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00:00Hey what's up, MKBHD here. So if you're one of those people who has ever thought, wow,
00:07seems like all the phones coming out these days look and feel the same. Well, this one's
00:11for you because this is one of the most contrarian, against the grain set of features I've seen
00:17in a new phone in a long time. So this is the Asus Zenfone 9. And the more you look
00:23around this phone, the more you see it's just not like very many other phones. First of
00:27all, flagship phones these days are getting bigger and bigger than ever, we know this.
00:31This phone is actually refreshingly compact. It has slightly bigger bezels, but those
00:36are around a 5.9 inch display. So maybe not mini, but pretty close. And that translates
00:41to so many little things, just feeling smaller in the pocket, smaller in the hand, obviously.
00:46Reachability of the whole display is easier. It's great. And then you already know most
00:50flagships these days are working with glass. They're usually pretty shiny and glossy backs.
00:55This one is plastic, but it is a sort of a nice textured, softer touch plastic back.
01:02It's not quite the rough sandstone of the classic OnePlus phones, but it is somewhere
01:05in between. It's got a little more grip, which combined with the flat aluminum sides of this
01:10phone are quite nice to hold. Plus it has all these little design cues, you know, the
01:15little notch cut out around the metal of the power button, the little bits of text on the
01:19back of the phone, not full on ROG phone levels of text, but it is something. And the notch
01:24cut out around, what is that? Oh yes, a headphone jack. Yet another piece of this phone that
01:30you just don't see very often in many new phones out there. Plus just when's the last
01:35time you saw a red phone? The only thing I don't like about this design might just be
01:38that the size of the camera bumps makes the whole thing rock when it's flat on a table,
01:43but we'll get to those cameras in a second. A lot of phones have been moving their fingerprint
01:46readers to underneath the display, which fair, they've gotten pretty good lately. Maybe haven't
01:51improved that much in the last year or two. Asus said, you know what, we're going to
01:55take this power button and we're going to double it as our fingerprint reader. But
01:58not only that, we're going to have it triple as a smart key. So you can customize both
02:04a double press and a long press to start a quick action. You can start Google assistant
02:09with it or open literally whatever app you want. And then not only that, we're also going
02:14to have it quadruple as a reachability hack where you can swipe the button down to pull
02:19the notification shade down at any time, anywhere from any screen, just like Samsung
02:24did back in the day with the Galaxy S10e, I think it was. And Asus has really gone the
02:29extra mile just to make sure you can reach everything on the phone with one hand. They've
02:33also got a little edge tool to let you quickly launch apps with your thumb from the side.
02:37What else do most normal flagship phones have these days? I think you could argue a pretty
02:41heavily customized software experience is pretty common. I'm happy to report though
02:46that Asus is taking the opposite approach with a fairly lightweight, just a couple
02:51of additions on top of nearly stock Android. So Zen UI, which is what it's called, just
02:56adds a couple things here and there, and it's doing wonders for this phone. First of all,
03:00for performance, I mean, there's no real bloatware here. Things are pretty light. This phone
03:04also has 120 Hertz display and combined with the top of the line Snapdragon 8 plus Gen
03:101 and 8 to 16 gigs of RAM, things have been very smooth pretty much all the time, which
03:16is awesome. And for usability, they just find a couple places to tuck some extra features
03:20into the settings around the material you elements that are smart, like little thoughtful
03:24additions here and there. I like that they lifted the display animation speeds that
03:29are usually buried in developer settings and just put it right into the display settings.
03:33They always on display, you can customize a little bit to look differently. And they
03:37put a bunch of stuff in the advanced section, including mapping a double back tap to a custom
03:42action or a custom one-handed mode for even better reachability. And actually one of
03:46my favorites, you can super easily customize which camera modes show up at the bottom.
03:51So you aren't always scrolling around looking for the option you want, no matter which one
03:54it is. So then battery life. Yo, let me talk to you about the battery life on this phone.
03:59So typically on a smaller phone, especially a small flagship phone, that's one of the
04:04weakest parts of the phone, which makes perfect sense. There's a lot going on in a small space.
04:08So there's not a lot of room for much battery. This Zenfone 9 has a 4,300 milliamp hour battery,
04:14which is pretty big for the small size of this phone. And when I put my SIM card in
04:18it, honestly, I was expecting about the status quo. You know, I set the 120 Hertz refresh
04:23rate because that's what I'm into. And I got way, way more than I was expecting. This phone
04:29actually has seriously incredible battery life. It sips power. Turns out this is actually
04:35a really good phone to put the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 in because not only is it more
04:39powerful at the highest end, but it's also more efficient than the previous chip. So
04:44great standby time and a lot of quick bursty stuff has handled no problem. But I was having
04:48like heavy days of using a lot of high brightness screen on time, navigation, playing some games,
04:54just doing a bunch of stuff that typically drains phones. And it just lasted for a long
04:59time. I was having seven plus hour screen on time days and ending with 10, 20% left.
05:06Really great battery on this phone. And hey, while we're at things that punch above their
05:09weight class, the cameras back here. The cameras are probably better than what you're expecting.
05:15Now, the main sensor here is actually the same one that was in the nothing phone and
05:20the ROG Phone 6, both of which took like B to B plus quality photos at best and were
05:25a noticeable step behind the flagships in pretty much every way. So same chip in here,
05:30but two things are different. One, they put this entire sensor in this huge six axis hybrid
05:35gimbal stabilization setup. And two, we know a lot of what makes a good smartphone camera
05:40these days is software. So the Zenfone 9 takes photos that look very different from say the
05:45ROG Phone, which actually Asus also makes, or the nothing phone. Basically, if you've
05:50watched my blind smartphone camera tests in the past, this statement won't shock you,
05:53but the Zenfone 9 has the closest look of a pixel phone of any non-pixel camera. So
06:00a typical Zenfone 9 photo is very bold and contrasty and saturated. So straight off the
06:05rip, it's pretty nice. If anything, it can have the tendency to go over the top and really
06:10over process and over HDR things that looks kind of harsh. And they can really see that
06:15in higher dynamic range situations, but the extra stabilization does help not just for
06:20video, but also for taking less noisy photos in the dark, at least on the main camera. It's
06:24still not freezing moving subjects very well because you need a fast shutter speed and a
06:28bigger sensor to do that reliably. But out of all the phones with this sensor, I think this one
06:33looks the best. The ultra wide is also pretty consistent with color to match the main camera.
06:37So shout out to Asus for their software processing in the Zenfone cameras over the years. Maybe
06:42pass some of that along to the ROG Phone team, you know, maybe have a meeting or two. So I've
06:47said a lot of positive things about this phone. So I'm just going to say one more, which is, I think
06:51the price is really good. It starts at $699, which actually when I first started, I put my SIM
07:00card in this phone like two weeks ago, didn't really know much about it. And I hadn't been told
07:03the price yet. And I would have guessed higher than that. It kind of reminds me of when a Pixel
07:095 came out and it was the best Pixel at the time, but it was a Snapdragon 7 series and it was 90
07:14hertz. And we were hoping for like a full flagship Pixel. This feels like a Pixel 5 Pro, like
07:20two years later, it's got the highest end chip. It's got a nice screen and incredible battery life.
07:26Not a whole lot of downside. I'm going to say actually this phone at this price is my favorite
07:31release this year. I am very impressed with it. Now it's not perfect. And we already know no phone
07:36is perfect. It's got a few key trade offs. And so I'm going to nitpick because that's what I have
07:41to do. But here's what's wrong with this phone. So battery life is incredible, like I said, but the
07:46max charging speed 30 Watts, that's decent, but there is no wireless charging that's missing. Lots
07:51of people love reminding me that they don't really care about wireless charging. But hey, almost
07:55every other phone at this price is going to at least have the option. So that's something to note.
08:01And then this display that I was telling you about, it is definitely super responsive at 120
08:05Hertz with a 240 Hertz touch sample rate. But it is a slight step below the flagships visually, and it
08:12maxes out at 800 nits when not showing HDR content, which can get washed out in direct sunlight. Also,
08:18the corner cutout for the selfie camera has this little ring around it that might be a little more
08:23distracting than some people might like. Also, the speakers and small phones have never been great
08:28because physics and these aren't really an exception. They're fine, but they're semi easily blocked. And
08:34probably the biggest thing I've noticed is this soft touch red color is very cool, and I really like it, but I am
08:40concerned about how this will wear. You can see the edges and the corners of mine are already starting to
08:46fade and turn darker, and that the sunset red color is slightly less vibrant than it was when I first got
08:52the phone. And this is only two weeks, like I haven't really had the phone for that long. So while I
08:57haven't seen a phone with quite this finish of plastic before, I can't vouch for it aging well. Now just to
09:03get ahead of the comments that I can already see you typing. Yes, most people just put a case on their
09:08phone already by default. So it does actually come with this decidedly more plastic feeling case in the
09:16box. But yeah, I don't know, I just I feel like a phone that has a soft touch plastic back shouldn't have
09:22to always have a case on it the way maybe a fragile glass one might. So yeah, that's something to know. And
09:29then all the power button features I was just telling you about. Super. First of all, this is one of the
09:33fastest fingerprint readers in any phone, you just graze it for a second and it unlocks super sensitive. But
09:38then the pull down notification feature, I was accidentally triggering all the time, it kind of got
09:45annoying. So I ended up turning it off because it was getting in the way kind of like I on the S10e. I think I
09:50also disabled it. So cool for a few days. Then I turned it off. But yeah, this power button. This is
09:56something sustainability note, this phone isn't particularly repairable, but it does come in 100% fully
10:03recyclable packaging. And it does come with 30 watt charging brick. But yeah, as far as downsides, that's
10:09pretty much it. I think I can confidently say this is the most well rounded compact phone in the world. If you
10:18can consider it compact. I think there's a lot of really great things about this phone and I'm very happy to
10:23keep using it. This is probably going to end up extremely underrated in the US because you don't really see
10:27Zen phones in carrier stores. So most people don't end up buying these. But if you're looking around shopping
10:33for a great, compact Android phone around 700 bucks, don't even think twice. This is a great one to get. Yeah,
10:42easy as that. Okay, that's pretty much it. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.