ASUS Zenfone Max (M1) First Impressions: All Round Budget Phone With A Solid Battery

ASUS is one of the smartphone which entered India first. They were the first smartphone brand that had good camera chops and the devices were premium looking. ASUS once again has come up with two new smartphones in the Zenfone series – Zenfone Max (M1) and Zenfone Lite (L1). Here is our first impression of the Zenfone Max (M1)

ASUS Zenfone Max (M1) is in line with its Zenfone Max series with maximum battery size. ASUS Zenfone Max (M1) is one of the device which has huge battery life of 4000mAh. Despite having battery of this size, the smartphone is lightweight and looks slim. The device weighs just 150 grams and has metallic finish which looks premium. When we first look into the Zenfone Max (M1) it looks quite pretty. The smartphone is easy to hold in a single hand as it is small and compact. With 5.5 inch and 18:9 display this device looks good. Zenfone Max (M1) is powered with Qualcomm Octa-Core Snapdragon 430 with Adreno 505 GPU. It has a memory of 3GB and 32GB. ASUS Zenfone Max (M1) comes in two colour variants – black and gold.

ASUS Zenfone Max (M1) has a design which is comfortable for the hand. The design of the Zenfone Max (M1) looks premium with golden colour. The smartphone is made of plastic but has metallic finish which makes the phone look good. The rear camera is present on the top left of the device with LED flash just below and the fingerprint scanner is present in the top middle of the smartphone. The smartphone has curved edges. All the buttons are present on the right side while on the left we have the triple slot tray for the SIMs and MicroSD card. We can find the headphone jack on the top and as usual the speakers are present on the bottom with micro USB port. It is a very good to see that the smartphone is only 8.7 mm thick and weighs just 150 grams despite having 4000mAh battery.

The smartphone does not have physical buttons on the front. It has on screen buttons which are present on the bottom and the fingerprint scanner present at the back is easy to access.

Zenfone Max (M1) comes with HD+ IPS display with 1440 X 720 pixels with a contrast ratio of 800:1. The display looks bright and crisp. The device does not have notch as of the recent smartphones. The smartphone comprises of 82% screen to body ratio which means Zenfone Max has thinner bezels. The bezels on the sides are thinner. The smartphone is packed with 2.5D curved glass and has 18:9 aspect ratio of the display which adds to the beauty of the device.

The device comes with latest Android Oreo out of the box with its latest ZenUI 5.0. The ZENUI 5.0 is lighter with very minimal apps. It also has the PowerMaster app which helps us to increase the battery lifespan and battery optimization options which is very useful if you are worried about battery performance. There are different battery modes present here so that we can customize our battery saving options.

ASUS Zenfone Max (M1)  comes with a single 13MP camera on the rear with aperture of f2.0 and the front camera comes with 8MP and an aperture of f2.2. This is very disappointing. Now a days all are having dual cameras. We didn’t expect ASUS to have single camera as ASUS is the first smartphone which had wonderful cameras.

ZenFone Max (M1), also sports the Snapdragon 430 is an octa-core A-53 processor clocked at 1.4GHz and is paired with the Adreno 505 GPU.

As for as the first experience, Zenfone Max (M1) looks good for a budget smartphone. Still we have to see the battery performance and picture quality of the camera. We need to try out more things still like gaming performance. Will give a detailed review once our tests are done.

About Hema

Likes Food, Technology and Mobile Devices in that order. Started as a programmer, became an architect and now a blogger. Topped University Ranks once, been in tech for two decades. Wants to travel the world and climb the everest!

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