 New YouTube creator, or if you are the friend in the group who loves documenting every moment while on a trip with your friends, or if you just like capturing every moment on a trip for yourself, then the most important things to have are a good cell phone camera and a phone gimbal. Gimbals are essentially a motorized stick which balances your phone so that when you walk around, it captures video with less or completely without the up and down jitters you cause as you walk. Depending on which gimbal you get, you will need to get the free application on iOS or the Google Play Store for you to use so that it opens up more features like face or object tracking in addition to just video stability. Hi, I'm Rafael from Hardware Sugar and this is the Zen gimbal from Asus. Using a cell phone gimbal is very important to me as a content creator because whether I'm reviewing a keyboard, mouse, or even RAM, I always need to shoot some sort of b-roll. In fact, shooting with a cell phone on a gimbal will produce smoother video as opposed to a DSLR, not to mention the loads of money you would save on that and a DSLR gimbal. Packaged in a quick carry grey pouch, the Zen is something that you could quickly throw into your travel bag and assemble pretty quickly. Asus marks it out as your cell phone companion which you can fold into your pocket. Personally, I feel this would only work conveniently if you were wearing a coat or jacket because there's no way I could handle having a gimbal and a phone in my jeans. Along the tube of the Zen are four switches, a red button which activates the cell phone camera shutter or the recording on and off, a button marked M in order to switch between different modes, a joystick to control the direction of the gimbal, and an up and down notch which allows you to control the zooming in and out function of your camera. If you've never used a cell phone gimbal before, it is important to note that none of these buttons, except the joystick, will work unless you have your phone Bluetooth tethered to the Zen and that you are actually using Zen's gimbal app and not the camera application of your phone. Connected to the tube is the arm itself where you attach your cell phone by using the clamp. Asus also included a weight balancer block which you attach to the side. Its existence is due to the variety of phone consumers now have in their pockets which vary in weight and size. To adapt to this, the Zen needs extra help in balancing your phone. I don't like two things about the design. First, I'm uncomfortable that the three legs are so short as it requires me to be very careful when I place the gimbal down because of how top heavy the arm and weight make it out to be. It also requires that you must place it down on an extremely stable and flat surface, something which my DJI has less problems with because of how wide the legs are. Mobile vloggers need to make use of their surroundings whether that be a rock on a mountain or an uneven mound of grass. A device which is meant to inspire stability leaves me anxious each time I put it back on top of my desk. So much so that I leave my hand holding onto it for a second or two just to make sure it found its footing. Starting up the Zen is as simple as clamping your phone down and turning on the gimbal. At this point you can jump to the Zen app however you should know that you were restricted to videos of 24 to 30 frames per second and cannot go any higher even if your phone can capture higher frame rates. My S21 Ultra can be set to record video at 60 frames per second, something you should use if you are recording something fast moving such as a speeding dog. You may thus want to use the Zen with your regular phone app sometimes. However, that would mean you won't be able to use the cool tracking features of the Zen but you'll still have access to the gimbal's movement through the joystick which I'll talk about later as somewhat problematic. After you have linked the Zen to your phone through Bluetooth, you can immediately start using the other buttons of the gimbal such as the red button to begin recording or to take a quick snapshot. This is so your hands never need to leave the handle in order to use the camera controls on your phone screen. Overall, the look and design of the application itself is bland and needs an artistic overhaul. This is surprising considering ASUS makes sleek software design such as its Armory Crate program on PC. The Android application doesn't even have an exit button and so if you wish to leave the application you need to swipe up on the bottom of your phone and hit the back button there. A lot of users might not even know how to do this and may just assume that the only way out would be to restart their phone. Nevertheless, the essential parts of the software makes the Zen run smoothly. The most important of which is face and object tracking. If you want your phone to just take stable videos without any fancy tracking then you'll be happy to know that this indeed keeps it stable. I did the same walk down a corridor and you can evidently see a lot more movement without the Zen gimbal in use. It is important to note that the up and down motion of my steps still show up slightly even with the gimbal in use however that is normal and the difference without the gimbal is substantial. My biggest problem with the Zen is that the gimbal's movement is incapable of diagonal movement. It can only go up, down, left, right but never in between. And second, it is incapable of moving slowly. Even at the lowest setting, the speed at which the Zen turns through the use of the joystick is very fast. This is somewhat fatal for content creators because B roll often requires clips that are of the same thing taken from different angles at an extremely slow pace. My DJI gimbal gives me the ability to do both, it can maneuver diagonally and it allows you to control the speed of the gimbal with precision. This is not to say that the Zen is not maneuverable, far from it. It in fact allows a 360 turn which would be able to give you some interesting shots if you know how to make use of it. I however as a tech youtuber and the guy who likes taking excessive amount of video don't really know how to make full use of this and would have rather traded this feature out if that meant I could get slower control and more manual directional control through the joystick. A workaround of both problems I just mentioned is to use the tracking feature of the Zen. Successful use of the tracking will both slow down the speed at which the gimbal moves and it allows diagonal movement, something which is impossible through manual joystick usage. There are two forms of tracking, facial and object tracking. Object tracking requires that you make a box over what you want tracked. The gimbal will then point your phone towards that specific object the entire time you move about. This is what it should do in theory so that you can track fast moving objects or want to get smooth b-roll. My findings are mixed, tracking objects which are far away such as this plant box leads to successful tracking and smooth b-roll. However, it was unable to successfully track my moving dog when I was a meter away from her. This feature is thus best used purely for inanimate objects which don't move and which are at least 4 meters away and which are rather large to track to begin with. The facial recognition feature is much more accurate. I don't need to box myself in selfie mode as it tracks my face automatically and it keeps my face centered consistently. I would thus recommend this gimbal for vloggers who like talking spontaneously on the go. Especially since the Zen is much more compact than the DJI I use. You can also place this on a desk and just shoot freely while moving about a little. The Zen comes with a 2900mAh battery and is charged through a USB-C. It is marketed to give 10 hours worth of battery life however I would say that its life is more in the 6 hour mark based on my usage with the S21 Ultra. The maximum cell phone weight it can carry is 260 grams. A cell phone thickness of 12mm, a length of 180mm and a width of 58-86mm if your phone exceeds any of these then your phone is not compatible with the Zen and even if you are lucky enough to get it to work with your phone which exceeds the weight limit, expect the Zen gimbal to fall apart in a couple of months. A common mistake by users who do not check the weight of their phone before buying any gimbal. It is compatible with both Apple and Android phones. We at Hardware Sugar don't sell cell phone gimbals but PC Hub according to a post back in April 22 report that they sell it for 7500 pesos. I also cannot find a listing of it on Shopee or Lazada during the editing of this video. However if you do find a store which lists it let us know in the comments section as we and our HWS community would really appreciate it. With that said I would say that the Zen is very pricey considering the lack of basic control and the uninspiring application. In conclusion the ASUS Zen gimbal is an extremely portable and stylish gimbal which offers smooth stabilization but at the cost of having extremely restrictive manual control. I think however this can be solved through a software patch because the Zen is capable of smooth movement. It just does not give access to this through the manual usage. We are giving the Zen a 6 out of 10 because it is an expensive piece of hardware which is capable of delivering on its price. ASUS just needs to dial back down on the speed and give more manual control. I would thus recommend the DJI OM4 over the Zen. However keep in mind that the OM4 does not have the 360 degree movement which the Zen offers and it is slightly less portable. And we would like to give a special thank you to our top fans Rafael James, Liam Magnaje, Ian Meru, Richard Rónquico, ITX Addict, John Rubinocia and Christian Espinosa. Thank you so much for going to be able to get to 100,000 subscribers pretty soon thanks to your consistent help. Thank you.