Ahead of today’s Zenfone 5 launch at Mobile World Congress 2018, Asus hosted a media briefing to tell us about its new phone and directly address the very familiar notch at the top of the device. “Some people will say it’s copying Apple,” said Marcel Campos, Asus’ global head of marketing, “but we cannot get away from what users want. You have to follow the trends.” So that’s settled: the iPhone-esque notch is now trendy and we’re all going to have to marvel at it across a diversity of Android devices, including the new Asus Zenfone.

If you’ve been able to keep track of all the various Zenfone releases from Asus so far, you’re ahead of me, because I’ve gotten lost in the cornucopia of slightly different models the company has issued in its brief history as a phone maker. Thankfully, the Zenfone 5 family is relatively simple: there’s the 6.2-inch Zenfone 5 itself, there’s the flagship Zenfone 5Z, which looks the same but amps up the internal specs, and there’s the Zenfone 5 Lite (branded as the Zenfone 5Q in the US), which has an entirely different design.

Grid View Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Compared to its own previous hardware, Asus has made a major leap forward in design. The Zenfone 5 fits a 6.2-inch display within the same physical footprint as the 5.5-inch Zenfone 4. That’s thanks to a thin-bezel design that results in a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio. In its effort to appear more advanced, Asus accompanies the screen with some spurious AI claims. The company has an automatic adjustment for color temperature — much like Apple’s True Tone on the iPhone X — and a sensor to keep the screen on while you’re looking at it, which it collectively calls AI Display. When I queried Asus on what’s “AI” about those functions, which already exist in other phones, I was told that the company is “adopting a broad definition of AI.”

The new Zenfone doesn’t feel too light or too heavy, weighing 155 grams, and it remains easily usable with one hand in spite of its large screen. Featuring an aspect ratio of 19:9, the Zenfone 5 is very similar to the Plus models of the Galaxy S8 and S9. Like those phones, Asus’ new handset has glass on both the front and back, however Asus settles for an LCD, less sophisticated than Samsung’s excellent OLED display. Still, the resolution of the Zenfone 5 is a perfectly reasonable 2246 x 1080, and the display’s performance doesn’t seem to be too far behind.

Like Apple’s iPhone X, Asus has a Face Unlock option on the Zenfone 5, but don’t get your hopes up for seeing anything as sophisticated as the Face ID system that resides inside the iPhone. Face Unlock is just there to satisfy user demand, and Asus notes that its new phone still has a fingerprint sensor as a fallback.

Asus goes for a less-than-flagship spec on the Zenfone 5 processor, using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 636, and on-board storage is limited to 64GB with a choice of 4GB or 6GB of RAM. The Zenfone 5Z steps up to a Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip, and has a maximum of 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. The regular Zenfone 5 is evidently specced to try to achieve a more affordable price point — the 5Z will start at $499 / €479 — though it still has dual cameras on the rear and another batch of big AI claims from Asus.

My highlight from the Zenfone’s camera spec is the 1.4-micron pixel size on the main 12-megapixel image sensor. That’s equal to HTC’s U11 and not far behind the Google Pixel, and in a couple of sample shots I took with the phone, it seemed to be promising — a lot more promising than I might have expected from Asus.

Beside the main sensor, there’s an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera, which is used for depth detection for portrait mode. That didn’t work well in my testing: the camera would shoot a regular photo when I wanted a portrait, and when it did produce a portrait, the edges of the subject were quite rough and obvious. Asus augments all of this with what it calls AI scene detection, which optimizes the saturation, white balance, exposure, brightness, and post-processing based on the particular thing you’re photographing. This is actually the one part of the Zenfone 5 that probably merits the AI tag, because this is all based on machine learning. Asus has also built in a system that will learn from the way you process your images and, over time, will start suggesting similar edits to other photos you want to tweak.

Asus also claims it has a thing called AI boost, which sounds like selective overclocking of apps, and AI charging, which only tops up your Zenfone to 80 percent at night and then holds it there until your usual wake-up time approaches and then it goes all the way to 100. These are all quite handy features, but maybe the abuse of the AI label could have been avoided.

A final highlight with the Zenfone 5 is its built-in speaker system, which gets very loud and clear. Alas, it doesn’t have much in the way of bass or a high end, but if you like your speakers to be Bose-y like that, you’ll be in luck. For a phone, clarity and volume are often more important than pure audio quality, so I can’t fault Asus for its design choice. Support for AptX HD and LDAC, for higher-quality Bluetooth audio, is built in. Asus also includes a headphone jack on both the Zenfone 5 and Zenfone 5 Lite, which gives it a differentiating feature from the high-end phones the company’s obviously trying to emulate.

Grid View Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The Zenfone 5 Lite, pictured above, is a predictably simplified device. It bears little physical resemblance to the more premium phone, but it still comes with a 6-inch screen with thin bezels, the same 3,300mAh battery as on the Zenfone 5, and Android Nougat — not Android Oreo — as the operating system. The 5 Lite also has dual cameras on both the front and back, with the additional lenses providing a wider, 120-degree field of view for group photography.

Asus will release the Zenfone Lite in March, followed by the Zenfone 5 in April and then the Zenfone 5Z in June. Exact release dates have yet to be announced, but we’ll bring those to you as soon as they become official.