WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.440 I am absolutely smitten with the ASUS Zenfone 10. 00:00:03.440 --> 00:00:07.160 It's small-ish, but it still has flagship performance, 00:00:07.160 --> 00:00:10.240 great battery life, and just a ton of amazing features 00:00:10.240 --> 00:00:13.280 that ASUS has actually added to it, which is why when I heard that they were making 00:00:13.280 --> 00:00:16.760 the Zenfone 11, I was excited until I found out 00:00:16.760 --> 00:00:20.020 that it was going to be the Zenfone 11 Ultra, 00:00:20.020 --> 00:00:26.960 and I found out that they went big mode. And alongside the size increase is a pretty radical departure 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:30.600 from the two large camera lenses that we know, 00:00:30.600 --> 00:00:33.680 and I don't know, love, maybe? 00:00:33.680 --> 00:00:38.080 It's gone from their textured plastic back to a kind of smooth glass back, 00:00:38.080 --> 00:00:41.800 which honestly has a decent amount of grip in the hand, 00:00:41.800 --> 00:00:47.600 but nothing compared to this textured plastic back. It also still maintains an aluminum frame on the outside, 00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:52.000 though this time, it's recycled aluminum because they're going eco-friendly mode, 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:55.640 which is great, we love it. The phone has IP68 water resistance, 00:00:55.640 --> 00:00:59.840 and on the front has Gorilla Glass Victus II, durable, baby. 00:00:59.840 --> 00:01:04.520 I really liked this Zen Touch button that was featured on the side of the Zenfone 10. 00:01:04.520 --> 00:01:08.560 It ended up being your fingerprint reader, as well as like you could use it to swipe down notifications 00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:12.880 and stuff like that. It was a multi-purpose button, and I really enjoyed that feature. 00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:17.120 And now you have an underscreen fingerprint reader and just a normal lock button, 00:01:17.120 --> 00:01:21.720 which is a little bit of a downer, in my opinion. Hey, look at that, an included case. 00:01:21.720 --> 00:01:25.840 That's always a nice value add. I love looking at these cases. 00:01:25.840 --> 00:01:29.000 Look at the size of the, 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:32.320 look at the size for the camera bump. There was already a huge camera bump. 00:01:32.320 --> 00:01:37.400 You might notice that there's a crack in my camera lens here because it protrudes so much 00:01:37.400 --> 00:01:43.280 that it's one of the easiest parts to hit the ground when it falls. Elsewhere in the box, we have a charging cable, 00:01:43.280 --> 00:01:47.040 a USB-C to C, and they don't give you a wall plug, 00:01:47.040 --> 00:01:50.940 which is a bummer because it looks like there's space in the box for it. 00:01:50.940 --> 00:01:54.840 So while it stylistically is a departure from the Zenfone 10, 00:01:54.840 --> 00:01:59.120 of what it isn't very much a departure from is the ROG phone. 00:01:59.120 --> 00:02:03.360 It's basically the same. You can look around, you can see that there is 00:02:03.360 --> 00:02:09.400 the volume rocker, the lock button, the antenna band, the camera bumps, the camera layout, all the same. 00:02:09.400 --> 00:02:13.160 There are some things that they don't include like the extra USB-C port on the side, 00:02:13.160 --> 00:02:16.600 but the bottom, you can even see that you got the USB-C port 00:02:16.600 --> 00:02:20.360 and the headphone jack. Shout out to ASUS for keeping a headphone jack. 00:02:20.360 --> 00:02:26.800 I love to see that. So basically they took the shell of the ROG phone 00:02:26.960 --> 00:02:32.960 and made it a nicer phone, which is okay because the ROG phone 8 is a great phone. 00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:36.080 I'm a gamer, but I don't like it to be like my entire personality. 00:02:36.080 --> 00:02:40.240 So it's nice that you can kind of, you know, something that's presentable for like the parents 00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:44.720 or something like that. I personally think the ROG phone looks a little better 00:02:44.720 --> 00:02:49.960 just because it's got, feels a little bit more intentional. I think the camera bump placement on this is kind of ugly. 00:02:49.960 --> 00:02:54.440 And alongside that ugly camera bump, it also brought a lot of the specs of the ROG phone 8. 00:02:54.440 --> 00:02:59.920 The phone ships with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a top-line processor that's like a massive improvement 00:02:59.920 --> 00:03:04.240 over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The Zenfone comes with up to 16 gigabytes of RAM 00:03:04.240 --> 00:03:07.380 and 512 gigabytes of storage. But if you live in the US, 00:03:07.380 --> 00:03:13.240 you only get the option of the 12 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage. 00:03:13.240 --> 00:03:17.680 Finally, a win for the non-US people. That feels pretty good. 00:03:17.720 --> 00:03:22.560 The screen is a 144 Hertz LTPO AMOLED display, 00:03:22.560 --> 00:03:26.440 which means that it can go all the way down to one Hertz if there's nothing on the screen 00:03:26.440 --> 00:03:30.080 that requires a rapid refresh rate. Now, speaking of rapid refresh rate, 00:03:30.080 --> 00:03:33.400 that 144 Hertz number is only available in games. 00:03:33.400 --> 00:03:37.800 When you're moving around the UI, it's just going to be at 120 Hertz. 00:03:37.800 --> 00:03:42.720 That high refresh rate screen is also huge, 6.7 inches. 00:03:42.720 --> 00:03:47.520 But apparently it's only a 1080 screen. It's 2400 by 1080. 00:03:47.520 --> 00:03:51.560 I can't really tell, but that means it's probably the same resolution as this. 00:03:51.560 --> 00:03:57.880 It looks pretty good to me. I really don't think that there's a reason to have 4K on your phone display. 00:03:57.880 --> 00:04:01.280 It's too small. It just is. You don't need the higher pixel density. 00:04:01.280 --> 00:04:05.320 And if it increases battery life, that's great. Speaking of battery, 00:04:05.320 --> 00:04:08.560 the battery in this phone is 5,500 milliamp hours, 00:04:08.560 --> 00:04:13.240 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, 00:04:13.240 --> 00:04:16.780 which is a, who would have thought that that would happen? 00:04:16.780 --> 00:04:20.940 But the Zenfone 10 has a smaller battery and it has killer battery life. 00:04:20.940 --> 00:04:25.580 And according to the results from the lambs, this thing is a battery king. 00:04:25.580 --> 00:04:30.860 In our longevity tests, where we watch YouTube at 1080p at a brightness of 250 nits, 00:04:30.860 --> 00:04:35.860 the Zenfone Ultra got 22 hours and 11 minutes 00:04:36.060 --> 00:04:40.700 of screen on time, which is insane. In comparison, the Google Pixel 8 Pro 00:04:40.700 --> 00:04:45.340 gets just 14 hours and 11 minutes. The phone does support 65 watt fast charging, 00:04:45.340 --> 00:04:48.980 which obviously isn't the fastest compared to like the 100 watt chargers out there. 00:04:48.980 --> 00:04:52.020 Still pretty good, but they didn't include a charger in the box. 00:04:52.020 --> 00:04:55.860 So we tested our battery charging with a 30 watt charger. 00:04:55.860 --> 00:05:00.580 And in about half an hour, you'll see about 44% of your battery filled up 00:05:00.580 --> 00:05:05.780 with a 30 watt charger, which is still pretty good, especially if that means that you get around 10 hours 00:05:05.780 --> 00:05:10.380 of battery life remaining on the phone. The time for a full charge was around 75 minutes at 30 watts. 00:05:10.380 --> 00:05:14.580 So still pretty good. Let's take a look at the screen. And as you can see from the top down camera, 00:05:14.580 --> 00:05:18.260 this is a bright display. With the auto brightness on, 00:05:18.260 --> 00:05:23.260 the screen can go as high as 2483 nits. 00:05:23.420 --> 00:05:27.700 That'll only really happen outside with the sun shining on it, but that's crazy good. 00:05:27.700 --> 00:05:31.680 It makes it really, really easy to use outside. If you turn the auto brightness off 00:05:31.680 --> 00:05:36.900 and you just manually set it, the max you'll get is still a very high 1000 nits. 00:05:36.900 --> 00:05:40.980 Let's listen to the speakers. I mean, they're pretty loud. 00:05:44.740 --> 00:05:49.060 That's not bad. 00:05:49.060 --> 00:05:50.660 Those are pretty good speakers. 00:05:52.260 --> 00:05:56.300 They definitely do some processing to like make it sound even louder at the top. 00:05:56.300 --> 00:06:02.620 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. 00:06:02.620 --> 00:06:06.460 Now the display might look good, but can you take good photos? 00:06:06.460 --> 00:06:09.780 The biggest weakness on the Zenfone 10 is probably its camera system. 00:06:09.780 --> 00:06:14.300 It takes photos and it takes them okay. 00:06:14.300 --> 00:06:17.300 I think ASUS's camera software is a little bit finicky 00:06:17.300 --> 00:06:23.340 and also they don't really have the great processing that you can find on pixels or Samsung phones. 00:06:23.340 --> 00:06:27.280 However, they have upgraded from two sensors to three. 00:06:27.280 --> 00:06:31.200 So now we have a 13 megapixel ultra wide camera, 00:06:31.200 --> 00:06:35.480 a telephoto that comes in at 32 megapixels 00:06:35.480 --> 00:06:39.680 and a main shooter that comes in at a whopping 50 megapixels. 00:06:39.680 --> 00:06:44.280 But obviously resolution doesn't matter if the phone can do stuff very well. 00:06:44.280 --> 00:06:50.620 I found that on the Zenfone 10 that the ultra wide was far worse of a camera 00:06:50.620 --> 00:06:54.000 than the main sensor. And just taking a quick look 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:57.040 in what is pretty gnarly setting. I mean, just through the viewfinder, 00:06:57.040 --> 00:07:02.880 you can see that the ultra wide does not handle light nearly as well as that main sensor. 00:07:02.880 --> 00:07:07.040 And in this lighting, there's kind of a haze that comes over the telephoto lens. 00:07:07.040 --> 00:07:10.840 Is that like, I've never really seen that before. The telephoto doesn't have a crazy 00:07:10.840 --> 00:07:15.240 like 10 X zoom or anything like that. But in the camera app, you can go all the way up 00:07:15.240 --> 00:07:20.580 for a digital crop to 30 times zoom. And it looks grainy. 00:07:20.580 --> 00:07:25.360 And in terms of the camera processing, a lot of the colors kind of get mushed down 00:07:25.360 --> 00:07:29.460 and things kind of start to look synthetic because you lose a lot of these details. 00:07:29.460 --> 00:07:34.080 It looks competent and it's like good enough. But one thing I know from using my Zenfone 00:07:34.080 --> 00:07:39.280 is that I really would miss the quality that I got when I was using a pixel. 00:07:39.280 --> 00:07:43.640 Just switching over to the selfie camera, we have a 32 megapixel front sensor 00:07:43.640 --> 00:07:47.960 and it looks pretty good in this lighting. 00:07:47.960 --> 00:07:54.240 So on top of that, there's also a ton of AI features. Of course there's AI features because it's 2024. 00:07:54.240 --> 00:07:57.340 And if you don't have an AI feature, I mean, what are you? 00:07:57.340 --> 00:08:00.620 Oh, there's AI smart search for your photos. It's gonna use object recognition 00:08:00.620 --> 00:08:03.880 to search through your photos for you. Apparently you can also search for apps 00:08:03.880 --> 00:08:08.200 which again, doesn't sound like AI or you can deep and smart search for settings. 00:08:08.200 --> 00:08:12.480 Okay, the portrait video is an interesting feature. Basically, it's supposed to allow you 00:08:12.480 --> 00:08:16.820 to have like a depth of field effect where it'll focus on a certain face 00:08:16.820 --> 00:08:20.460 and then it'll do a processed blur all around it. 00:08:20.460 --> 00:08:24.600 They have a six axis gimbal for your video so you can get really steady motion 00:08:24.600 --> 00:08:28.760 and it works quite well. I'm gonna make sure that we have it set up here. 00:08:28.760 --> 00:08:31.900 The hyper steady will limit the resolutions that you can record at probably 00:08:31.900 --> 00:08:35.600 because it's going to be doing some sort of cropping at the edges so that you can get more balanced. 00:08:35.600 --> 00:08:39.780 So you aren't able to shoot at the 8K 24 frames per second that the phone is capable of. 00:08:39.800 --> 00:08:43.400 So I don't know why you're taking 8K video. It can also do 4K 60 on the video. 00:08:43.400 --> 00:08:46.760 Let's see how good it is. Let's see. It's pretty good. 00:08:46.760 --> 00:08:49.840 That's pretty stable. Let's take a look at the regular video quality 00:08:49.840 --> 00:08:53.440 which Lab specifically said was actually quite good. 00:08:53.440 --> 00:08:56.440 With the student normal stabilization. Just from the viewfinder things 00:08:56.440 --> 00:09:00.840 are actually looking quite good. Colors seem accurate. There's not a ton of noise 00:09:01.720 --> 00:09:05.880 when I look at the darker scenes. It seems like the mic is pretty sensitive to noise 00:09:05.880 --> 00:09:08.960 to like being bumped and stuff though. Maybe something to note. 00:09:08.960 --> 00:09:13.540 But again, it's a competent camera. It would be interesting to see if installing GCam 00:09:13.540 --> 00:09:17.100 could maybe like give you an extra edge in terms of photo processing. 00:09:17.100 --> 00:09:21.700 But who knows? What I know is I want a game on this. 00:09:21.700 --> 00:09:25.380 Despite this not being an ROG phone you still get to take advantage 00:09:25.380 --> 00:09:29.460 of like the game genie features that are on the ROG phone 8 00:09:29.460 --> 00:09:34.220 which includes stuff like setting frame rate limits or increasing your overall performance 00:09:34.220 --> 00:09:38.540 like and not worrying about the heat. However, I think Lab saw from testing 00:09:38.920 --> 00:09:43.520 that if you let this thing go absolutely unhinged it gets really hot and it can be uncomfortable to hold. 00:09:43.520 --> 00:09:48.240 And honestly, apparently the performance holds pretty steady 00:09:48.240 --> 00:09:52.960 even at like not full tilt. You see you can adjust the refresh rate. 00:09:52.960 --> 00:09:56.400 Bunch of other stuff. You can do macros picture in picture 00:09:56.400 --> 00:10:01.160 if you want a video over top. You can speed up the systems optimized now boys. 00:10:01.160 --> 00:10:04.600 We're playing Genshin Impact on high settings. 00:10:04.600 --> 00:10:07.720 And it's not quite at the full resolution of the screen 00:10:07.740 --> 00:10:14.300 but it is definitely good enough. And we are seeing a pretty solid 60 FPS 00:10:14.300 --> 00:10:17.300 even in a busy scene like this castle town area. 00:10:17.300 --> 00:10:22.560 And Labs confirms that it plays well. Apparently it runs warmer than the ROG phone in most settings 00:10:22.560 --> 00:10:27.860 but you still get a pretty consistent near 60 FPS with 58 average frames per second 00:10:27.860 --> 00:10:31.780 in this specific area of the game on a 30 minute play session. 00:10:31.780 --> 00:10:34.940 The performance mode offered slightly higher frame rates at higher quality settings 00:10:34.940 --> 00:10:40.000 but the thermal management of the SOC would throttle the phone down to about 50% performance 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:44.400 and it kind of made things worse. So they recommend that you keep it in dynamic mode 00:10:44.400 --> 00:10:47.800 as opposed to going for the performance mode which you can all control through the game genie. 00:10:47.800 --> 00:10:54.000 Zero complaints about gaming performance. It's just a solid chip set. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a heck of a chip. 00:10:54.000 --> 00:10:58.640 One thing that I find very frustrating about their software is that their display settings 00:10:58.640 --> 00:11:02.640 they have this thing called Splendid. Like what does any of this mean? 00:11:02.640 --> 00:11:05.800 Should my phone be an optimal, natural or standard? 00:11:05.820 --> 00:11:09.260 It's useless. The correct answer is that you want it at natural 00:11:09.260 --> 00:11:11.460 and you want to turn it a little bit warmer. 00:11:12.660 --> 00:11:15.700 That's enough of me griping. Nice things to have on here, Wi-Fi 7 00:11:15.700 --> 00:11:20.100 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. 00:11:20.100 --> 00:11:23.300 They also have Bluetooth 5.4 which means it supports a lot of the upcoming 00:11:23.300 --> 00:11:26.780 Bluetooth features like a Bluetooth low energy audio 00:11:26.780 --> 00:11:32.140 and the AuraCast stuff. So great for a future proof phone. 00:11:32.140 --> 00:11:37.040 The big thing about this phone is that it's nice, it's competent, it's capable. 00:11:37.040 --> 00:11:42.480 But outside of its battery life, it doesn't really excel where any large flagship phones don't. 00:11:42.480 --> 00:11:47.360 The cameras are not as good as the ones that you can find on iPhones or Pixels 00:11:47.360 --> 00:11:51.200 or Galaxy S, whatever the number is at now. 00:11:51.200 --> 00:11:54.440 The software experience is good. 00:11:54.440 --> 00:11:58.960 I'm a big fan of it, but is not say as gimmicky 00:11:58.960 --> 00:12:02.680 or as doesn't have the really cool features that Pixel can bring. 00:12:02.680 --> 00:12:06.540 Another thing is that you get two major OS updates in four years of security updates, 00:12:06.540 --> 00:12:10.740 but that's not really great when competitors are offering a lot more. 00:12:10.740 --> 00:12:16.460 And the biggest killer feature for me, which was the size being so reasonable as has been gone. 00:12:16.460 --> 00:12:21.220 And now we have like another big phone. I guess if this is what ASUS needs to do 00:12:21.220 --> 00:12:25.620 to remain in the market and succeed in selling more phones, 00:12:25.620 --> 00:12:28.660 I guess that's good because I love a lot of what ASUS does 00:12:28.660 --> 00:12:33.500 with their phones and I love that there's more competition in the space, but like it's gonna suffer 00:12:33.500 --> 00:12:37.940 from the same flaws that this phone has and that like I can't find a good case for this 00:12:37.940 --> 00:12:43.140 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 00:12:43.140 --> 00:12:47.180 to get it fixed. I would love to be able to just swap the lens out myself. 00:12:47.180 --> 00:12:50.420 And that's because it's a small volume phone. 00:12:50.420 --> 00:12:57.380 I just worry that this phone no longer has enough differentiation to make it worth buying over a OnePlus 00:12:57.380 --> 00:13:00.480 or a Pixel or an iPhone. 00:13:00.480 --> 00:13:04.380 And the price is $900 US dollars, which is like pretty high up there. 00:13:04.380 --> 00:13:09.020 I mean, this was not a cheap phone either, but again, that's a very, very competitive territory 00:13:09.020 --> 00:13:12.900 where you're seeing a lot of the best phones on the market sitting at. 00:13:12.900 --> 00:13:16.500 After using the phone, I am less disappointed than I thought I would be, 00:13:16.500 --> 00:13:22.440 but I still feel a little bit of a betrayal for ASUS leaving the small phone market. 00:13:22.440 --> 00:13:26.220 I'm hoping that because there's a suffix, maybe there will be a Zenfone 11 non-ultra 00:13:26.220 --> 00:13:30.660 that will be small and not sacrifice too many of the specs, 00:13:30.700 --> 00:13:37.060 but I'm not holding my breath and I'll keep holding on to this banger of a phone. 00:13:37.060 --> 00:13:40.940 I love you. And I love you for watching ShortCircuit. 00:13:40.940 --> 00:13:44.700 If you liked this video, why don't you check out Mr. Jake Belivance's video 00:13:44.700 --> 00:13:46.380 on the Zenfone 10?