- Everybody forgets about the Zenfones.
No one asks how the Zenfone is doing.
Turns out, it's doing great.
It's living its best life people.
The Zenfone 9 is here.
ASUS is still making phones
that aren't ridiculous gaming things,
but turns out, yeah,
the Zenfone line has been around for a while,
there's been nine of them,
and this one may be the best one yet.
The thing with Zenfones,
at least in the past couple generations I think,
they're making a Flagship phone,
but they're not making it ridiculously oversized,
so that only people with large hands can use them.
The Zenfone 8 was a compact size,
it was around six inches,
and they're doing the same thing with the Zenfone 9,
it's a 5.9-inch display.
But, it's one of the first phones on the market
with the latest
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1?
They tried to simplify their naming scheme,
and it only got more complicated.
For you guys, I'm gonna unbox the other version.
I had the black version here,
and this is the what did you call it?
Sandstone?
- [Bell] It's actually called Moonlight White.
- Moonlight White?
♪ Sandstone in the moonlight ♪
Alright, what have we got in the box here?
We have another box.
Compact size, big possibilities.
Inside, we have the SIM removal tool,
and it's been a bit of a trend lately,
an included case, okay,
and then user guide inside there, okay,
and then we have the phone itself.
Come to Papa.
- [Bell] Whoa.
- Felt good.
What was that noise? (laughs)
You know, in a world full of phones
with like five and six cameras on the back
it gets a little trypophobic.
So I appreciate ASUS just saying like, you know what
we're just gonna have two big old phone,
big old cameras on the back, whoosh,
you know, it looks like it looks like a minion.
(Minion sounds)
The cameras are a big thing that ASUS has upgraded
over the Zenfone eight, and we'll talk about that,
but first let's talk about the actual exterior of the phone.
You know what? That's why I thought it was sandstone
because the back has this sort
of like texture on it, feels like sandstone.
We got this metal rail all around the side
which is like vaguely iPhone-like,
but also not because it's like got
kind of a rounded edge on it, so that's cool.
On the top, look at that,
there's a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack.
I'll say right now, this is, this phone starts
at $699 and it's got the latest chip,
so it's not one of those like low end phones
like the Pixel A series where they were like,
ah we'll put a headphone jack on there
for the people who can't afford Bluetooth headphones.
Every phone should still have a headphone jack on it.
I'm sorry, there's room for it,
and even in a 5.9 inch phone.
Screw you Apple.
On this side, we got the volume rocker and the power button
which doubles as a fingerprint sensor,
which also doubles as a multifunction button
with swipe functionality.
We're gonna talk about that.
That's exciting.
On the bottom, we got the speaker and this phone also
they have front facing speakers where the other
speaker is here and the earpiece and the ones on the bottom.
So sort of front facing.
USB-C, port SIM card slot, no SD card support on this one
and the other side is blank.
What else we got in the box?
Oh, a little fancy compartment with a charging cable
USB-C to C and a power adapter,
this is 30 Watts.
I did a little bit of testing with it.
I got from 35% to a hundred percent in an hour.
I got 30% in just 20 minutes.
So that's not bad.
Actually that's, I mean, I've seen better.
The one other big thing that I wanted to say
about the exterior right off the bat is that
this is my Pixel 3 okay,
it's that perfect size where I can reach all the way
on with my phone.
When I use these bigger phones, I'm like, what's the point?
Like, am I supposed to be double handing?
Do you guys have big phones?
Why do you, why do you have big phones?
What's the point?
- [David] More screen.
- Okay. Anyways, the point is that I like smaller phones
because you can do the one handed thing,
and ASUS is really one
of the only manufacturers out there that is still
deciding to make a compact phone with decent specs.
I mean, you can find like quote, unquote,
compact phones out there,
but most of them are going to be like, really low end.
I've seen some people say
that this might even be the best compact phone
even considering the iPhone Mini's,
and I don't, I don't wanna say that,
but I will tell you that people are saying that.
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As you can see here, the bezels aren't like,
the you know, what you'd expect from a flagship phone.
There's a little bit more of a chin and a,
what do you call that? Forehead?
- [David] Yup. - Up at the top?
So you can see on my Pixel 3, it still has those,
so thankfully I'm already used to it.
But this is a 5.9 in screen, 1080x2400, Super AMOLED
with apparently 1100 nits peak brightness,
which you know, that looks, that looks pretty bright.
It's got HDR10+.
- [David] Wow.
- So that's the peaks that you're gonna get
when you're watching something with high dynamic range.
The other thing is it's 120Hz screen
so we're up to Flagship's standards with that.
It's crazy, specially seeing 120Hz
on such a small display like this.
Going from the Pixel 3, which is 60Hz, I guess,
to 120Hz on this thing,
it's just like a crazy difference,
and because it has the latest Snapdragon phone,
I mean, I've been using this for a day or two,
I have not experienced any kind of slowdown.
You click on something, it goes.
This baby flies.
Also contributing to that performance
is the 8GB of RAM
that comes with default.
The $699 price point is gonna get you
8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
But there's 256GB storage
and up to 16GB of RAM as well,
if you really wanna spec this thing out.
I don't know how expensive that one is.
It was probably over a thousand dollars.
While we're talking about the display,
we were talking about the display a second ago,
let's do a YouTube thing.
I mean, that's looking pretty nice.
The greens are popping.
Looks pretty sharp.
There they are.
- [David] Those dang lobsters.
- Love those guys. Those dang lobsters. (laughs)
(upbeat music)
Okay. I mean, it's a phone.
(both laugh)
(upbeat music)
Oh, I'm already disappointed.
(upbeat music)
As usual, iPhones are kind of
like the gold standard for phone speakers right now.
(upbeat music)
Yeah, this definitely sounds like a little bit tinier
but volume's pretty good.
Oh yeah, this is a 13 Pro, I mean, what does that start at?
Like 1200 bucks or something?
So this is a thousand sustained brightness on the 13 Pro,
iPhone 13 Pro, and this has an 800 sustained brightness.
But peak brightness is very similar.
This is 1100, this is a 1200.
Yeah, they're both on max brightness now.
They look pretty similar.
Nice job ASUS.
Alright, let's talk about the cameras
because they're these big chunkers
on the back of the device.
So I don't know which is which,
but one of these is a 50 megapixel main camera,
and the other one is a 12 megapixel ultra wide.
The main camera uses the Sony IMX766 sensor,
the ultra wide, whatever one is the ultra wide,
uses the IMX363, which is the same sensor used
in the 6A, 12 megapixel camera
and all of the previous Pixels.
So maybe Zenfone was going for something
where they were like,
okay, we're gonna be drawing in some Pixel fans with this,
let's bring back that old camera sensor
that they all know about, for sure.
So those rear cameras can do 8K video recording
at 24fps, 4k at 30 or 60 and up to 120fps slow mo,
so that's nice to see,
and on the front camera
it's a 12 megapixel Sony IMX663 sensor.
Okay, so ASUS talked about how their camera UI
is easy to use one handed.
I guess in this scenario, translates to them just
using something that looks like IOS's camera module.
Are you guys ready? Look at these guys.
Okay, so that's using the regular
50 megapixel sensor on the back.
Hey, okay. It's a little bit gray.
It's a little bit, you know,
I think I'd like a little bit more pop in there.
So the main camera's already pretty wide there,
and when you go to the ultra wide, I mean,
I'm very happy with how wide that situation is.
Good gravy. You can get the whole situation in there.
One of the really cool additions that made me
a bit more excited for the Zenfone 9
was that they have this, like, what they're calling,
you know, an Advanced Gimbal System.
Based on some demo videos that I've seen,
does a really good job of like emulating, you know,
kind of like one of those handheld Gimbals,
and to help you have even steadier photos
they have this like, guide system, where you have to
if you keep that little ball in the circle, then you're
it's saying that your videos are gonna be a little smoother.
I want to take a video now.
What do you think about that?
I'm gonna go running.
(feet slapping on floor)
Excessive shaking.
On screen it said, Excessive shaking. Keep the phone stable"
No! (feet slapping on floor)
That's pretty smooth.
Okay, so even at the point where I told me excessive shaking
keep the phone stable, it still looked really stable,
and for the selfie camera, let's take a demo shot for that.
Yeah, the colors, I mean,
just looking at the viewfinder here,
the colors are like a little muted for me.
I would like a little bit more pop, not too much,
but like, you know, on top of all the things
that are so great about this phone,
if the camera is just, okay, that's fine with me.
Now, the phone is not perfect.
I'll say that right now
because there's no wireless charging.
That's a big, annoying thing for me.
I wireless charge my Pixel 3 all the time.
It does have a 43,000mAh battery.
4300, 4300,
43,000 you could ride it into space.
I haven't charged it since
I did that charging test yesterday,
and it's still only at 52% and I've been using it, you know,
kind of on and off as much as I would,
I would use a normal phone.
I'm not sure if I said it already
but these ZenUI that they include with these end phones,
is a lot leaner it seems to me than the
custom Android skin that they put on the ROG gaming phones.
It basically seems like stock Android.
I mean, when you go into the settings,
there's not a ton of like extra crazy stuff,
but what I did notice is that as you kind of dive
into the settings, there's just a few little
quality-of-life tweaks that I thought were good.
Like in the battery section, for example,
you have a battery saving mode,
but they also give you a high-performance mode
and a way to like customize all that.
ASUS has also gone outta their way to add the type
of shortcuts that I love to see in a phone.
For one, I mentioned it earlier,
the power button/slash fingerprint sensor,
also doubles as a scroll.
You can add a scroll functionality to it.
I disabled the swipe up and down thing
where you can bring the notification bar down
by swiping on the side,
'cause I didn't really like that.
But you know, if you want that there, it's there,
and I believe you can customize it for other things.
Let's go see.
You can have, check notifications,
so you can swipe to open your notifications slide.
You can refresh the webpage.
So like instead of scrolling down from the top.
Home/End of webpages, I didn't even know about this.
That's actually seems like it would be really useful.
Maybe I should enable that and look at that.
It's kind of finicky.
I don't know if I'll have that enabled all the time,
but the other cool thing about this is
that you can customize the double tap action
on the power button.
There's also gestures you can do with a back double tap.
So right now I think iPhone has this as well,
but this is not a standard thing on Android phones at all,
and if I've said it to double tap to open the flashlight.
It did it.
Now, this is probably not useful in a small phone
but they also have an option where I think if you,
if you swipe down past the little navigation pill
at the bottom, it'll enter one handed mode,
and you can do stuff with that and then put it back up.
What is this now? Mobile Manager?
I didn't even know this was a thing,
but I guess this is an ASUS,
one of the things ASUS has added that you can optimize your
your Ram and storage and stuff like that.
So that's cool.
Bell really, really wants me to talk about
gaming performance on the phone
because it's got the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1
which is the new chip everybody's talking about,
everyone who wants to play Genshin Impact.
Our fancy new labs team,
did some testing on one of the Zenfones that we have here,
and let me tell you about it.
The labs team notes that Zenfone 9 is able to achieve
60fps in some games that they tested,
like Real Racing 3 and Shadow Fight 3,
but in Genshin Impact it couldn't quite get there.
It, could only manage 40fps.
Although apparently ASUS did some magic development stuff
and were able to make the 120Hz display work well
with lower frame rates in games
so that you don't experience micro-stuttering.
So that's good.
They also noted that during gaming
the overall temperature stayed low.
We're seeing a peak temperature of 51 degrees
but it hovered more, most of the time,
more around 40 degrees,
and in my experience, that was true as well.
I think while I was charging it
from 35% to a 100%
I did notice the back of the phone getting a little warm
but it wasn't anything that seemed problematic
and it cooled down relatively quickly,
so there's that.
Okay, Bell just brought up something interesting
that I didn't know about.
So I was gonna say one of the great things
about the phone, another great thing is that
it's IP68 water and dust resistance,
however ASUS says on their website that it's IP68/65
because over time the IP68 protection may degrade
and then get to go down to 65, to drop three points.
Yeah. On one hand, I'm like,
okay good on you ASUS for saying that,
but on another hand I'm like
but maybe it should just stay IP68.
(laughter)
And the, okay, the last kind of interesting tidbit
that I wanted to say about the Zenfone 9 is
that they apparently have these modular accessories.
There's a case that can go on the back
and then have like a magnetic attachment
for either like a little wallet thing
for your cards or for a kickstand,
which I thought was cool
but I'm probably not gonna buy
because it's probably you know, more expensive than,
you know, a comparative cheap thing
I could get on the internet
but they also have this interesting
like Backpack Mount thing with like a retractable connector.
So that's cool.
Probably no one will get that, but hey,
that it gave me the vibes of like LG
back when they were making, they were like getting
into the modular thing and they've released that phone,
I forget what the phone was called,
you could take out the bottom of the phone
and you could slot in either a new battery
or there were also like, there was like a camera module,
and then there was also an audio module
for like higher quality audio playback.
That was a time where we had like,
fun innovations in phones,
and while the Zenfone 9 doesn't quite achieve
that level of quirkiness,
it's really nice to see that
at least one manufacturer is still taking the idea of
you know, Flagship quality,
somewhat affordable, compact phones, seriously
because that's exactly what I want.
ASUS knew that this is what I needed and I love them,
and I love you for watching this video.
Subscribe to Short Circuit or don't
and help me burn it to the ground.
There are other videos you could watch too.
Like my Phixel's 6A review.
Okay, see you later.