Asus has revealed three new phones in the form of the mid-range ZenFone 5 and flagship-spec ZenFone 5Z.

Both have so-called notches at the top of the screen, leading to inevitable comparisons with other handsets already out there. According to Asus, it’s because users are demanding bigger displays and we’ll be seeing a lot more phones feature notches this year.

Revealed at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the ZenFone 5 is a slick Qualcomm Snapdragon 636-powered, 6.2-inch handset that will be released in the UK in “Q3” – so expect it in the late Summer.

Asus drops ZenFone 5 and flagship ZenFone 5Z – but we won’t get the latter until later in 2018 image 2
Pocket-lint

The ZenFone 5Z ups the ante with the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, a huge 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. We have confirmed pricing for it, too, and it’s tasty – it’ll be £500 in the UK or €479 in mainland Europe and feature dual-SIM.

As far as a ZenFone 5Z release date, we’ve only got “later in the year” for the UK release date. We’d expect the Autumn.

Both handsets feature Sony’s latest IMX363 image sensor (1.4µm pixels and f/1.8 wide-aperture) and dual-rear cameras alongside a 120-degree wide-angle secondary camera with 4K video recording at 60fps. The camera also has a flexible Pro mode with support for RAW and shutter speeds from 1/10000 to 32 seconds.

You can also use Face Unlock, although Asus is quite clear that it believes the rear-mounted fingerprint-reader is by far the more secure option.

Asus drops ZenFone 5 and flagship ZenFone 5Z – but we won’t get the latter until later in 2018 image 3
Pocket-lint

Both phones also make use of several technologies which use AI to learn more about how you use your phone. These include scene detection, learning adjustments you make to your photos and applying them automatically (called “photo learning”) plus AI Charging. This is designed to reduce the effect of age on the battery by adjusting the charging rate depending on how you charge your phone.

Asus also announced a more compact 6-inch version of the ZenFone 5 called the ZenFone 5 Lite, although that won’t be coming to the UK.

Check out all the other new phones from Mobile World Congress 2018