Asus Zenfone 3 Max ZC553KL

With the ZenFone 3 lineup, ASUS has been able to successfully shed its image of a budget smartphone maker, and that continues with its latest offering. But, instead of the drool-inducing combination of metal and glass in the ZenFone 3 (review), the ZenFone 3 Max sports a unibody metallic construction – similar to the ZenFone 3 Laser (first impressions).

The 5.5-inch display on the ASUS ZenFone 3 Max is a 1080p affair. The screen offers decent sharpness and the colour reproduction is also impressive. However, the display is quite reflective, which makes it difficult to read anything in harsh lighting conditions. Even though the company has made use of IPS display on the phone, the viewing angles aren’t the best.

In the software department, the ASUS ZenFone 3 Max isn't much different from its brethren. It comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which is layered with Zen UI 3.0.

The ASUS ZenFone 3 Max shares its camera specs with the mainstay of the lineup, the ZenFone 3 (camera review), i.e., a 16-megapixel sensor with f/2.0 aperture at the back. It also has fast autofocusing capabilities of 0.03 seconds thanks to a combination of laser, phase detection, and continuous autofocus mechanism. Even though it misses out on optical stabilisation, it boasts three-axis Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS) to counter the inadvertent handshakes while capturing pictures or videos. The illumination is provided by a dual-tone LED flash. At the front, the handset sports an 8MP shooter for capturing selfies.

With the third iteration of the ZenFone series, the Taiwanese company has changed a lot of things, and the most prominent among them is ditching Intel SoCs for Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipsets. The ZenFone 3 Max comes equipped with the octa-core Snapdragon 430 CPU, with its high-power cores running at 1.4GHz. It's coupled with 3GB of RAM, and the combination manages to deliver a lag-free performance, for the most part. Navigation is quick, and switching between apps is instantaneous, though the heavy UI does slow down the device quite often.

The 'Max' variants of the ZenFone smartphones feature beefy batteries. However, unlike its predecessors which drew juice from powerful 5,000mAh batteries, the ASUS ZenFone 3 Max sips power from slightly smaller 4,100mAh Li-Po unit. Despite that, it’s able to power the handset for about a day and a half consisting of typical usage of calls, sparing internet access via Wi-Fi or cellular data, and web browsing. Even with heavy use, it’ll easily last the entire working day. Our battery test is a testament of phone’s impressive battery life, as it played back a 720p video for about 15 hours and 30 minutes before giving up. You can also extend the battery of the ASUS ZenFone 3 Max further by enabling various battery-saving modes.