Asus Zenfone 10 has leaked in full glory ahead of the phone’s global unveiling on June 29. The phone in question will reportedly come in as many as five finishes and have a more streamlined design, relative to the outgoing Zenfone 9. The leak caught the attention of Nothing founder Carl Pei who then decided to weigh in on what he liked about it and what he didn’t.
Serial tipster Evan Blass (@evblass) recently took to Twitter to share what appear to be official-looking press renders of Zenfone 10 showing off Asus’s upcoming Zenfone 10 from almost every perceivable angle. You can take the renders to the bank because Asus has already shared the look of the Zenfone 10, more precisely the phone’s green variant and Blass’s leaked info simply is an extension to that.
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The real kicker though was Carl Pei’s response(s) to the tweet which talked about a range of topics from the design of the Zenfone 10 to –and this is the interesting part— why very few people might actually buy it.
Starting off, Pei seemed impressed that Asus “removed the squiggly lines on the back” in this generation but its asymmetrical bezels were “triggering” his OCD. A Twitter user jumped in with a request in the same thread for the possibility of a “small flagship phone” from Nothing, something on the lines of an iPhone 13 Mini. Pei responded by tweeting out that “contrary to what we may believe living in the echo chamber, very few people buy small phones.”
Compact flagships aren’t as common as they used to be. Even though Apple tried to make them for a while, it stopped making any new ones last year, instead switching sides to a plus model, iPhone 14 Plus.
Asus is probably the only brand not giving up on these pocketable phones even if it’s the only phone it makes today. We can’t say for sure how much money Asus makes with these phones but with the Zenfone 9 not coming to India (and no word on Zenfone 10, too, at the time of writing), it would appear that interest may be waning. How long Asus can keep up is something only time will tell.
Still, if compact flagship phones catch your fancy, the Zenfone 10 is set to arrive on June 29 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, 5.9-inch screen, a second-generation six-axis gimbal stabilisation system and wireless charging support. Watch this space for more updates.
