The ASUS Zenfone 10 seems to be the best compact flagship, delivering a powerful experience in a compact form factor without any of the usual downsides by many reviewers so far.
ASUS Shuts Zenfone Division(rumored)
In this race, Zenfone 10 and even the Zenfone 9 have received critical acclaim.
The smartphone brand is praised by many for continuing with trends like including a 3.5mm headphone jack and maintaining a compact flagship with no real compromises.
However, this could be the end of the lineup as new reports have emerged about ASUS shutting down the Zenfone division.
ASUS appears to be carrying out internal restructuring, and as part of the process, certain departments have been cut down, as per media report.
Zenfone division seems to be one of the unfortunate victims of this internal restructuring as it is said to have been shut down.
Coming to employees who have been working in this division have been absorbed into the ROG Phone team and other parts of the business.
No More Compact Flagships
Considering this development, the Zenfone 10 will be the last phone in the Zenfone series.
It also implies that there is unlikely to be a successor to this phone since the team no longer exists.
The other incidents around Zenfone are also supporting the theory as ASUS stopped allowing bootloader unlocks for Zenfone owners earlier in the month.
According to the company, they are not stopping the possibility of unlocking, just that the tool is currently unavailable.
Besides this, the community members a few weeks ago spotted that ASUS had removed older Zenfone firmwares from its website.
In its defense, the community moderators responded that ASUS no longer provides previous firmware versions or downgrade packages to ensure users remain on up-to-date firmware.
It is noteworthy here that both of these incidents do not directly point to the shutdown of the Zenfone division.
Nonetheless, they appear to add the value of hindsight to the report, and we can’t help but wonder if the writing was on the wall all this time.
So far, ASUS has not released any statement in this regard.
If this rumor comes true, the loss of the Zenfone lineup will be a big blow to the smartphone ecosystem.
In The meantime, we can still hope to see more ROG-branded phones.
The Zenfone lineup will be sorely missed for bringing the clean Android experience to small smartphone lovers.
