everybody forgets about the zen phones no one asks how the zen phone is doing
turns out it's doing great it's living its best life people the zenfone 9 is
here ASUS is still making phones that aren't ridiculous gaming things
but turns out yeah the zenfone line has been around for a while there's been
nine of them and this one may be the best one yet the thing with zen
phones at least in the past couple generations i think they're making a
flagship phone but they're not making it ridiculously oversized so that only
people with large hands can use them the zenfone 8 was a compact size it was
around six inches and they're doing the same
thing with the zenfone 9 it's a 5.9 inch display but
it's one of the first phones on the market with the latest snapdragon
uh eight plus gen one they tried to
simplify their naming scheme and it only got more complicated for you guys i'm
gonna unbox the other version i i had the black version here and this is the
what did you call it sandstone
moonlight white sandstone in the moonlight all right what do we got in
the box here we have another box compact
size big possibilities inside we have
the sim removal tool and it's been a bit of a trend lately uh an included case
okay and then user guide inside there
okay and then we have the phone itself come to papa
oh it felt good what was that noise
you know in a world full of phones with like five and six cameras on the back it gets
a little tryptophobic so i appreciate uh ASUS just saying like you know what
we're just gonna have two big old phone big old cameras on the back whoosh you
know it looks like it looks like a minion
the cameras are a big thing that ASUS has upgraded uh over the uh the zenfone
8 and we'll talk about that but first let's talk about the actual exterior of
the phone you know what that's why i thought it was sandstone because the back has this sort of like texture on it
feels like sandstone we got this metal rail all around uh the side which is
like vaguely iphone like but also not uh
because it's like got kind of a rounded edge on it so that's cool
on the top look at that there's a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack i'll say right
now this is this phone starts at 6.99 and it's got the latest chip so it's not
one of those like low end uh uh phones like the pixel a series where
they were like i will put a headphone jack on there for the people who can't afford bluetooth headphones every phone
should still have a headphone jack on it i'm sorry there's room for it and even
in a 5.9 inch phone screw you apple on
this side we got the volume rocker and
the power button which doubles as a fingerprint sensor which also doubles as
a multi-function button with swipe functionality we're going to talk about
that that's exciting on the bottom we got the
speaker and this phone also they have front-facing
speakers where the other speaker is here and the earpiece and the ones on the
bottom so sort of front-facing usb-c port sim card slot no sd card support on
this one and the other side is blanc
what else we got in the box oh a little fancy compartment with
a charging cable USB-C to c
and a power adapter this is 30 watts i
did a little bit of testing with it i got from 35
to 100 in an hour i got 30
in just 20 minutes so that's not bad actually that's i mean
i've seen better the one other big thing that i wanted to say about uh the
exterior right off the bat is that this is my pixel 3 okay it's that perfect
size where i can reach all the way across with my phone when i use these bigger phones i'm like what's the point
like am i supposed to be double handing do you guys have big phones why do you
why do you have big phones what's the point okay anyways the point is that i like
smaller phones because you can do the one-handed thing and ASUS is really one
of the only manufacturers out there that is still deciding to make a compact
phone with decent specs i mean you can find like
quote-unquote compact phones out there but most of them are going to be like
really low end i've seen some people say that this might even be the best compact
phone even considering the iphone minis
and i don't i don't want to say that but i will tell you that people are saying
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as you can see here the bezels aren't like the you know what you'd expect from a
flagship phone uh there's a little bit more of a chin and a what do you call
that forehead over the top so you can see on my pixel 3 it still has those so
thankfully i'm already used to it but this is a 5.9 inch screen 1080 by 2400
super amoled with apparently 1100 nits
peak brightness which you know that looks that looks pretty bright it's got
HDR 10 plus wow so that's the peaks that you're gonna get when you're watching
something with high dynamic range the other thing is it's 120 hertz screen so
we're up to flagship standards with that it's crazy especially seeing 120 hertz
on such a small display like this going from the pixel 3 which is 60 hertz i
guess to 120 hertz on this thing it's just like a crazy difference and because
it has the latest snapdragon phone i mean i've been using this for a day or
two i have not experienced any kind of slowdown you click on something it goes
this baby flies also contributing to
that performance is the eight gigabytes of RAM that comes with default the the
699 price point is gonna get you uh
eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage but there's 256 gigs storage and
up to 16 gigs of RAM as well if you really want to spec this thing out i
don't know how expensive that one is it's probably over a thousand dollars
while we're talking about the display we were talking about this place a second ago let's do
a youtube thing i mean that's looking pretty nice
the greens are popping looks pretty sharp
there they are love those guys those dark lobsters
okay i mean
it's a phone
oh i'm already disappointed
as usual iphones are kind of like the gold standard for phone speakers right
now yeah
this definitely sounds like a little bit tinier but
is pretty good oh yeah this is a 13 pro i mean what does that start at like 1200
bucks or something so this is a thousand sustained brightness on the 13 iphone 13
pro and this has 800 sustain brightness the peak brightness is very similar this
is 1100 this is 1200. yeah they're both on max brightness now they look pretty
similar nice job ASUS all right let's talk about the cameras because they're
these big chunkers on the back of the device so i don't know which is which but one of these is a 50 megapixel main
camera and the other one is a 12 megapixel ultra wide the main camera
uses the sony imx 766 uh sensor the
ultra wide whatever one is the ultra wide uses the imx 363 which is the same
sensor used in the 6a uh 12 megapixel camera
and all of the previous pixels so maybe
zenfone was going for something where they were like okay we're going to be
drawing in some pixel fans with this let's bring back that old camera sensor
that they all know about for sure so those rear cameras can do 8k video
recording at 24 FPS 4k at 30 or 60 and
up to 120 FPS slo-mo so that's nice to see and on the front camera it's a 12
megapixel sony imx 663 sensor okay so
ASUS talked about how their camera ui is
easy to use one-handed i guess in this
scenario translates to them just using something that looks like iOS's camera
module are you guys ready look at these guys okay so that's using the regular 50
megapixel sensor on the back hey okay it's a little bit gray it's a little bit
uh you know i i think i'd like a little bit more pop in there so the main camera
is already pretty wide there and when you go to the ultra wide i mean i'm very
happy with how wide that situation is good gravy you can get the whole
situation in there one of the really cool additions that made me a bit more
excited for the zenfone 9 was that they have this like what they're calling you
know an advanced gimbal system based on some demo videos that i've seen it does
a really good job of like emulating you know kind of like one of those handheld
gimbals and to help you have even steadier photos they have this
like guide system where you have to if you keep that little ball in the circle
then you're it's saying that your videos are going to be a little smoother i want to take a
video now what do you think about that i'm going to go running
excessive shaking
on screen and said excessive shaking keep the phone stable
no
that's pretty smooth okay so even at the point where it told me excessive shaking
keep the phone stable it still looked really stable and for the selfie camera
let's take a demo shot for that yeah the colors i mean just looking at
the viewfinder here the colors are like a little
um muted for me i would like a little bit more pop not too much but like you
know on top of all the things that are so great about this phone if the camera
is just okay that's fine with me now the phone is not
perfect i'll say that right now because there's
no wireless charging that's a big annoying thing for me i wireless charge
my pixel 3 all the time it does have a 43
000 milliamp hour battery 4 300 4300
43 000 you could ride it into space i haven't charged it since i did that
charging test yesterday and it's still only at 52 percent and i've been using
it you know kind of on and off as much as i would i would use a normal phone
i'm not sure if i said it already but the zen ui that they include with these
end phones is a lot leaner it seems to me than the uh
custom Android skin that they put on the rog gaming phones it basically seems
like stock Android i mean when you go into the settings there's not a ton of
like extra crazy stuff but what i did
notice is that as you kind of dive into the settings there's just a few little
quality of life tweaks that i thought were were good like in the battery
section for example you have a battery saving mode
but they also give you a high performance mode and a way to like
customize all that ASUS has also gone out of their way to add the type of
shortcuts that i love to see in a phone for one i mentioned earlier the
power button fingerprint sensor also doubles as a
scroll uh scroll you can add scroll functionality to it i disabled uh the
swipe up and down thing where you can bring the notification bar down by
swiping on the side because i don't really like that uh but you know if you
want that there it's there and i believe you can customize it for other things
let's go see you can have check notifications so you can swipe to uh
open your notification slide you can refresh the web page so like instead of
scrolling down from the top home end of web pages i don't even know about this
that's actually seems like it would be really useful maybe i should enable that
and look at that it it's kind of finicky
i don't know if i'll have that enabled all the time but the other cool thing
about this is that you can customize the double tap action on the power
button there's also gestures you can do with uh a back double tap so right now i
think iphone has this as well but this is not a standard thing on Android
phones at all and if i've set it to double tap to open the flashlight
it did it now this is probably not useful in a small phone but they also
have an option where i think if you if you swipe down past the little
navigation pill at the bottom it'll enter one-handed mode and you can do
stuff with that and then put it back up what is this now mobile manager i didn't
even know this was a thing but i guess this is an ac one of one of the things
ASUS has added that you can optimize your your RAM and storage and stuff like
that so that's cool bell really really wants me to talk about
gaming performance on the phone because it's got the snapdragon 8 plus gen 1
which is the new chip everybody's talking about everyone who wants to play
genshin impact our fancy new Labs team did some testing on one of the zenfones
that we have here and let me tell you about it the Labs team notes that the
zenfone 9 is able to achieve 60 FPS in
some some games that they tested like real racing three and shadow fight three
but in gentian impact it couldn't quite get there it it could only manage 40 FPS
although apparently ASUS uh did some
magic development stuff and were able to make the 120 hertz display work well
with lower frame rates and games so that you don't experience micro stuttering so
that's good they also noted that during gaming the overall temperature stayed
low uh we're seeing a peak temperature of 51 degrees but it
hovered more most of the time more around 40 degrees and in my experience
that was true as well i think while i was charging it uh from 35 percent to
100 i did notice the back of the phone getting a little warm but it wasn't
anything that seemed problematic and it cooled down uh relatively quickly so
there's that okay bell just brought up something interesting that i didn't know
about so i was going to say one of the great things about the phone another great thing is that it's ip68
water and dust resistance however ASUS says on their website that it's ip68
65 because over time the ip68 protection
may degrade and then get down to 65. drop three points yeah on
one hand i'm like okay good on you ASUS for saying that but on another hand i'm
like but maybe it should just stay ip68
and okay the last kind of interesting tidbit that i wanted to say
about the zenfone 9 is that they apparently have these modular accessories there's a case that can go
on the back and then have like a magnetic attachment for either like a
little wallet thing for your cards or for a kickstand which i thought was cool
but i'm probably not gonna buy because it's probably you know more expensive than you know a comparative cheap thing
i could get on the internet but they also have this interesting like backpack
mount thing with like a retractable
connector so that's cool probably no one will get that
but hey it gave me the vibes of like lg back when they were making uh they were
they were like getting into the modular thing and they released that phone i forget what the phone was called you
could take out the bottom of the phone and you could slot in either a new
battery or there were also like there was like a camera uh module and then
there was also an audio module for like higher quality audio playback that was a
time where we had like fun innovations and phones and while the zenfone 9
doesn't quite achieve that level of quirkiness it's really nice to see that
at least one manufacturer is still taking the idea of
you know flagship quality
somewhat affordable compact phones
seriously because that's exactly what i want ASUS knew
that this is what i needed and i love them and i love you
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