ASUS Reportedly Shuts Down Zenfone Division, No More Compact Flagships

According to a report from Technews Taiwan, ASUS has shut down its Zenfone division responsible for making some of the best compact Android flagships on the market. The reason is due to "internal restructuring." Employees in the Zenfone division are being moved over to the ROG Phone team and other parts of the business. Android Authority reports: The report further asserts that the Zenfone 10 will be the last phone in the Zenfone series. Since the team no longer exists, there is unlikely to be a successor to this phone. The report follows other incidents around Zenfone. Earlier in the month, ASUS stopped allowing bootloader unlocks for Zenfone owners. The company maintained that they are not stopping the possibility of unlocking, just that the tool is currently unavailable. A few weeks ago, community members also spotted that ASUS had removed older Zenfone firmwares from its website. Community moderators responded that ASUS no longer provides previous firmware versions or downgrade packages to ensure users remain on up-to-date firmware. Both of these incidents do not directly point to the shutdown of the Zenfone division. But they 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.

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