Setup

Once plugged into power, the small LED next to the DC input will light up red until it is charged. Once full, it will turn green to let you know. The LED itself has no further function as it will remain off if no external power source is connected.


Setting up the ZenBeam Latte L1 is pretty straightforward with its own UI on top of Android 9.0. As such, it leans heavily on a user experience that is phone-centric. Weirdly enough, the actual UI is smaller than the total projected screen size, which becomes apparent when the standard Android keyboard is present. Such an input method is fine when on a phone, but a painful experience if you are sitting there pointing an IR remote at the device to get to the right letters for your WiFi password.


Brightness in the well-lit room on a sunny afternoon is just very good. It does come at the cost of contrast when compared to other projectors we recently looked at, but this is due to the fact that the ASUS ZenBeam Latte L1 has 300 LED Lumens vs. 300 ANSI Lumens. The image may be bright, but at the cost of contrast, at least to some extent as ASUS added its own UI on top of an Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 platform. With its eight cores, you should be just fine running anything on the device, while the 2 GB memory and 16 GB storage, of which around 9 GB are available to the user, are pretty much standard these days.

The UI on the ZenBeam Latte L1 is rather basic with four main functions, two of which are the same but geared towards Android and iOS, while the thirds triggers HDMI and the last puts the unit into Bluetooth mode, so you may connect your media device wirelessly and get up to 12 hours of battery life by not using it as a projector.


Navigating the unit with the remote is a bit cumbersome, but once you get used to it, things are functional enough. That said, the UI is riddled with spelling mistakes, like "secends", "waitting" or "NetWork," to name a few. (Editor's note: Asus has confirmed that spelling errors will be fixed in a future update) Also, our unit shipped with software version 1.XX, and we had to update to 2.02 manually using a flash drive and downloaded file before the upgrade to 2.07 via its OTA function would successfully install. While we are fortunate enough to get that kind of support, end-users would theoretically have to contact customer support in this scenario, as the firmware files are not made available for download via their website at the time of this review. However Asus did also follow-up on this and mentioned that unlike our sample, all retail units of the Latte L1 should all be shipping with a firmware version which may be updated via the OTA feature.

Also, when switching to Bluetooth-only mode, you get an Android message toast in Chinese at the bottom of the screen before the change takes effect. On the upside, the settings allow you to tweak the screen temperature based on preset settings a bit, and brightness on "standard" defaults to 80%, which is good for most usage scenarios, even with plenty of ambient light around. Eco Mode, which is naturally the most battery efficient way of using the ZenBeam Latte L1, drops the brightness to 0%, which actually is not zero. However, that setting is only useful in a completely darkened room as any daytime brightness will overpower anything the unit can throw at the wall.

The UI is a classic example of how a user experience could really hamper the joy and to some extend its usability. ASUS is well known for their ROG phones, and Google provides Android TV for exactly these types of devices. Instead, ASUS takes a phone platform with all its quirks, like Aptoide TV asking for access to your contact list when attempting to sign in, that runs mobile Android 9.0 and then opts to build its own UI and offer a very detached and non-optimized Aptoide TV integration instead, even warning the user that ASUS is not responsible for the user experience while you are using the app. This is also why Google opted for a dark interface on Android TV, which a projector with limited brightness would benefit from, while ASUS has gone with a gray/white theme instead.


Cranking the screen's brightness to 100% compared to the 80% does make a slight difference as well, so you do have a bit of wiggle room if you need a bit more at times. The ASUS ZenBeam Latte L1 offers vertical keystone correction, so the left and right edges of your video are always aligned properly. As it lacks horizontal correction, you need to make sure it is always projecting straight onto the surface yourself. On top of that, as should be apparent by the physical wheel on the side of the unit, you will have to manually adjust the focus as well.