The Asus Zenfone 3 Max Review!

The Zenfone lineup of Asus is a mixed range of smartphones varying from midrange price segments to the premium lineup. It’s been quite some time since the Zenfone 3 Max was announced, and this is our full review if the Asus Zenfone 3 Max.

The Zenfone 3 Max, in India, is powered by a 1.25 Ghz Quad Core Processor* [Keep on reading, more on the processor down below].  It has a 5.2″ IPS LCD 720p display, whose colours aren’t that tad accurate. The camera department is handled by a 13mp rear camera with an f/2.2 aperture along witha 5mp front camera, f/2.0. More on the camera performance below. It has a 4130mAh battery, good enough to last you 2 days on a single charge. It is 4G enabled, but no signs of VoLTE as of now. The phone comes in two storage options, 2GB RAM + 16GB ROM & 3GB RAM + 32GB ROM. It also has a fingerprint scanner to the back. The phone runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box. The form factor and ergonomics are quite good. Feels good to hold in hand.

Well, a 13/5 camera combination, 4000 mAh battery, a standard 5+ inch HD display, pretty standard specsheet for a chinese manufacturer as we compare it to other phones in the market. 

*Now comes the major counterpart. The SOC (System On Chip) or the ‘Processor’. Given all the big battery capacity and a fair enough camera combo, the bottleneck is that the Zenfone 3 Max is powered by a Mediatek MT6737 Processor coupled with Mali T720MP2 GPU. We mention it here as we didn’t want you to leave this article just after hearing the word Mediatek.

Considering the fact that Mediatek isn’t a bad company, they have manufacturered the X30 processor at 10nm architecture, and they too are good at making decent chipsets at an affordable rate for entry level midrange handests. So what’s the con here ? The MT6737 & Mali T720MP2 GPU, just doesn’t have enough horsepower to run that beautiful looking handset. It’s like, designing a a Splendor bike like a Ninja, but afterall the Engine remains the same, its just an underpowered baby, who can’t deliver sheer performance.

In all the time we spent with the Zenfone 3 Max, & when we threw some games at it, the performance was satisfactory. Casual games like Leo’s Fortune, Temple Run played well on the device. But when you start pushing it to graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8 or Modern Combat 5, we can see the device struggle and the game is almost unplayable at times. The phone started heating after 10 minutes of casual gaming. RAM management is decent It could keep 4-5 apps in memory, but reloads apps after that.

The build quality of the phone is good and sturdy, which we feel is a good thing of the Zenfone 3 Max. The Fingerprint scanner at the rear though, is slow and isn’t accurate too. Considering the competition, not a good one.

The Camera performance is again satisfactory, in good lighting conditions, both the front and rear facing camera click in some good pictures and there are also some beautification modes in the stock camera app. Both the cameras can shoot 1080p videos at 30fps. However, in low lighting conditions, it struggled a lot, which is quite normal for a phone in the midrange price segment. So not that much complains here.

The battery life on this phone is excellent! The 4130mAh battery, on a full charge, will last you 2 days on moderate usage, 1.5 days on heavy usage. If you are a user who doesn’t use data a lot, and just some casual usage, the phone can give you even 3 days of battery life. The supplied charger however isn’t a fast charger. A standard 5V 1A charger which takes 3-3.5 hours to charge from 1% to 100% Thats too much time for charging, but overall, excellent battery life.

The pricing of any phone is very crucial in India, because it’s a price sensitive market. And this is what irks us a lot. The Zenfone 3 Max is priced at ₹12,500/- INR and sells on both Amazon and Flipkart. Considering the competition, there are lot of better phones in the market. The Redmi Note 4, The Lenovo K6 Power, Huawei Honor 6X, Smartron SRT phone, are all way better than the Zenfone 3 Max in the same price range of 12,000-15,000 INR. So we wouldn’t recommend this phone at all, under any circumstances. You can get yourself a Redmi Note 4 for excellent gaming performance and battery life, the K6 power if you are looking to buy from offline markets, the Honor 6X if camera is your highest priority and the SRT phone which a quite a decent option that provides good performance and stock Android experience.

So that’s our full review of the Zenfone 3 Max. And just in case, you want to pick yourself up a Zenfone 3 Max.Here are our affiliate links, do consider using them, it does help us to deliver back to you guys. http://amzn.to/2rtx9u4

Thanks for making it until here, drop down a comment below for which next phone you’re interested in our review.