The Battery King (is finally) dead. Long live the king. That’s what I’ve been pretty much shouting the moment the Zenone Max Pro I borrowed blinked its last blink and shown its last light. It took three days of medium usage including connecting to wi-fi at home and playing a buttload of games before it finally fell. And I’m happy.

Unboxing

Check out my unboxing video for the Asus Zenfone Max Pro below:

Design

The Zenfone Max Pro maintains a sense of royalty with the way it was designed and crafted while still sticking to the standard ASUS design. With that I mean that it still has a uni body with the volume controls and the power button situated on the right side of the smartphone.

 

The left side houses the SIM tray and the micro SD card tray as well…

At the bottom, you’ll find the audio jack and the USB 3 port for charging the smartphone, which, you won’t need as much as you’d think you’d need because, we’re talking about #TheBatteryKing here.

Loved the metallic, almost chrome-y finish they gave the ZenFone Max Pro because it definitely highlights all the black areas in the phone such as the rear camera.

Display

The Zenfone Max Pro comes with 6 inch Full HD display (2160×1080) which works really well for either gamers or movie buffs.

The display for this smartphone goes for bright rather than life like colors. Understandable too because it wants to blanket as much consumers as possible.

I absolutely loved the 180 gram light metal body complete with diamond-cut edges as well as a 2.5d curved display glass. So it’s not just royalty but also stylishness.

The ZenFone Max Pro is designed in a stylish 180g-light metal body with diamond-cut edges and 2.5D-curved display glass.  At the heart of the smartphone is an advanced Snapdragon 636 Mobile Platform, which combines smooth, responsive performance with the superb battery life of 5,000 mAh, and a powerful Adreno 509 GPU that is designed to support enhanced mobile gaming and browsing performance. ZenFone Max Prohandles any task easily, with performance to spare.

Battery Life

Boy, Asus wasnt lying when they called this #TheBatteryKing. There have been several instances where I purposefully tucked away the phone and proceeded to live my life then remember that I had a smartphone stored away. And I always find myself surprised that its still got juice.

The secret was in the battery they had put in the Asus Zenfone Max Pro. The smartphone has a 5000 mAh battery thats capable of 35 days on a 4G connection in standby.

Being that I have an active kid who loves her YouTube videos and all those entetaining content on streaming sites, I used the Max Pro as a device to keep her occupied. Again going back to the level of display and the picture quality which was almost perfect. Most of the time the Zenfone Max Pro hits a maximum of 20 hours for YouTube usage via Wi-Fi connection.

Expect a total of 12 hours of phone life when you continually play games with this device. Imagine that, 12 hours on uninterrupted gaming with the Max Pro.

UI and Performance

This smartphone won’t require a rocket scientist to operate. Using the latest Android OS, Android 8, we get a fast and smart user interface and user experience.

The Snapdragon 636 also does wonders to the phone’s performance. It’s definitely one of the high points in using the phone. The interface is fluid and we get to see that not just when we swipe but also when performing other tasks such as playing games and just chatting away on Facebook messenger and using other applications.

Camera

The Max Pro’s camera is something that’s impressive to say the very least. The review unit I got had a 16 megapixel camera with an additional 5 megapixel secondary camera for depth and range and more crisp photos.

Here are some of the photos I took with the Max Pro’s camera:

Also, don’t expect too much in terms of filters and other alternate ways of taking photos as its pretty much bare bones. I’m sure they’ll be adding it down the road but at the moment, it’s just the automatic and expert level of shooting.

Taking photos outdoors is great as well. Selfies are where I draw the line though as the phone’s not really keen on providing good selfies, usually the output’s dim or they’re just muted in terms of color.

Benchmarking

Geekbench 4

 

 

 

 

3DMark

 

ZenFone Max Pro Review – Verdict

8/10

I gave this score for the ZenFone Max Pro review because of a few noteworthy problems I had with the unit. For one, while it’s faster than the “leading” gaming mobile device for at least this quarter, it felt like it could have done more with a different processor. Don’t get me wrong, at this level the Snapdragon they slapped into the Max Pro was great but it could do more.

Also the UI (at least for this review unit) had crashing issues from time to time. And no, I already updated the software for the phone and still the problem persisted.

Design-wise and usage wise I had no problem. I loved every moment I used the device. There’s also the problematic colors for the phone. It could work with other people, but I’m very particular with the colors that appear on my display.

Still, using the ZenFone Max Pro was a breeze. It’s definitely worth the price point and I will still recommend this smartphone for people, nah, geeks on a budget.