If you ask the smartphone owners what they would like to see improved in their smartphone then they will say the battery life. So, here is the smartphone for the users who are seeking for the good battery life and it is Asus Zenfone Max. It has got a 5,000 mAh battery life and lot of specifications which makes this smartphone a good one. Also, the price ranges from Rs. 8999 – Rs. 12999. It ships with great features and here is our review for this smartphone.
Hardware:
The back button hierarchy which you normally see in the Asus, here also you will see the traditional setup like the power button at the right side with volume rocker. When you consider the size of the smartphone this is the pretty good decision. The rear of the phone is not exactly made of leather, but a material which is soft, more like a Matte finish. It does not skid over smooth surfaces, and makes it seem tough. It holds good if you’ve big hands, but you can’t have a one hand operation, as the screen is too big to handle with.
Display:
Asus Zenfone Max has the 5.5 inch HD IPS display which is made only to accommodate the battery. The size of the smartphone affects the brightness and the viewing angles, when you go out in the sunlight the display is barely legible which is the side effect of having a big screen size. Though it’s a 720p display, the color modes such as Vivid, Splendid boosts the colors and ignores the fact that it’s not a full HD Display.
Performance:
Asus has got the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 quad-core chipset paired with 2GB of RAM and Adreno 306 GPU. This is the pretty common specification but it works decently in the multi-tasking mode also. When you play high end Android games, then the phone gets warm a bit which is the sign that the chips are struggling to support. So, you have to close the apps and allow it to cool down a bit.
Inside the hood:
The phone comes with Android 6.0.31 Marshmallow out of the box, and as usual like the other phones, it comes with the ZenUI, which differs a lot from the stock android. The phone comes with the preloaded android apps and some of the company apps like MyAsus, Asus Web Storage, Asus Support, Mini Movie, Photo Collage and many more.. To be honest, there are so much bloatware in the phone, some are useful, while some aren’t. The thing is, the bloatware cannot be uninstalled. For example, Asus has integrated Clean Master app into the phone, and there’s a shortcut to optimize in the notification bar. Ofcourse, these apps are useful, but they eat up a lot of memory, but if you’re a fan of system apps, you’d like it.
These are apps which cannot be uninstalled so you may find that 16GB of storage is inadequate. But, you can expand the storage to 64GB using microSD card.
Camera:
When you come to the camera part, the rear view camera has got 13MP camera at the back and the 5MP camera at the front to take the selfie. Also, it comes with lots of capturing features like panorama, time-lapse, slow motion, cartoon, Little Planet and many more.
The camera works very well with the laser autofocus featue, but the photos shown on the camera screen and the photos which come out differ a lot. Also, when you go out in sunlight then the camera is unable to focus accurately and it is captured as a bit shaky photo. Overall, the camera is not upto the mark, I’d give it a 3 out of 5.
Battery:
The final part is the battery part; it has got the best in the market battery life with a whooping 5000mAh battery. The battery is not removable and it weighs a bit. But, it is worth it, to have a good battery life. If you use the apps for the course of time then also it will give 24 hours of battery life to the smartphone. When it comes to the charger it has got 1A/5V charger, which is horribly bad for this type of smartphone. So, you have to purchase the high speed charger or a quick charger, as this charger will take six to eight hours to charge your battery fully.
Should you buy it?
As far as I’ve seen, apart from the display and bloatware, almost everything was fulfilled. If you already have the older Asus Zenfone Max, I’d not suggest to upgrade to this. The equal competitor for this phone would be the Xiaomi Redmi 3, which is made of metal body, and comes along with a finger print sensor, but a battery of 4050mAh. But if you’re a traveler, or a person who spends most of his time with phone, the battery of 5000mAh is a great deal to have. With the given specs, and the features, it’d be a great phone to have.
Below is an excerpt from the launch event of the phone:
