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Asus recently released their Zenfone 3 series and got a good response as well. One of those series was the Zenfone 3 Max. And now, Asus has prepared up to improve it to justify the word “Max” with its successor, the Zenfone 3S Max. But is it better than the Zenfone 3 Max? Let’s make out a full verdict to know more about it.
Asus Zenfone 3s Max Review
contents
DESIGN
The Zenfone 3S Max looks different from the Zenfone 3 Max but feels the same as its predecessor. The smooth metal like plastic body feels slippery but not much. The device isn’t much too heavy nor too much light for its price.
To the right of the phone, we get the volume rockers and power button and the left side of the device there comes the SIM tray. We don’t get capacitive buttons here since they’re on-screen navigation keys now. On the front, we have the fingerprint sensor at the bottom which also acts as a home button. I didn’t get what Asus has done here like when there are capacitive buttons, then what is the need of fingerprint with a home button. Other than that, we get the earpiece, proximity sensor and the front camera, and the Asus logo above.
Turning the phone around, we can see the antenna band resembling with that of iPhone 7. Other than that, we get the camera and LED flash with a noise-cancelling mic in between to the top left side and the Asus logo in the center. On the bottom side, we’re still missing the USB Type-C port and that’s why we have the standard USB port along with the speakers aside whereas on the top we can find our most familiar 3.5mm audio jack.
It doesn’t feel heavy nor bulky, it just looks crazy beautiful. As far now, I’m loving the design very much. The phone feels solid and great. The 2.5D curved glass on the display and the metal making a curve to the sides makeover an almost seamless edge. I’ve to say it again that I’m much more comfortable with 5.2-inch size rather than the 5.5-inch devices. Overall in terms of design, I am very much impressed.
DISPLAY
We get a 5.2-inch HD (720 x 1280) IPS display here with 2.5D curved glass protection and it definitely looks great. The display is nice and crispy but I have a small problem with that. The icons look way to bigger than its predecessor. But thank god that it comes with Nougat to tweak up the DPI.
The 5.2 inches display on paper might look very small but in the real world, I would say it is a perfect size to hold in hands. I’ve big hands so I didn’t have any problems while reaching the corners of the display. Overall, the display is crispy and I like it as well.
SOFTWARE
This the place where the things change. This the first Asus device to come with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box which is a pleasant surprise for me. And I was happy to know that it was actually running Nougat out of the box and I love the way it looks with Zen UI on top of it. The UI looks much better than the one on the Marshmallow. Unlike the other Chinese UIs, the ZenUI is relatively light when you compare it to some of the Chinese counterparts, and offers a lot of customization options as well. It comes with an app drawer too which I didn’t expect at all. One of the big issues with the UI though is the sheer number of preloaded Asus apps on the smartphone.
To give you an idea, when we started the smartphone for the first time, the Play Store had to update almost 20-30 apps. The company has separate apps for most of the functions, including a dialer, clock, camera and contact list to name a few. And that being said, it gives the phone a better efficiency over that. But few tweaks like, Glove mode are missing in here in Nougat. I hope they’ll bring it back with an update. The Zen UI works very smooth as hell and I don’t have any complaints about it here. Great work Asus! But please do try to remove that bloatware if you can. Sorry to say but, it annoys a lot. I’m very impressed now and think that Zen UI is getting much better and better.
PERFORMANCE
Under the hood, we get the MediaTek MT6750 octa-core chipset clocked at 1.51 GHz along with Mali-T860 GPU with 3 GB of RAM. We get an internal storage of 32 GB which can be expanded via a microSD card slot embedded into the 2nd SIM slot making the phone being support Hybrid Dual SIM option. The fingerprint is very quick without any delay but there is a small glitch with that. You need to either press the fingerprint button or the lock button to wake up the device and then only you can use the fingerprint. It’s okay once you get used to that quite after some time.
The combination is good enough to ensure a great performance and it is quite even better from its predecessor also. There were very few lags while gaming. I tested most of the high-end games I play every day like Assassin’s Creed: Identity, Asphalt 8, N.O.V.A 3, Dead Trigger 2, Pokemon Go, etc. Take a look at the benchmark scores to get an overview. As per my benchmarks, it looks like that the Zenfone 3S Max is a slightly incremental upgrade from the Zenfone 3 Max.
CAMERA
The camera looks like that it haven’t been changed from its predecessor at all. We get the same 13 MP rear camera with f/2.2 aperture and LED flash. The pictures taken with it looks dull and the colors are washed out as well. They do look great but very high saturation brings up too much bright images. Also, the focusing speed is very slow and sometimes, it doesn’t even properly focus. And that means I am very disappointed about the camera here. I don’t know what happens sometimes, it turns up with good pictures. Taking the camera to the night time, we get the night mode option which boosts up the ISO and which technically results into a noisy image.
Turning it around, we get a 8 MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture. And if I have to say one word about it, then I would say it is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. I mean it’s the same that we saw on the Zenfone 3 Max which results in a bad impression again. Even on bright lighting, the selfies turn out to be very dull but they have got this so called beauty mode which works great sometimes and most of the times it doesn’t.
For a better overview, take a look at the images provided below of both the rear and front cameras.
Rear Camera
Front Camera
BATTERY
Here’s the part where the phone outshines again and beats the Zenfone 3 Max, again. The Zenfone 3S Max comes with a 5,000 mAh non-removable Li-Po battery and it actually delivers a good amount of battery life and is better than the one I saw on the Redmi 3S and 3S Prime.
I got it run for about 42 hours with my heavy usage even on VoLTE of the Jio network. I made some calls as well as used apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter, and streamed music while running other everyday tasks and also used the camera occasionally. The battery life overall was good enough to last me 2 days with heavy usage. The phone charges in about 3-4 hours and it’s obvious since it comes with a huge battery.
VERDICT
The phone does perform very well and I think it’s a much better incremental upgrade than I expected. If you’re out to buy a new phone who needs a massive amount of battery life then you can get this blindly. The best part is that runs Nougat out of the box which is a pleasant surprise. The phone is priced at Rs 14999 which is on the higher side considering the competition.
If you want other options, check out the best smartphones under 15000 Rs
