ASUS officially makes available the Zenfone 4, 5, and 6 here in the Philippines. The lineup is a threesome of smartphones that are much awaited by many for their balance in specs and expected pricing. Scroll past the jump for more details.
ASUS ZenFone 4 specs: 4-inch TFT LCD, 800 x 480 @233ppi Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Intel Atom Z2520 1.2GHz dual-core processor with HyperThreading Technology PowerVR SGX 544 MP2 1GB RAM 8GB internal storage 64GB via microSD WiFi 802.11 b/g/n 3G/HSPA Bluetooth 5MP rear camera VGA front-facing camera 1,200mAh battery Android 4.3 124.4 x 61.4 x 11.2mm 115g Price: Php3,995
ASUS ZenFone 5 specs: 5-inch IPS display, 1280 x 720 @294ppi Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Intel Atom Z2560 1.6GHz dual-core processor with HyperThreading Technology PowerVR SGX 544 MP2 2GB RAM 8GB/16GB internal storage 64GB via microSD WiFi 802.11 b/g/n 3G/HSPA+ Bluetooth 8MP BSI rear camera w/ LED flash 1080p video recording @30fps 2MP front-facing camera Non-removable 2110mAh battery Dual-SIM Android 4.3 148.2 x 72.8 x 10.3mm 144g Price: Php6,495
ASUS ZenFone 6 specs: 6-inch IPS display, 1280 x 720 @247ppi Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Intel Atom Z2580 2GHz dual-core processor with HyperThreading Technology PowerVR SGX 544 MP2 2GB RAM 8GB internal storage 64GB via microSD WiFi 802.11 b/g/n 3G/HSPA+ Bluetooth 13MP BSI rear camera w/ LED flash 1080p video recording @30fps 2MP front-facing camera Dual-SIM 3300mAh battery Android 4.3 166.9 x 84.3 x 9.9mm 200g Price: Php11,995
You may visit ASUS retailers to get yourself a Zenfone or you may purchase online starting 7pm today over at Lazada.
ASUS launches the Zenfone 5 which is a 5-inch phablet with an Intel Atom processor. It’s locally priced at Php6,495 and will be available starting next week.
ASUS ZenFone 5 specs: 5-inch IPS display, 1280 x 720 @294ppi Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Intel Atom Z2560 1.6GHz dual-core processor with HyperThreading Technology PowerVR SGX 544 MP2 2GB RAM 8GB/16GB internal storage 64GB via microSD WiFi 802.11 b/g/n 3G/HSPA+ Bluetooth 8MP BSI rear camera w/ LED flash 1080p video recording @30fps 2MP front-facing camera Non-removable 2110mAh battery Dual-SIM Android 4.3 148.2 x 72.8 x 10.3mm 144g Price: Php6,495
THE WORLD is already eating way beyond its means, yet those who produce the food barely have enough to eat.
This dual layer of ironies was highlighted during the Responsible Business Forum on Food and Agriculture in Manila this week, as experts from around the world emphasized how growing consumer food demands are far and fast outpacing the ability of the world’s natural resources to provide this need.
The challenge, says World Wildlife Fund-Philippines president Lory Tan, is to find ways to produce more food while using up even less resources such as land and water.
Tan cited the country as an example in showing the pressure that people are placing on the natural resources of the world that would be compounded by problems brought about by climate change and water scarcity. In the face of the need for food, participants discussed the need to improve agricultural productivity while improving rural livelihood and reducing its impact on the environment.
“We are eating ourselves up; (the Philippines) sits 117 percent beyond our natural capital,” Tan said as he opened the two-day forum that gathered representatives from various agricultural sectors and business leaders throughout Asia.
Resources persons underscored the need to rethink food production. Jason Clay, senior vice-president, Markets and Food of the World Wildlife Foundation-USA cited as an example the growing of cattle for beef, which takes up 60 percent of land yet only provides for 1.3 percent of the total needed calories.
Tan and Clay said the answer to this problem is not to use more resources such as land for food production, but rather to find more efficient ways to produce the food that more people really need. In addition, both cited the need for people to be more efficient in their consumption of food, as a significant percentage of the food produced is really just wasted because of the nature of a consumer-driven society.
At the same time, experts noted how this growing food consumption is not reflected in the plight of those who have a direct hand in food production – the farmers.
Sec. Francis Pangilinan, presidential assistant on food and agricultural modernization, pointed out that Philippine farmers remain among the poorest of the poor.
Coconut farmers, for example, earn only an average of P23,000 a year, or not even P2,000 a month.
This, even as food prices have risen by 7.4 percent, or well above the inflation rate of 4.4 percent, Pangilinan said.
Even as the Gross Domestic Product of the Philippines rose last year, the second fastest-growing in Asia next to China, 20 out of 100 Filipinos remain hungry while four million households or at least 20 million Filipinos cannot feel the growth and do not have enough food, he added.
“We should treat our farmers like our parents,” Pangilinan quoted his own young daughter as saying. Pangilinan said people should place more importance on farmers, perhaps even more than lawyers and engineers, since people rely on the output of farmers three times a day, compared to the few times that people need lawyers in their lifetime.
Among the agricultural commodities addressed during the open and working group discussions were rice, poultry, fisheries and aquaculture, palm oil, coffee and cocoa, and sugar.
Juan Farinati, vice-president for Asia of Monsanto Corporation, said that there should also be a focus on “innovation and partnerships” that would lead to producing more food with less resources.
He cited the case of Vietnam where farmers have shifted to corn from other crops and were able to export it only a year using Monsanto bio-engineered seeds that increased the income of farmers to more than US$400 per hectare.
Aside from the shift to other crops, Matthew Morell, deputy director general for research of the International Rice Research Institute, said there is also a need to improve production systems like moving to mechanized farming to boost yield.
He added genetics would play a “strong role” in improving rice strains that would have higher yields.
Guy Hogge, head of sustainability of Louis Dreyfus Commodities, on the other hand, said farmers in rural areas might not have access to markets as he raised the need for government intervention in agriculture.
Sugar, on the other hand, once the biggest export commodity of the Philippines, was described by Sugar Regulatory Administration Gina Martin-Bautista as a “game changer” because it can be used to branch out to other industries like bio-water and bio-plastics because it is a “green commodity” or environment-friendly.
Bautista, however, pointed out that Thailand, which learned sugar production from the Philippines, has outstripped the country in terms of production.
Second only to Brazil in terms of sugar production, Thailand now has more than one million hectares planted to the crop compared to the Philippines’ 420,000 hectares.
Yet while Thailand only has double the hectarage devoted to sugar compared to the Philippines, it is producing more than four times the sugar output, or 11 million metric tons for Thailand compared to the Philippines’ 2.5 million metric tons.
Amid the problems posed by climate change and limited resources, Pangilinan said, using the words of his then nine-year-old child, that “we must treat farmers like our parents” because “we need them on a daily basis” for us to eat.
He also said that if the country’s framework for sustainable agriculture must put farmers, fisherfolk, and agricultural first, integrated environmental care and preservation and must show “new way of doing things” while going back to basics.
We’re yet to officially see Apple’s iPhone 6 but the folks at Goophone have already launched a clone of the upcoming iOS smartphone called the Goophone i6, sporting a 4.7-inch display and powered by a quad-core CPU.
The Goophone i6 is based on leaked designs as well as cases made by accessory manufacturers. The said smartphone features a 4.7-inch qHD IPS display at 234ppi, 13 megapixel rear camera, 5 megapixel front facing, and 8GB of internal storage. Powering the device is a MediaTek MTK6582 quad-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, and runs a custom Android ROM.
Goophone’s website didn’t mention anything about its price but it is set to go on sale on August 1.