It's been over a year since the ASUS ZenFone Zoom was announced at CES 2015, and now at CES 2016 we got to spend a bit of time with the ZenFone Zoom and its zooming camera. This isn't the first time we've gone hands-on with the ZenFone Zoom — we spent a bit of time with it at IFA 2015 — but this was the first time we've been allowed to actually use the camera. Let's take a look.

So what's the deal here? Unlike other optically zooming smartphones (such as the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom), ASUS has opted for a traditional smartphone sensor paired up with a periscope-style 3x optically-zooming lens. Samsung's approach was more in line with slapping a smartphone onto the backside of a telescoping zoom lens point-and-shoot camera — bigger sensor for better images, plus a thicker body to hold that (sideways!) lens. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines

That's not to say that the ZenFone Zoom isn't thicker than your average smartphone. It is — by all measures it's a standard ASUS ZenFone 2 plus the camera module. That brings the thickness up to 11.95mm, a good 40 percent thicker than your average smartphone, but your average smartphone also doesn't have a zoom lens going on. And it's still notably thinner than previous camera/phone efforts from Samsung. Inside you'll find the same Intel Atom processor, 5.5-inch 1080p display, and 4GB RAM with 64GB internal storage. ASUS has changed up the ZenFone Zoom since we last saw it, swapping out the hard matte-finish plastic back for a hard leather back. This new back gives it a more sort of "classic" look, especially coupled with the new miniature "grip" that runs along the bottom. This ridge is nowhere near as prominent as you'd get on a traditional DSLR, but it does give you something to grab onto when holding it in landscape as a camera. These backs also come in new colors: black, white, and orange. Amusingly, the orange color plus the leather texture makes it look more like an orange fruit. So let's talk about the camera. Operationally, ASUS put a camera button on the bottom right corner. Press it down and the phone launches into the camera, even with the phone off or in any app. It's a proper two-stage button — press it halfway to focus and all the way to capture the photo. A few millimeters above that is a small round button dotted with red: video recording. Same deal: press and hold to launch straight to video recording. There are three (three!) more buttons on the right side of the phone. The power button sits roughly in the middle with a volume rocker towards the top. This volume rocker also doubles as the zoom control — volume up zooms in (T for telephoto), volume down zooms out (W for wide-angle).

And then there's the camera module itself. This is where the extra bulk comes from, and it's a unique solution to the question of how to fit a zooming lens into a normal smartphone. Essentially, it's a periscope arrangement. Turn the phone onto its side (putting the exterior lens at the top of the camera disc) and the light that goes through that lens is refracted through a prism, travels down across the back through a series of lenses that manage the zooming, and then is refracted through a second prism that directs the light away from the phone into a backwards-facing sensor.