On a budget? Asus's ZenFone 2 is a ton of smartphone performance for $300

The last time Asus launched a smartphone in North America, it was a complete failure. Do you even remember the PadFone 2? No? Of course you don't. It was a silly product.

The ZenFone 2 is a back to basics approach: $199 gets you an unlocked 5.5-inch smartphone with Android 5.0 Lollipop, a 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage (expandable via a microSD card slot), 13-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel selfie camera, 3,000 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery and dual SIM card slots.

It's a nice bundle of specs to start, but what you really want is the $299 model, which bumps up the processor to a faster 2.3GHz, doubles the RAM to 4GB (a first world's first for any smartphone) and quadruples the internal storage to 64GB. Read more...