Is Asus Zenfone 6’s Motorized Camera Durable Enough?

Asus Zenfone 6 has one of the craziest motorized cameras out there. The super cool dual lens cam is able to flip 180 degrees, allowing it to work as both your main camera and your selfie cam.

But is this neat little feature durable enough? – let Zack from JerryRigEverything demonstrate.

Scratch Test

Asus cites costs as its reason for not using an OLED display – the LCD helped them stay within budget. It starts getting scratches at a level 6, with deeper grooves at a level 7. Nothing out of the ordinary for a display with Gorilla Glass Protection. The rest of the phone seems similarly durable as the all-metal design passed Zack’s durability test with flying colors. Even the camera module is made of metal.

For reference, the levels mentioned here are on Moh’s Hardness scale, where materials are rated based on how hard/durable they are. As a general rule, material at a certain level on Moh’s scale can only be scratched by the same or harder material.

For example, a level 6 material can’t be scratched or damaged by a level 5 material, but it can be scratched by a level 6 or 7 material.

Gorilla Glass screens in smartphones are usually level 6 whereas diamond, the hardest material, is a 10.

The Flip Camera

The flip camera on the Zenfone 6 is rated to last for 100 flips a day for 3 years, and the durability test further goes to show just how solid the module is.

In the video, Zack pushes and pulls the camera, twists the hinge and bends it, bangs it against the table and ties heavy objects to it – all to find out that nothing slowed the camera down.

At the end of the test, the camera performed the same way it did fresh out of the box.

Burn and Bend Test

As for the burn test, the display started to show dead pixels once it was exposed to an open flame, but nothing from which the phone couldn’t recover from. The dead pixels returned to normal in a matter of seconds and the touch response was just fine.

There was zero flex on the phone when bent from both sides, with no damage to the screen or the frame. Compare this with the Oppo Find X (also with a motorized camera unit) which bent in half during the test. The Asus Zenfone 6 made it through completely unscathed.