[ZenFone 2 General] Level99:
I would do individual post replies but that would mean I'm responding to half the posts between Monday and today.

* Yeah, Canadian locality taxes can be a complete and total killer. My wife hails from QC, and I tell you, as good as the socialized amenities are up there, it definitely comes at cost of general shopping and such depending on which province you're in. Products in-general are more expensive even before the taxes, and elsewhere in the world, this phone may not be at the same price as in the States/EU. That being said, other devices also scale up in price outside of homegrown companies, so no matter where you are in the world, this device still slots solidly into the midrange price with high end features area. If I'm wrong, someone give me links showing a Galaxy S6/S7 or LG G5 being sold at or near the same price as the Zenfone 2, please.

* Of course, if people are having legitimate hardware or functionality issues with the device that are not the result of poor usership (aka repeated drops, using your phone as a water toy, and so on), that is on ASUS's back. There's no device made in flawless batches, and everyone's experience with customer service can be different. I've heard mostly positive feedback on people getting unlocked Zenfone 2 and variants (non carrier branded) serviced well and quickly from the parent company, with a few outliers that had a negative one. The people who have bad experiences tend to be louder as those who have it good are just happy to move on and keep doing stuff, or at worst are called out as being paid off by ASUS to say positive things. However, I'm pretty sure a thread dedicated to the upcoming release of the next version on Android for our devices is not a relevant discussion for those kinds of issues, yeah? Issues with the software that a lot of people are having stock at 5 hopefully fixed in 6? That is okay :)

* I have yet to speak to a developer on XDA who's worked on a rom that would call it easy in any respect. The only ones I've found to have a propensity to say its easy, it should be faster, fix these features, rah rah rah have never worked on a rom or port of rom themselves. Most don't even have a rudimentary coding experience. So first, know that while you can find guides that somehow show an "easy way" to port a preexisting rom codebase over to your device provided you have a specific set of files and prerequisites in the kernel and partitions etc etc, even that is not easy. Working on a pure rom codebase is even harder, and working on issues for a specific device even if its unlocked is no easy task. And you can not hold the standards of XDA speed of releases to actual companies. Companies have shareholders, public image, and international laws and regulations to comply/appeal to. Anyone here on XDA is under zero obligation to keep working on tomorrow what they're working on today, nor are they obligated to fixing all the issues or creating releases beyond what they feel like contributing. So any comparisons between XDA and ASUS releasing their roms is basically useless.

* It is entirely possible that the amount of effort to port ZenUI to 5.1 from 5.0 was seen as too much/too much more than just staying on 5.0 and issuing bugfixes. We'll never know, but maybe there was a discussion where they were only planning one major OS upgrade and it was decided to wait for 6 instead of doing point release update to 5.1. The incremental releases on 5.0 have basically fixed all that can be outside the native google code itself. I can respect the software engineers doing those changes while saving a large trunk of the work for a bigger work of going to 6. I eagerly await a valid argument that staying on 5.0 has rendered a person's device unusable in the meantime, simply because that would mean that the device failed your expectations of working right out of the box.

* Those screenies for the ZF2L look really intriguing. Yes, its awesome they're going straight to 6.0.1. I'm curious if this version will support microsd as native storage. I see the notification pane for SD Card, but if the update would allow the expandable memory to work as internal, that would be a major point in the favor of getting a lower model Zenfone and pumping in a huge memory card. While I love having the 4GB ram, I'd be content with 2GB and a bit lesser CPU if I could get 128GB memory seen as internal. Also WOO PROPER APP PERMISSIONS!