Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This MIGHT be the Best Flagship device of 2022! – ASUS Zenfone 9”.
There are no shortage of devices vying for the top Android honors this year, but most are choosing to go big or go home when it comes to the Asus Zenfone 9. However, we see a flagship trying to do more with less and it begs the question is small: the new big okay. So I know I’m a little bit late to the party with the Asus Zenfone 9, but I’ve been using it for a while now and I feel like it’s still worth talking about. So let’s talk about it, starting off with the design. The Zenfone 9 breaks that big Flagship mold, with its extremely pocketable six inch edge to edge chassis, making it comparable in size to the pixel 7 or the s22.
The 5.9 inch Corning Gorilla Glass, Invictus display, looks pretty good thanks to the 445 PPI 1080p Samsung AMOLED display, with a variable refresh rate of up to 120 hertz, but depending on which app and how you’re, using your phone for gaming or other tasks. Switching between 60, 90 and 120 hertz really helps to get the most out of what you’ve got. What it can’t do, though, is drop down to the ultra low refresh rates that other flagships offer to preserve battery life flip the phone over and on the back. Here you will see two massive googly-eyed cameras, which some of our Instagram friends pointed out, looks a lot like the famous arachnid Lucas, The Spider, and I can definitely see the resemblance. You know what else I can see that subscribe button. So if you haven’t already go ahead and tap that and hit the thumbs up while you’re down there, but moving on the body of the Zenfone 9 is really satisfying to hold right.
Here we have the maxed out specked up Moonlight white with 16 gigs of LP ddr5 RAM and the 256 gig internal storage. The brushed aluminum chassis provides more than enough grip to keep the phone in hand and off of the ground, but the back is where the magic happens. The back of the Zenfone 9 feels extremely sturdy with a thick rubbery texture coating. That gives me confidence that I’m not going to drop the device, and even when I do it’s, not a glass back and I’m not worried that it’s going to shatter yeah.
It will pick up some stains and things from your pocket and just from holding it. And I I’ve washed this a few times and it’s actually got a really nice patina to it. That’S the way I like to look at it. You have a nice. Leather wallet gets a little patina, it tells a story and at the top of the phone you’re going to notice an old friend that we haven’t seen in a while a dedicated 3.5 millimeter audio jack, which many of you said was exciting to see, and I tend To agree down the side, you get a multi-function Button as well as your volume rocker. The multi-function button acts as a touch sensitive power button, which also is your fingerprint reader, and it’s quite quick.
It’S pretty Snappy. Now on the bottom of the phone. You will find your USBC charging port, along with your speaker, Grille, and your dual SIM tray lately. Other manufacturers are talking about e-sims and doing away with physical SIM cards.
As someone who travels quite a bit, I can definitely appreciate that and it’s nice to have it’s not all roses, though the Asus Zenfone 9 does not have wireless cheat charging, and I did find myself missing that. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Asus Zenfone 9 still comes with a charger in the Box. The Zenfone 9 includes a 30 watt, hypercharge adapter and it’s nice to have just as another Point here. I’Ve been using the Zenfone 9 in performance mode since day, one and I’ve regularly been able to max out my usability throughout the day. I use it for all my normal tasks as well as running one of my favorite game emulators for N64. For you know up to a few hours and by the end of my day I still have around 35 battery left when I get home from work.
So performance mode keeps the phone in 120 hertz refresh rate. It boosts your GPU as much as you need for those high octane tasks and demanding applications for a better experience, but you also get to take advantage of hyperfusion to meld your mobile data with Wi-Fi together for the strongest connection possible and utilize Dual Band Wi-Fi buy With 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz bands in total, there are four system modes, as you can see right here, you get high performance, dynamic, durable and Ultra durable, which is basically an ultra power saver mode. Now, speaking of performance with gaming other than the chassis getting pretty warm during gaming sessions, I found that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 plus gen 1 handles the task pretty well in performance mode and the Zenfone 9 grabs slightly better Benchmark numbers according to Rob Triggs. Then even the rog6, and even with this tiny phone getting hot at times, I still manage enough performance and enough battery life to keep me from toggling it into any of those energy saver modes that I was telling you about, but if you’re looking for Energy savings, Asus does claim that the Zenfone 9 is capable of up to 1.9 days of normal use, and you can even stream up to 18.5 hours of your favorite content, like the content from the sponsor of today’s video curiosity stream for less than the cost of some other Streaming services per month, curiosity stream has you covered for a full year, get access to thousands of top quality documentaries, shows and other non-fiction titles to grow your passion and increase your knowledge all for just 19.99 per year, watch from anywhere and instantly access tons of award-winning Exclusive content, including great original series, with curiosity stream, you can learn about anything from history, to ancient civilization, to space exploration or anything in between all from your home or on the go with so many titles to choose from covering Society technology, nature, science and lifestyle you’re Bound to find a subject to get curious about all you’ve got to do is click the link in the description below for a full year of curiosity stream for less than other streaming platforms charge per month, and when you’re done watching your curiosity stream you’ll get curious About the world around you, and that leads us to our next topic – the cameras, the Zenfone 9 – is small enough to fit comfortably in your pocket and to take anywhere when I head out for the day. But honestly, the cameras are the one area that Asus surprised me in all the wrong ways. The Zenfone 9’s camera offers a limited amount of settings for the 50 megapixel main camera, which is locked in 4×3 aspect ratio.
So you really have no no real settings to play with and honestly, if, if you want to even pinch in to zoom in or you want to pinch out to utilize, the 12 megapixel Ultra wide lens you’ve got to dig into your settings, you got to go Through there in the drop down mode and turn off the 50 megapixel mode for the main camera, and only then will you have the option to pinch out and switch between the now dual 12 megapixel cameras, so sure it’s a phone that can shoot at 50 megapixels. But shouldn’t in reality it’s a 12.5 megapixel Sony sensor using a quad, Bayer technology, so essentially they’re pixel binning. And if you’d like to learn more about that about pixel binning, then we have a great video explaining how it works. The link is up here in the corner to round out the cameras.
You also get a less than Stellar 12 megapixel selfie cam, which pumps out soft images indoors with tons of grain, leaving your images looking like a cheap, laptop cam, while Outdoors, it still struggles with some of the same issues that the main camera has, and I think It actually comes down to software, okay, so the camera software is definitely clunky and they made a few mistakes. I think with how it handles the exposure in priority. I found that through normal use, outdoors in good light, as well as indoors and poor light, the camera seems to prioritize aperture and ISO while allowing the shutter speed to take a hit. Let me explain that a little bit better, let’s just say, you’re, walking down the street with some friends. You want to grab a selfie with your group or maybe you’re just trying to capture a picture of your kids running around the house, because we all know kids, don’t really stay.
Still. You hit the capture button and your Zen phone gives you a brief, scrolly wheel, and your image is blurry because you and your subjects were not perfectly still. I’Ve had more problems with that trying to take pictures with this phone than I have with any Samsung or Google, or even iPhone that I’ve used this year.
With that being said, if your subject isn’t moving and as long as you have a really Steady Hand, there are plenty of fun camera modes to take advantage of when it comes to video. That’S actually where this phone impressed me the most, so the quality isn’t insanely great, but it can shoot up to 8K and where it really impressed me was shooting an fhd with the full six axis, gimbal hyper, steady setting turned on. I found myself spending more time, making video clips in situations with movement and – and I could see where this might actually be a good option for parents chasing around their kids, trying to capture those interesting moments, or even just messing around with your friends acting silly.
The gimbal Works fantastic, it’s super fluid and uh. I really enjoyed it for taking video clips now. Here’S three features that you won’t find on many other phones, the lock button swipe feature with the Zenfone 9.
I can customize the power lock button, just like I had mentioned earlier. The the lock button is also your your fingerprint sensor and it is touch sensitive, so the touch sensitive part it is hard to find, and while they have it written right on the side of the phone, it says your Zen touch right on the side of the Damn phone, that name is nowhere to be found in the settings. So here’s how you do it go to settings scroll down to the advanced settings tap on smart, key and scroll down to the swipe under swipe you’ll, see quick access once in there you can choose what a swipe down and a swipe up will do use this Feature to check your notifications swipe that down swipe it back up refresh web pages or applications scroll to the bottom or the top of a web page quickly, and you can even use it to change from your next song, your previous song, If you’re listening to music At that time, for me personally, I like to use this one mainly just for my notifications, so I can flick them down and then flick them back up and away pretty easily, but I did find that I had some accidental touches.
I just turned it off in the end, but some of you might enjoy it enough to keep that setting around. Secondly, there’s a feature that you may not know about when the Zenfone 9 is locked, you can quickly access any app you’d like by setting it to open with a simple design of a letter on your lock screen. For example, I could draw V and it would open up my call screen or anything else.
I wanted to set it for it’s interesting, but I never really found myself using it because Face Unlock or my fingerprint kept on unlocking the phone before I could get a chance to do any gestures. So it really didn’t it. Wasn’T that useful for me so last but not least, and by far my favorite feature is being able to trigger different actions by double tapping the back of my phone beside the cameras now before you say, Ryan yeah.
This is available on other phones. It’S not original! Well, yeah, you can get this feature on the pixel as well as iPhone devices. Also have this feature, but it nice addition here and I think it’s worth noting. So how do you set it up in the advanced settings? It’S called back double tap turn this on and you can automatically screenshot open up the camera, turn on and off the flashlight start or stop for audio recordings, open Google assistant or manage your multimedia playback. Now, for me personally for the double tap I like to have it work for my flashlight, so that I can keep it handy when I need it so down to brass tacks here. Folks, the Asus Zenfone 9 is a pint-sized powerhouse.
It’S almost everything that you would want or need in a phone, and it’s only my opinion, but I think it’s so so so close to being one of the best phones of the year. The gestures are fun and they’re so useful, and I don’t feel much like it’s a gimmick. If you get plenty of battery life, it’s ip68 waterproof and it has a rugged body which makes it a decent fit for really anyone. That’S looking for a tougher phone and it makes this definitely a phone worth taking a flyer on now. Personally, I’m gon na keep using this one for a little while longer, but at an MSRP of between 699 and 7.99, with only two years of promised updates and only a so-so camera setup. There are definitely better options available on the market.
If you’re prioritizing camera performance, it could make sense to just go with the pixel 7. Instead, Rob Triggs and I both gave this phone a Solid 4 out of 5 rating and with that, what do you think of the Asus Zenfone 9? What do you think is the best small form factor Flagship right now tell us in the comments down below, but with that being said guys, I’m Ryan from Authority media be kind and we’ll see you next time. .