sony.

I don't understand what's with all these giant phones.

Not surprised, they never fixed the rampdump issue

[Shadow of Eternity]

The Zenfone 8 was plagued with bricking issues that Asus simply refused to address. It's unsurprising they couldn't recover from that kind of hit.

Say it ain't so

[State your name]

My old Android phone charger connector is making charging a real hit-or-miss affair, so after nearly four years was looking for a new, small stock Android phone. The Zenfone 10 seemed to fit most of my criteria: small, audio jack and fairly stock Android (it seems that during the initial bootup the user is offered a choice of stock Android or Asus apps, wanted to investigate this a bit further). Only downside seemed to be that Asus was offering limited support duration, but then possibly lineageOS offers a

OnePlus 5T

[ArghBlarg]

I had a Zenphone 2 Laser... great, except for the slow-ass camera. Due to lineageOS dropping support and worsening battery I got the OnePlus 5T. A few years old, but very snappy camera, great lineageOS port.

Sad

[CAIMLAS]

It's been really sad watching the Android phone market race to the bottom on quality and support over the past 5+ years.

I guess it's been more of a crawl.

It's been a long time since cyanogenmod worked on a wide variety of phones and there were options to not have a locked-down device. Now there are even fewer options, and the underlying hardware (storage, specifically) is still ungodly slow.