ASUS may not be a smartphone brand making its way to the headlines recently. However, the company is still active and launching yearly flagship smartphones. This year, it has introduced the ASUS ZenFone 8 and the ZenFone 8 Flip. The first is a compact smartphone, perhaps the smallest flagship smartphone in 2021. The second is another take on the company’s full-screen design and flipping camera mechanism, but that does not bring much innovation. These devices weren’t big in terms of availability, but ASUS is still here to support them. Today, as promised, the duo of flagships is receiving the Android 12 update.
Android 12 update was announced in October this year ahead of the Pixel 6 series launch. Shortly after the announcement, the smartphone makers started to announce their respective versions of the new software as well as their roadmaps for the update. So far, not many companies have made big progress when it comes to bringing Android 12 to their smartphones. Samsung is one of the companies ahead of the competition, and we can also cite OnePlus when it comes to its flagship smartphones. Meanwhile, other companies are still months away from bringing Android 12, and also are still launching devices with Android 11. For that reason, it’s great to see ASUS ahead of the competition in this department.
The ASUS ZenFone 8 and ZenFone 8 Flip are now joining the very small group of smartphones running Android 12. The new update comes as a late Christmas gift, but it’s better late than never. And as we’ve said before, it’s much sooner than what other companies are going to do. This also shows a major shift for ASUS in terms of Android rollout. The company has been relatively slow with past smartphones. So, it’s a surprise to see its flagships getting Android 12 just two months after the update became official.
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The Taiwanese brand announced its update schedule back in October. It promised to bring the update in December 2021, and with just two days remaining it stayed true to its claims. Worth noting that the update is rolling out in an incremental form. Therefore, you may still need to wait a few days to receive the OTA notification. Alternatively, you can download and manually install these releases by yourself.
The ZenFone 8 Flip was one of the few 2021 flagships with a truly bezel-less screen and without an under-display camera. For the third time in a row, the company has brought its flipping camera mechanism that flips the camera to the front whenever you need to capture a selfie. The ZenFone 8, on the other hand, was a more conventional smartphone with a punch-hole display. The Flip disappointed some users since it didn’t bring improvements in other specs apart from bringing the Snapdragon 888. Apart from the chipset, the device was basically a ZenFone 7 Pro.
