I am absolutely smitten with the ASUS Zenfone 10.
It's small-ish, but it still has flagship performance,
great battery life, and just a ton of amazing features
that ASUS has actually added to it, which is why when I heard that they were making
the Zenfone 11, I was excited until I found out
that it was going to be the Zenfone 11 Ultra,
and I found out that they went big mode. And alongside the size increase is a pretty radical departure
from the two large camera lenses that we know,
and I don't know, love, maybe?
It's gone from their textured plastic back to a kind of smooth glass back,
which honestly has a decent amount of grip in the hand,
but nothing compared to this textured plastic back. It also still maintains an aluminum frame on the outside,
though this time, it's recycled aluminum because they're going eco-friendly mode,
which is great, we love it. The phone has IP68 water resistance,
and on the front has Gorilla Glass Victus II, durable, baby.
I really liked this Zen Touch button that was featured on the side of the Zenfone 10.
It ended up being your fingerprint reader, as well as like you could use it to swipe down notifications
and stuff like that. It was a multi-purpose button, and I really enjoyed that feature.
And now you have an underscreen fingerprint reader and just a normal lock button,
which is a little bit of a downer, in my opinion. Hey, look at that, an included case.
That's always a nice value add. I love looking at these cases.
Look at the size of the,
look at the size for the camera bump. There was already a huge camera bump.
You might notice that there's a crack in my camera lens here because it protrudes so much
that it's one of the easiest parts to hit the ground when it falls. Elsewhere in the box, we have a charging cable,
a USB-C to C, and they don't give you a wall plug,
which is a bummer because it looks like there's space in the box for it.
So while it stylistically is a departure from the Zenfone 10,
of what it isn't very much a departure from is the ROG phone.
It's basically the same. You can look around, you can see that there is
the volume rocker, the lock button, the antenna band, the camera bumps, the camera layout, all the same.
There are some things that they don't include like the extra USB-C port on the side,
but the bottom, you can even see that you got the USB-C port
and the headphone jack. Shout out to ASUS for keeping a headphone jack.
I love to see that. So basically they took the shell of the ROG phone
and made it a nicer phone, which is okay because the ROG phone 8 is a great phone.
I'm a gamer, but I don't like it to be like my entire personality.
So it's nice that you can kind of, you know, something that's presentable for like the parents
or something like that. I personally think the ROG phone looks a little better
just because it's got, feels a little bit more intentional. I think the camera bump placement on this is kind of ugly.
And alongside that ugly camera bump, it also brought a lot of the specs of the ROG phone 8.
The phone ships with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a top-line processor that's like a massive improvement
over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The Zenfone comes with up to 16 gigabytes of RAM
and 512 gigabytes of storage. But if you live in the US,
you only get the option of the 12 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage.
Finally, a win for the non-US people. That feels pretty good.
The screen is a 144 Hertz LTPO AMOLED display,
which means that it can go all the way down to one Hertz if there's nothing on the screen
that requires a rapid refresh rate. Now, speaking of rapid refresh rate,
that 144 Hertz number is only available in games.
When you're moving around the UI, it's just going to be at 120 Hertz.
That high refresh rate screen is also huge, 6.7 inches.
But apparently it's only a 1080 screen. It's 2400 by 1080.
I can't really tell, but that means it's probably the same resolution as this.
It looks pretty good to me. I really don't think that there's a reason to have 4K on your phone display.
It's too small. It just is. You don't need the higher pixel density.
And if it increases battery life, that's great. Speaking of battery,
the battery in this phone is 5,500 milliamp hours,
which might not seem that big for this big of a phone, but it's just the same size as the one in the ROG Phone 8,
which is a, who would have thought that that would happen?
But the Zenfone 10 has a smaller battery and it has killer battery life.
And according to the results from the lambs, this thing is a battery king.
In our longevity tests, where we watch YouTube at 1080p at a brightness of 250 nits,
the Zenfone Ultra got 22 hours and 11 minutes
of screen on time, which is insane. In comparison, the Google Pixel 8 Pro
gets just 14 hours and 11 minutes. The phone does support 65 watt fast charging,
which obviously isn't the fastest compared to like the 100 watt chargers out there.
Still pretty good, but they didn't include a charger in the box.
So we tested our battery charging with a 30 watt charger.
And in about half an hour, you'll see about 44% of your battery filled up
with a 30 watt charger, which is still pretty good, especially if that means that you get around 10 hours
of battery life remaining on the phone. The time for a full charge was around 75 minutes at 30 watts.
So still pretty good. Let's take a look at the screen. And as you can see from the top down camera,
this is a bright display. With the auto brightness on,
the screen can go as high as 2483 nits.
That'll only really happen outside with the sun shining on it, but that's crazy good.
It makes it really, really easy to use outside. If you turn the auto brightness off
and you just manually set it, the max you'll get is still a very high 1000 nits.
Let's listen to the speakers. I mean, they're pretty loud.
That's not bad.
Those are pretty good speakers.
They definitely do some processing to like make it sound even louder at the top.
But with that, this kind of makes this like a bit of a media monster. If you got this great screen on it plus great speakers.
Now the display might look good, but can you take good photos?
The biggest weakness on the Zenfone 10 is probably its camera system.
It takes photos and it takes them okay.
I think ASUS's camera software is a little bit finicky
and also they don't really have the great processing that you can find on pixels or Samsung phones.
However, they have upgraded from two sensors to three.
So now we have a 13 megapixel ultra wide camera,
a telephoto that comes in at 32 megapixels
and a main shooter that comes in at a whopping 50 megapixels.
But obviously resolution doesn't matter if the phone can do stuff very well.
I found that on the Zenfone 10 that the ultra wide was far worse of a camera
than the main sensor. And just taking a quick look
in what is pretty gnarly setting. I mean, just through the viewfinder,
you can see that the ultra wide does not handle light nearly as well as that main sensor.
And in this lighting, there's kind of a haze that comes over the telephoto lens.
Is that like, I've never really seen that before. The telephoto doesn't have a crazy
like 10 X zoom or anything like that. But in the camera app, you can go all the way up
for a digital crop to 30 times zoom. And it looks grainy.
And in terms of the camera processing, a lot of the colors kind of get mushed down
and things kind of start to look synthetic because you lose a lot of these details.
It looks competent and it's like good enough. But one thing I know from using my Zenfone
is that I really would miss the quality that I got when I was using a pixel.
Just switching over to the selfie camera, we have a 32 megapixel front sensor
and it looks pretty good in this lighting.
So on top of that, there's also a ton of AI features. Of course there's AI features because it's 2024.
And if you don't have an AI feature, I mean, what are you?
Oh, there's AI smart search for your photos. It's gonna use object recognition
to search through your photos for you. Apparently you can also search for apps
which again, doesn't sound like AI or you can deep and smart search for settings.
Okay, the portrait video is an interesting feature. Basically, it's supposed to allow you
to have like a depth of field effect where it'll focus on a certain face
and then it'll do a processed blur all around it.
They have a six axis gimbal for your video so you can get really steady motion
and it works quite well. I'm gonna make sure that we have it set up here.
The hyper steady will limit the resolutions that you can record at probably
because it's going to be doing some sort of cropping at the edges so that you can get more balanced.
So you aren't able to shoot at the 8K 24 frames per second that the phone is capable of.
So I don't know why you're taking 8K video. It can also do 4K 60 on the video.
Let's see how good it is. Let's see. It's pretty good.
That's pretty stable. Let's take a look at the regular video quality
which Lab specifically said was actually quite good.
With the student normal stabilization. Just from the viewfinder things
are actually looking quite good. Colors seem accurate. There's not a ton of noise
when I look at the darker scenes. It seems like the mic is pretty sensitive to noise
to like being bumped and stuff though. Maybe something to note.
But again, it's a competent camera. It would be interesting to see if installing GCam
could maybe like give you an extra edge in terms of photo processing.
But who knows? What I know is I want a game on this.
Despite this not being an ROG phone you still get to take advantage
of like the game genie features that are on the ROG phone 8
which includes stuff like setting frame rate limits or increasing your overall performance
like and not worrying about the heat. However, I think Lab saw from testing
that if you let this thing go absolutely unhinged it gets really hot and it can be uncomfortable to hold.
And honestly, apparently the performance holds pretty steady
even at like not full tilt. You see you can adjust the refresh rate.
Bunch of other stuff. You can do macros picture in picture
if you want a video over top. You can speed up the systems optimized now boys.
We're playing Genshin Impact on high settings.
And it's not quite at the full resolution of the screen
but it is definitely good enough. And we are seeing a pretty solid 60 FPS
even in a busy scene like this castle town area.
And Labs confirms that it plays well. Apparently it runs warmer than the ROG phone in most settings
but you still get a pretty consistent near 60 FPS with 58 average frames per second
in this specific area of the game on a 30 minute play session.
The performance mode offered slightly higher frame rates at higher quality settings
but the thermal management of the SOC would throttle the phone down to about 50% performance
and it kind of made things worse. So they recommend that you keep it in dynamic mode
as opposed to going for the performance mode which you can all control through the game genie.
Zero complaints about gaming performance. It's just a solid chip set. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a heck of a chip.
One thing that I find very frustrating about their software is that their display settings
they have this thing called Splendid. Like what does any of this mean?
Should my phone be an optimal, natural or standard?
It's useless. The correct answer is that you want it at natural
and you want to turn it a little bit warmer.
That's enough of me griping. Nice things to have on here, Wi-Fi 7
as well as they have like a dual band mode that's really sick. So you can get a really stable Wi-Fi connection on here.
They also have Bluetooth 5.4 which means it supports a lot of the upcoming
Bluetooth features like a Bluetooth low energy audio
and the AuraCast stuff. So great for a future proof phone.
The big thing about this phone is that it's nice, it's competent, it's capable.
But outside of its battery life, it doesn't really excel where any large flagship phones don't.
The cameras are not as good as the ones that you can find on iPhones or Pixels
or Galaxy S, whatever the number is at now.
The software experience is good.
I'm a big fan of it, but is not say as gimmicky
or as doesn't have the really cool features that Pixel can bring.
Another thing is that you get two major OS updates in four years of security updates,
but that's not really great when competitors are offering a lot more.
And the biggest killer feature for me, which was the size being so reasonable as has been gone.
And now we have like another big phone. I guess if this is what ASUS needs to do
to remain in the market and succeed in selling more phones,
I guess that's good because I love a lot of what ASUS does
with their phones and I love that there's more competition in the space, but like it's gonna suffer
from the same flaws that this phone has and that like I can't find a good case for this
or I cracked this lens and I can't find a replacement part for it. And I don't wanna have to like send it into ASUS
to get it fixed. I would love to be able to just swap the lens out myself.
And that's because it's a small volume phone.
I just worry that this phone no longer has enough differentiation to make it worth buying over a OnePlus
or a Pixel or an iPhone.
And the price is $900 US dollars, which is like pretty high up there.
I mean, this was not a cheap phone either, but again, that's a very, very competitive territory
where you're seeing a lot of the best phones on the market sitting at.
After using the phone, I am less disappointed than I thought I would be,
but I still feel a little bit of a betrayal for ASUS leaving the small phone market.
I'm hoping that because there's a suffix, maybe there will be a Zenfone 11 non-ultra
that will be small and not sacrifice too many of the specs,
but I'm not holding my breath and I'll keep holding on to this banger of a phone.
I love you. And I love you for watching ShortCircuit.
If you liked this video, why don't you check out Mr. Jake Belivance's video
on the Zenfone 10?