Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1 hands-on review

Display

The ZenFone Max Pro has a 5.99-inch, 18:9, IPS LCD with a resolution of 2160x1080. The display and image quality are generally very good.

Display settings

The panel is sharp, with good contrast, ample brightness and wide viewing angles. The only slight flaw here are the oversaturated colors, with no manual color settings. You can adjust the color temperature but you don't get the same level of adjustment that you find on other ASUS phones. We would have liked to see a standard sRGB color mode here, as the colors on the ZenFone Max Pro can get quite saturated, especially reds, which tend to look very intense. If you're not a stickler for color accuracy, however, then you should be perfectly satisfied with the display on this phone.

Battery Life

With a massive 5000mAh battery and a relativel frugal chipset, the battery life on the ZenFone Max Pro was bound to be impressive. Indeed, in our usage, the phone lasted about two days on a single charge. Even on days with a lot of heavy usage consisting of GPS navigation, 4G data and full display brightness, the phone easily managed to make through the entire day with charge to spare.

Battery menu

The big battery like this essentially takes the anxiety of running out of charge in the middle of the day out of the equation. Once you realize that you can trust the phone to make it through the day, you are then free to focus on other things. A big battery like this helps you achieve that.

That said, we wish the phone had proper fast charging. ASUS claims "fast charging" on its website but it does not support any of the fast charging standards and is indeed, just standard 10W charging. While you can still charge the battery completely in under three hours, and we'd recommend you only really charge this phone overnight, if for some reason you run out of juice in the middle of the day, you are looking at a fairly long charging period. It doesn't help that the phone's battery is larger than most power banks.

Previous ZenFone Max phones were also capable of charging other devices. Considering the slow rate of charge and doubts regarding how many people actually used this feature, we are not surprised it didn't make it into this phone.

Audio quality

The ZenFone Max Pro comes with a single loudspeaker at the bottom with a 5-magnet design. The speaker gets loud but the audio tuning isn't to our liking. It sounds a bit nasal with peak somewhere in the upper midrange, which makes vocals sound harsh. The supplied Max-Box accessory further accentuates this. By the way, it doesn't really do anything that you can't by simply cupping your hand near the speaker. We wish the phone had an always-on display so we could at least use the acessory as a dock.

Asus Max-Box

The headphone audio quality is good and the phone also gets very loud. The phone doesn't come with any earphones in the box, however.