Asus Zenfone 9: The New Compact King!

hey what's up mkbhd here so if you're one of those people who has ever thought wow seems like all the phones coming out these days look and feel the same well this one's for you because this is one of the most contrarian against the grain set of features i've seen in a new phone in a long time so this is the asus zenfone 9 and the more you look around this phone the more you see it's just not like very many other phones first of all flagship phones these days are getting bigger and bigger than ever we know this this phone is actually refreshingly compact it has slightly bigger bezels but those are around a 5.9 inch display so maybe not many but pretty close and that translates to so many little things just feeling smaller in the pocket smaller in the hand obviously reachability of the whole display is easier it's great and then you already know most flagships these days are working with glass they're usually pretty shiny and glossy backs this one is plastic but it is a sort of a nice textured uh softer touch plastic bag it's not quite the rough sandstone of the classic oneplus phones but it is somewhere in between it's got a little more grip which combined with the flat aluminum sides of this phone are quite nice to hold plus it has all these little design cues you know the little notch cut out around the metal of the power button the little bits of text on the back of the phone not full-on rog phone levels of text but it is something and the notch cut out around what is that oh yes a headphone jack yet another piece of this phone that you just don't see very often in many new phones out there plus just when's the last time you saw a red phone the only thing i don't like about this design might just be that the size of the camera bumps makes the whole thing rock when it's flat on a table but we'll get to those cameras in a second a lot of phones have been moving their fingerprint readers to underneath the display which fair they've gotten pretty good lately maybe haven't improved that much in the last year or two asus said you know what we're going to take this power button and we're going to double it as our fingerprint reader but not only that we're going to have it triple as a smart key so you can customize both a double press and a long press to start a quick action you can start google assistant with it or open literally whatever app you want and then not only that we're also going to have it quadruple has a reachability hack where you can swipe the button down to pull the notification shade down at any time anywhere from any screen just like samsung did back in the day with the galaxy s10e i think it was and asus has really gone the extra mile just to make sure you can reach everything on the phone with one hand they've also got a little edge tool to let you quickly launch apps with your thumb from the side what else do most normal flagship phones have these days i think you could argue a pretty heavily customized software experience is pretty common i'm happy to report though that asus is taking the opposite approach with a fairly lightweight just couple of additions on top of nearly stock android so zen ui which is what it's called just adds a couple things here and there and it's doing wonders for this phone first of all for performance i mean there's no real bloatware here things are pretty light this phone also has a 120 hertz display and combined with the top of the line snapdragon 8 plus gen 1 and 8 to 16 gigs of ram things have been very smooth pretty much all the time which is awesome and for usability they just find a couple places to tuck some extra features into the settings around the material u elements that are smart like little thoughtful additions here and there i like i like that they lifted the display animation speeds that are usually buried in developer settings and just put it right into the display settings they always on display you can customize a little bit to look differently and they put a bunch of stuff in the advanced section including mapping a double back tap to a custom action or a custom one-handed mode for even better reachability and actually one of my favorites you can super easily customize which camera modes show up at the bottom so you aren't always scrolling around looking for the option you want no matter which one it is so then battery life yo let me talk to you about the battery life on this phone so typically on a smaller phone especially a small flagship phone that's one of the weakest parts of the phone which makes perfect sense there's a lot going on in a small space so there's not a lot of room for much battery this zenfone 9 has a 4300 milliamp hour battery which is pretty big for the small size of this phone and when i put my sim card in it honestly i was expecting about the status quo you know i set the 120 hertz refresh rate because that's what i'm into and i got way way more than i was expecting this phone actually has seriously incredible battery life it sips power turns out this is actually a really good phone to put the snapdragon 8 plus gen 1 in because not only is it more powerful at the highest end but it's also more efficient than the previous chip so great standby time and a lot of quick bursty stuff has handled no problem but i was having like heavy days of using a lot of high brightness screen on time navigation playing some games just doing a bunch of stuff that typically drains phones and it just lasted for a long time i was having seven plus hour screen on time days and ending with 10 20 left really great battery on this phone and hey while we're at things that punch above their weight class the cameras back here the cameras are probably better than what you're expecting now the main sensor here is actually the same one that was in the nothing phone and the rog phone 6 both of which took like b to b plus quality photos at best and were a noticeable step behind the flagships in pretty much every way so same chip in here but two things are different one they put this entire sensor in this huge six axis hybrid gimbal stabilization setup and two we know a lot of what makes a good smartphone camera these days is software so the zenfone 9 takes photos that look very different from say the rog phone which actually asus also makes or the nothing phone basically if you've watched my blind smartphone camera test in the past this statement won't shock you but the zenfone 9 has the closest look of a pixel phone of any non-pixel camera so a typical zenfone 9 photo is very bold and contrasty and saturated so straight off the rip it's pretty nice if anything it can have the tendency to go over the top and really over process and over hdr things that looks kind of harsh and you can really see that in higher dynamic range situations but the extra stabilization does help not just for video but also for taking less noisy photos in the dark at least on the main camera it's still not freezing moving subjects very well because you need a fast shutter speed and a bigger sensor to do that reliably but out of all the phones with this sensor i think this one looks the best the ultra wide is also pretty consistent with color to match the main camera so shout out to asus for their software processing in the zenfone cameras over the years maybe pass some of that along to the uh rog phone team you know maybe have a meeting or two so i've said a lot of positive things about this phone so i'm just going to say one more which is i think the price is really good it starts at 6.99 which actually when i first started i put my sim card in this phone like two weeks ago didn't really know much about it and i hadn't been told the price yet and i would have guessed higher than that it kind of reminds me of when uh pixel 5 came out and it was the best pixel at the time but it was a snapdragon 7 series it was 90 hertz and we we're hoping for like a full flagship pixel this feels like a pixel 5 pro like two years later it's got the highest end chip it's got a nice screen an incredible battery life uh not a whole lot of downside i'm gonna say actually this phone at this price is my favorite release this year i am very impressed with it now it's not perfect and we already know no phone is perfect it's got a few key trade-offs and so i'm going to nitpick because that's what i have to do but here's what's wrong with this phone so battery life is incredible like i said but the max charging speed 30 watts that's decent but there is no wireless charging that's missing lots of people love reminding me that they don't really care about wireless charging but hey almost every other phone at this price is gonna at least have the option so that's something to note and then this display that i was telling you about it is definitely super responsive at 120 hertz with a 240hz touch sample rate but it is a slight step below the flagships visually and it maxes out at 800 nits when not showing hdr content which can get washed out in direct sunlight also the corner cutout for the selfie camera has this little ring around it that might be a little more distracting than some people might like also the speakers and small phones have never been great because physics and these aren't really an exception they're fine but they're semi-easily blocked and then probably the biggest thing i've noticed is this soft touch red color is very cool and i really like it but i am concerned about how this will wear you can see the edges and the corners of mine are already starting to fade and turn darker and the sunset red color is slightly less vibrant than it was when i first got the phone and this is only two weeks like i haven't really had the phone for that long so while i haven't seen a phone with quite this finish of plastic before i can't vouch for it aging well now just to get ahead of the comments that i can already see you typing yes most people just put a case on their phone already by default so it does actually come with this decidedly more plastic feeling case in the box but yeah i don't know i just i feel like a phone that has a soft touch plastic back shouldn't have to always have a case on it the way maybe a fragile glass one might so yeah that's something to know and then all the power button features i was just telling you about super first of all this is one of the fastest fingerprint readers in any phone you just graze it for a second and it unlocks super sensitive but then the pull down notification feature i was accidentally triggering all the time it kind of got annoying so i ended up turning it off because it was getting in the way kind of like i on the s10e i think i also disabled it so cool for a few days then i turned it off but yeah this power button this is something sustainability note this phone isn't particularly repairable but it does come in 100 fully recyclable packaging and it does come with 30 watt charging brick but yeah as far as downsides that's pretty much it i think i can confidently say this is the most well-rounded compact phone in the world if you can consider it compact i think there's a lot of really great things about this phone and i'm very happy to keep using it this is probably going to end up extremely underrated in the us because you don't really see zen phones in carrier stores so most people don't end up buying these but if you're looking around shopping for a great compact android phone around 700 bucks don't even think twice this is a great one to get yeah easy as that okay that's pretty much it thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace [Music]

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,756,128

Keywords: Asus Zenfone, Zenfone 9, compact phone, small phone, best small phone, MKBHD, Zenfone 9 review

Id: AxV0_1Y4zl0

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Puzzleheaded-Top8929]

That's actually a reasonable looking replacement for my Pixel 4a.

[u/SmarmyPanther]

Wow surprisingly good battery life.

I think this is the first phone that really shows the efficiency of the 8+g1 chip

[u/james2183]

As someone who is potentially looking to upgrade his Pixel 5 in the not too distant future, and only wants smaller phones, this looks like my next one

[u/UnstableParallel]

what was that sound at 9:20ish? sounded like an announcement over a shitty PA system

[u/lastjedi23]

Do Zenfones come down to 600 or so after 6 months? I really like that red one and am open to getting after enjoying my S10e (hated the shitty battery).

[u/Solaris48]

I love the option to choose which refresh rate you want to use, 60, 90 or 120Hz. Most phones only give you the 60 or 120Hz option.

[u/_btw_arch]

That's very positive of him, I must say.

I fell in love with the Zenfone 9 the moment I saw it. What a beast. I'm definitely getting it as soon as I can to replace my Pixel 5.

[u/mrjfilippo]

How's the custom rom support normally on Zenfones?

[u/Mirai4n]

I'm getting it as soon as it releases. Done with all the big ass phones for a while