Back in the last week, ASUS has unveiled its highly-anticipated smartphone series and surprised us by going against certain rumors. The company unveiled a new smartphone dubbed ZenFone 8 that has a small form-factor, quad-camera setup, and punch-hole display. For those who can’t say goodbye to the company’s very characteristic flipping camera mechanism, the company brought the ZenFone 8 Flip which brings a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC, and apart from that isn’t such a big upgrade. Today, both the ZenFone 8 and ZenFone 8 Flip are receiving their first post-launch software update. Apparently, it is coming with last-minute fixes that weren’t ready for the release.
Before the phone’s launch, reviewers received an incremental upgrade with versions WW 30.10.46.64 for the ZenFone 8 and WW 30.10.39.62 for the ZenFone 8 Flip. These are the first updates for the duo of flagships. Now, the company is rolling yet new builds for these smartphones. The ZenFone 8 gets version WW 30.11.51.41 software, while the 8 Flip is being contemplated with version WW 30.11.55.37.
The two changes for the ZenFone 8 include a priority mode to the phone’s Settings menu. This Priority mode allows the user to set “priority contacts” that can bypass the phone’s Mute function and ring anyway if it’s a priority call. The update also includes a search function for the “Force Dark Mode” feature. This feature basically forces a dark mode on applications that don’t normally support it. It is available on stock Android since Android 10 and can be a little buggy sometimes. The new search bar allows you to lookup an installed app’s name instead of looking it up on a list.
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The new changelog for both ZenFone 8 and 8 Flip includes the following changes:
- Improves system stability
- Improvements for system performance
- Improved camera quality
- Includes a new priority mode in ASUS Settings
- Search function now shows Force Dark Mode
- Enabled VoLTE on Telia (Lithuania)
- Addition of VoLTE & VoWifi on ICE (Norway)
- Updated Android security patch (April 2021)
Both flagships come with Android 11 straight out of the box which is hardly a surprise at this time. Instead of heavily customized software from the days of the ZenFone 5 series, the company now opts for a close-to vanilla Android build. As aforementioned, the vanilla ZF8 gets all the highlights as one of the best “mini” flagships in the industry. The ZenFone 8 Flip, in counterpart, isn’t much impressive due to the many similarities it has with the last year’s flagships.
