Asus ZenPad S 8.0 Review

That tablet, made by Asus, was pretty good. And then Asus came back the next year with an even better cheap Android tablet. The second Nexus 7 was 15000 and, aside from an annoying 16:10 aspect ratio, had few obvious faults. It was great. Fast forward to today, and we are looking at Asus’ latest inexpensive tablet, the ZenPad S 8.0. But this is a much different tablet than the Nexus you may still have on your coffee table or tucked in a drawer somewhere. In some ways that’s good, but it’s mostly a regression. We’re somehow moving backwards.

The Asus ZenPad S 8.0 tries to reproduce what was so appealing about the ZenFone 2. It’s impressive hardware being sold at a very low price 17499 with few gotchas to be found. But this is no Nexus, and left to its own devices, Asus is a company that struggles with software design. Whether the rest of what’s here can compensate for that will depend entirely on how you use a tablet.

Design:

There are two aspects of the design of the ZenPad S 8.0 that are noticeable right off the bat, with the first being how compact this 8-inch tablet is, and the second being how thin it is, with a thickness of just 6.6 mm. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the display means that the device is a little wider that it would be with a 16:9 ratio display, but it isn’t uncomfortable to hold on to.There is a brushed metallic finish throughout the back, bordered by a shiny metallic edge that gives the tablet a nice elegant look, but helping with the grip is a soft, leathery material that used along the bottom of the tablet when holding it in the landscape orientation, which feels really nice, and prevents the tablet from easily slipping from your hand. Also aiding the grip is a soft rubbery material that borders the entire tablet. Its sleek profile and build material choices not only make for a great looking device, but also makes it that much more portable and easier to use.Going around the device, the camera can be found on the back, the headphone jack is up top, and on the left side is a flap that allows for access to the microSD card slot. The volume rocker and the power button are on the right, and the buttons are unfortunately quite stiff and hard to press, more so in the case of the power button, which does help to avoid accidentally triggering them, but can be confusing as to whether you have actually pressed the button or not without the tactile feedback you had expect. The tablet does come with the double tap to wake feature however, so you won’t find yourself reaching for the power button that often.The ZenPad S 8.0 also comes with a USB Type-C port at the bottom, and its great to see OEMs slowly start to adopt the new USB standard with their devices. Up front, on either side of the display, is the dual stereo speaker setup, which is of course the best implementation when it comes to the placement of speakers, especially in the case of a tablet, a primary use of which for a lot of people is media. 

Display:

The ASUS ZenPad S 8.0 comes with an 8-inch IPS LCD display with a 2048 x 1536 resolution, resulting in a pixel density of 320 ppi. Quad HD is all the rage in the smartphone arena, but makes much more sense with the larger displays of a tablet, allowing for great viewing experience. Text is very clear and sharp, viewing angles are fantastic, and the color reproduction, with the default settings, is very accurate. If you are looking for a touch of more saturation, you do have the option to change it, with preset options including Balance, BlueLight filter, and Vivid, as well as the ability to manually adjust the settings. A small amount of sharpening does appear to be going on throughout the display, which can make text appear a little fuzzy, which is especially noticeable in certain scenarios, like with black text on a colored background. As good as looking at still images on this high-resolution display is, viewing videos may lead to some disappointment. The software tries to smoothen the video out, similar to the Soap Opera effect available with some HDTVs, so if a movie you are watching is intended to be shot at a cinematic 24 frames per second, the tablet will try to smoothen the video to make it look like it was shot at 60 frames per second, making it seem very strange looking.

You do have the option to adjust this “Blur Motion Free” setting to either high, medium, or low, or even completely disable it. However, it has to be mentioned that even when it is disabled, this effect is still very noticeable. The issues with sharpening and the smoothing of videos can, and will hopefully, be fixed with future updates, but for now, these questionable software implications put a damper on what is otherwise a gorgeous display.

Buttons, Ports, and Speakers:

This model has a minimal number of physical buttons, as the standard Back, Home, and Open Apps buttons appear only on screen. Still, there’s a volume rocker on the right side of the device, with the power button located below it. This isn’t an ideal location, as it’s easy to accidentally press this button when picking up the device.

The ZenPad S 8.0 is essentially unique among tablets for having a USB Type-C port, rather than a microUSB one. This is very forward thinking of Asus, as USB-C is going to become nearly ubiquitous on laptops, tablets, and phones in the next few years, but right now this model is ahead of the curve. Travelers will either need to carry a separate cable to charge it and their cell phone, or buy an adapter that will enable this device to be charged with a microUSB cable. To help balance against that bit of hassle, unlike all previous versions, there’s no wrong way to plug a USB-C jack into its port: it’s reversible so there’s no top and bottom.A microSD memory card slot is located on the left side, and covered with a door to protect the card and prevent it from being accidentally ejected. Asus says cards up to 128GB are supported.Too many tablets have their speakers on their sides, which tends to muffle the sound, so the front-facing speakers on this model are quite welcome. Audio is clear, and loud enough to make it easy to watch a movie or TV show in even a moderately noisy area. Asus included an app to adjust the speakers for a number of uses, including movies, music, gaming, and vocal.

Camera:

If you want to shoot photos with your tablet, you'll really appreciate the ZenPad S 8.0. Its 8-megapixel rear camera captured bright, sharp and colorful pictures.The 1080p video I took of Manhattan streets was clear, smooth and vibrant.The ZenPad's 5-MP front cam also shot vivid, clear selfies. However, it tended to oversaturate colors, making my peach dress look like neon orange instead.Asus offers plenty of extra functions with its camera app, including Selfie Panorama, Low Light Mode, Beautification and GIF Animation. I loved the granular controls Beautification offers, letting you set the intensity of face slimming, skin smoothing and eye enlarging individually. Other camera apps just give you one slider for the overall beautifying effect.

One of my favorite camera modes is GIF Animation, which turns videos you record into Internet-friendly animated GIFs.Lasting just 6 hours and 47 minutes on our battery test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits, the Zenpad S 8.0 has barely enough juice to last you a day. It lagged behind the average tablet (8:36), Kindle Fire HD 7 (8:25), Yoga Tablet 2 8-inch (9:40), Dell Venue 8 7000 (9:47) and Galaxy Tab S2 8-inch (10:19).

Performance:

Rocking a 2.3-GHz quad-core Intel Atom Z3580 processor and 4GB of RAM, the $299 configuration of the ZenPad S 8.0 handles multitasking with ease. I played a round of my favorite mobile game, Does Not Commute, with several apps running in the background and did not encounter any hiccups. On general performance benchmark Geekbench 3, the ZenPad scored 2,858, taking down the quad-core, MediaTek-powered Kindle Fire HD 7 (1,503), the quad-core Intel Atom Z3745-equipped Yoga Tablet 2 (2,282) and the average slate (2,582). It lost to the quad-core Intel Atom Z3580-backed Venue 8 7000 (2,866) and the Galaxy Tab S2, whose octa-core Exynos CPU netted it a whopping 4,113. 

Taking 6 minutes and 46 seconds to convert a 204MB, 1080p video to 480p, the Zenpad S was slightly faster than the average slate (6:58), but slower than the Kindle (5:18), Venue (5:01), Yoga (4:28) and Galaxy (4:26). The ZenPad S is good enough for casual games, thanks to its IMG PowerVR Series 6 G6430 graphics chip, but not for anything too taxing. Notching 13,047 on graphics test 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, the Asus tablet defeated the Kindle Fire (10,381), but fell to the average tablet (16,227), Yoga Tablet 2 (15,321), Galaxy Tab S2 (19,388) and Venue 8 7000 (20,602).The ZenPad S feels faster in daily use than the Nexus 9 does, so that should make Asus proud and Google a little sad. The multitasking screen pops up reliably on the first try, and touch response is good. There's an occasional hiccup while playing a game, but otherwise I haven't detected any lag to speak of. As long as you don't play a lot of 3D games, you shouldn't see anything out of the ordinary. I suspect these minor performance issues also have something to do with the SoC heating up, as they're more pronounced after several minutes of gameplay.

Battery: 

Asus only lists the battery capacity in watt-hours, but converting to the more conventional milliampere-hours, we're looking at a 4000mAh battery in this tablet. It's a little on the small side, but again, this thing is really thin. Because there's no quick charging functionality, it will take a bit over two hours to charge the ZenPad completely.You know how I lamented the scarcity of Type-C charging cables above I was maybe being a little dramatic because you really don't have to charge the ZenPad all that often thanks to it's killer standby time. I haven't even been bothering to plug it in overnight because it loses maybe 2% by the time I wake up. Intel's chipsets tend to be really efficient with WiFi-only devices, so I guess that's no surprise. As for actual usage, I'm seeing about six or seven hours of screen-on time with mixed usage including about a third gaming, a third reading, and a third general browsing/Redditing. That's about average for a good Android tablet, but a little more impressive considering this device only has a 4000mAh battery. I haven't really made any tweaks to the device to improve battery life, except for disabling and uninstalling some bloatware.

Verdict:

The question is whether that’s good enough. For tech enthusiasts willing to tinker, it might be. Like the ZenFone 2, this new Asus ZenPad S 8 can be a decent-to-good purchase, but getting it there takes legitimate work that regular consumers probably wouldn’t bother with. They shouldn’t have to. Once you rid it of the bloatware and annoying notifications, the hardware you’re left with scores higher than most other devices at this price point. Install another launcher and it will even be pleasant to look at. But if you are willing to spend even 5000 to 1000 more, you are better off with something from Samsung or even Dell. And if media consumption is your main interest in owning a tablet, put your money toward Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX line or an iPad instead. If Apple isn't your flavor and 20000 is your absolute ceiling for spending, the ZenPad S 8 is likely the best you can do. But the tablet market is stalling hard for a reason, and if you’re looking for one compelling reason why you need this in your life, well, it probably doesn’t exist. And that's pretty disappointing, seeing as this is the very same company that made those great Nexus tablets.

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