The New Asus Zenfone Max Review – Battery Problem? No Way!

Think of a situation that you’ve to text or call someone immediately and by that time your phone dies. That’s the time where your things get much harder. So, that’s why smartphone companies have been trying to get the most out of battery for very fewer bucks. And in this race, here comes the new Zenfone Max. A really very hardcore beast when we talk about the battery. This lower mid-range smartphone costs Rs. 9,999 for 2 GB RAM variant & Rs 12999 for 3GB RAMvariantt and is distinguishable by its large 5000mAh battery. It’s considerably cheaper and has a specification sheet that is geared towards achieving maximum power efficiency. Is the New ZenFone Max the energy efficient Android smartphone that you need? Let’s find out in our review.

DESIGN AND FEEL

The Asus Zenfone Max sticks with the same old design of the other Zenfone phones. The phone has a rounded gold plastic strip running along the sides, with a slight rounding off on the back panel which helps with grip and feel. The phone’s black version comes with leather texture while the white version comes with a smooth finish. This strategy was a bit of a hit-or-miss, and users either loved it or hated it. With a huge battery underneath, the smartphone weighs 202 grams, you can feel it weighing down in your palms. It is, however, a small sacrifice for the kind of battery life the device offers. But more on that later. Overall, the Zenfone Max feels well built, sturdy and not a cheap device by any means.

By the way, there’s nothing to be disappointed in terms of design as everything looks good straight forward.

HARDWARE ,DISPLAY, AND PERFORMANCE

The Zenfone Max comes with a 5.5 inch Full HD Display which is 1280×780 resolution with 267ppi pixel density.  The size of the display and the relatively low resolution affects the sharpness, and viewing angles aren’t that great either. It feels Asus went for this size only to be able to accommodate the battery. In sunlight, it looks straight away good too but you just need to put up the brightness to the top to get visibility in sunlight.

Coming to the processor, the Zenfone Max runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor with 2 GB RAM/3GB RAM and Adreno 405 GPU. This set of specifications will surely not light any benchmark charts on fire, but it does a decent job in a day-to-day scenario. Nearly all the apps you would use daily are easily handled by the smartphone, and as is multi-tasking to an extent. The New Zenfone max performs quite well compared to its predecessor. Most games played well without any lag. Few frame drops while playing high-end gaming but expect better performance in 3 GB RAM variant. There was an issue while lifting calls but it can be solved in upcoming updates.  The overall Performance was quite good compared to earlier Max.

BATTERY

Under the hood, you get a 5,000 mAh battery which is not removable and is also this phone’s important feature. I am full hardcore phone user. I used this phone from waking up at 5 AM to the time I went to bed by 2 AM and there was still 19% left which made me right into goosebumps. But as we know, “With Super Powers, comes greater responsibility”, the phone takes about 3-4 hours to charge from 0 to 100%. But that’s fair as it’s a really really big battery. Also, there comes an OTG cable in the package too to charge up other devices too and that was really crazy.

This makes me say that I’m really impressed by the battery over there.

SOFTWARE

The phone runs on Android Marshmallow 6.0 and on the top of it there is the ZenUI skin. 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. There are also few tweaks out there like the One Handed mode, Glove mode and much more done to the Lollipop.

The Zen UI works very smooth as hell and I don’t have any complaints over here. Great work Asus! ?

CAMERA

The Zenfone Max uses the same 13-megapixel camera and laser autofocus system same as the ZenFone 2 Laser. The 5-megapixel front camera is also the same, and both cameras are capable of recording 1080p video. The rear camera has a dual-tone LED flash as well. The cameras also come with a plethora of shooting modes like manual, HDR, panorama, beautification, low light, night, depth of field, slow motion, time lapse, miniature and smart remove among others.

The primary camera’s performance is a mixed bag of sorts. If you were to step out in the afternoon under harsh sunlight, the camera struggles to correctly measure the well-lit and dark areas, and the resultant photos are more often than not washed out. In a more balanced setting, though, the camera is able to capture some great shots with enough details and color reproduction. The camera is surprisingly good indoors as well and with the laser autofocus, it is quick to focus on subjects and shoots quite detailed photos. You will, however, have to deal with a bit of noise when lighting conditions are poor.

The selfie camera up front is satisfactory at best. You get beautification options along with selfie panorama, night, HDR and low light among others. The photos you click using the front camera don’t give you much to complain about and are good enough to be shared on social media without the need for any edits.

You can check out samples below here!

FINAL WORDS

The ZenFone Max is designed around optimizing energy usage, and apart from being significantly heavier, sticks to the ZenFone aesthetic in all other ways. This is a phone that offers a decent design, acceptable performance for the price, a decent primary camera and absolutely stellar battery life at a competitive price point. But if you’re on a budget and need a smartphone that you can count on to power you through your day, look no further. The Asus ZenFone Max is your answer to battery issues. And also, this gets me in a small doubt too. Why didn’t Asus Zenfone 2 Laser had the same battery performance? This may have saved a lot of bucks for Asus too rather than making a completely new device to release it into the market as Zenfone Max. At last, I can say is you can rather go for Zenfone Max better than the Zenfone 2 Laser as they both share the same specs except the battery which is quite more in Zenfone Max. It is the best mobile under 10000 with massive battery life.

You can get the  New Zenfone Max from Flipkart