This little-known smartphone has the best battery life I’ve ever tested
Jeff Dunn/Business Insider
The Asus Zenfone 3 Zoom.
Everyone just wants more battery life.
With each passing year, smartphones get thinner, faster, and stronger, with sharper cameras and better displays. But all of that eats power, and lithium-ion batteries are still flawed, needy little things.
There is no perfect way around this. Barring some major technical breakthrough, you simply cannot get a phone that lasts a week off a single charge and adequately performs all the tasks people expect from a modern smartphone.
But the Asus Zenfone 3 Zoom makes the best of what we’ve got today. The latest device from the Taiwanese tech firm is unremarkable from a distance — it’s a midrange Android phone, and there are a million of those. However, by mixing a giant 5,000 mAh battery, an energy-efficient processor, and a good enough display, it lasts longer than any other decently-powerful smartphone I’ve seen.
Whether that’s enough to make it worth your $330, though, is another question. Let’s take a closer look:
The Asus Zenfone 3 Zoom is handsome, but nondescript. It looks a bit like an iPhone. Its edges are rounded, and its back is coated in smooth aluminum. It’s neither thin nor light by modern standards, and it’s too big for most to use comfortably with one hand. It does manage to be lighter and more compact than an iPhone 7 Plus, however, which is impressive considering it has a same-sized screen and a much larger battery.
To be clear, nothing here feels as high-end as a Samsung Galaxy S8 or HTC U11. The aluminum is nice, but the areas above and below the antenna lines are made of a cheaper plastic. It’s not waterproof, either, so you’ll have to watch for spills. And the bezels around the display are sizable, though that’s understandable with a less expensive device like this.
I’ll also note that I managed to scratch both the back and front of my device without effort. Your mileage may vary here, but in most cases keeping my phone in the same pocket as my keys hasn’t led to those kind of scuffs.
Altogether, though, the design is a plus. Like Lenovo’s Moto G5 Plus, its main competitor, the Zenfone 3 Zoom is affordable without feeling cheap.
The design does cut some corners, though. While the phone uses the newer and faster USB-C standard, it doesn’t support NFC or 5GHz (i.e., faster) WiFi signals. The former is disappointing, but not too surprising for this price range; it mainly means you can’t make contactless payments. The latter is more baffling; it may not be a deal breaker, but those with newer WiFi routers will have to stay on the slower 2.4GHz band.
Also of note: Like many mid-tier unlocked phones, the Zenfone 3 Zoom only works with GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile.
Even then, the phone doesn’t support LTE band 12, which helps boost coverage, particularly indoors, with T-Mobile. I could get by without it, but be warned that you may see a downgrade.
By contrast, there are models of the Moto G5 Plus that work with all four of the major US carriers.
It does have a headphone jack, however. What’s more, it’s one of the handful of phones that supports High-Res Audio files. You have to be the kind of audiophile that goes out of their way to download those files in the first place, but in general, audio through the Zenfone 3 Zoom sounds a bit more alive than it might elsewhere.
The speakers on the bottom of the device are decently loud, too. And while we’re talking design, I’ll also note that the fingerprint scanner on the back is nice and fast.
The Zenfone 3 Zoom’s display is nothing amazing, but it’s good value. It’s a 5.5-inch screen with a 1080p resolution, which means text and images are sufficiently sharp. It’s also an AMOLED panel, which gives it notably deeper contrast and more vibrant colors than the LCD panels on most phones in this price range (Moto G5 Plus included).
That said, it could stand to be brighter; it’s not quite as easy to read in direct sunlight as other phones. It could be a bit more color accurate, too; whites and other bright colors have a slightly reddish tint to them out of the box.
It takes a keen eye to see that, though, and Asus does let you tinker with the color temperature in the settings menu. The display is still a net positive, but again, don’t expect the world for $330.
The Zenfone 3 Zoom runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 chip, supported by 3GB of RAM. This is the same processor that’s in the Moto G5 Plus and several other recent, less-than-flagship phones. In each case, the song is about the same: It’s not capital-f Fast, and it can keep some games from running as smoothly as possible, but it’s totally fine for the things most people do with a smartphone. It doesn’t feel hampered.
Just know that, if you can spare $100 more, phones like the OnePlus 3T have virtually no restrictions.
The big benefit of the Snapdragon 625 is that it’s efficient. This, combined with the relatively low-res display, energy-saving OLED tech, and giant battery, allows the Zenfone 3 Zoom to last wonderfully long on a charge. I regularly got two days of juice out of it, even on days when I was glued to the phone for hours at a time. If you don’t go as hard, it’s not impossible for it to get through three days. If you don’t touch your phone and leave it in standby mode, it can last for weeks. This is as good as it gets.
To give a more formal number, I tested the Zenfone 3 Zoom’s battery by continuously web browsing in Chrome over LTE, with a few stops in apps like Twitter and ESPN in between. On average, the phone lasted between 15-16 hours.
That is more than the Moto G5 Plus, the BlackBerry KeyOne, the Huawei Mate 9, the Moto Z Play, anything — and by a couple of hours at that. It’s fantastic. It’s also more futureproof than most; a battery this big has more room to stay strong when it inevitably degrades over time.
The flipside is, because the battery is so huge, the whole phone takes forever to charge, even though it does support some level of fast-charging tech.
The difference between the Zenfone 3 Zoom and other long-lasting phones may not mean much if you charge your phone every night anyway. But if you’re not as diligent about stuff like that, or you just don’t want to be, there is no better option right now for the battery-conscious.
The Zenfone 3 Zoom’s biggest drawback is its software. It runs on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box, which is about to become two years old. It’s a month behind on Google’s safety-boosting security patches. And between the chunk of pre-installed, mostly redundant apps, the torrent of optional settings, and the notable visual overhaul it gives to Google’s OS, it just has too much going on.
For the longest time, Android fans used to crucify Samsung for stuffing feature after feature into its TouchWiz OS, because it wasted space and overcomplicated the experience of actually using the phone. Eventually, Samsung got the message, and in recent years it’s worked on paring back its excesses. It’s been good.
Asus’ skin is like the alternate timeline where Samsung didn’t bother to clean up. To be fair, some of its optional features are handy: Holding the recent apps button can take a screenshot; an “Outdoor” volume toggle loudens the speakers; another mode makes the screen easier to use with gloves; a simplified “Kids” mode could help parents; and a quick setting to kill off wasteful background processes is nice. There’s even an FM radio app!
Getting to all of this, however, is a process. The settings menu is about a mile long, and the things that are helpful don’t make themselves immediately obvious. You can ignore everything and just use the phone for the basic slate of web browsing and apps — it’s responsive enough, and Asus doesn’t mess too much with the app drawer or anything like that — but even then, much of it just doesn’t look as pleasant as Google’s stock interface.
The biggest problem, though, is updates. The Zenfone 3 Zoom is already well behind the curve, and Asus doesn’t have the strongest history with keeping things up to date. With Android O coming down the pipe, it’s hard to see the phone staying current, be it with features or security patches.
Lenovo isn’t that much better, but the Moto G5 Plus’ take on Android is cleaner, and it starts with a more recent base of Android 7.0.
The Zenfone 3 Zoom has a dual-camera setup on its back, much like the iPhone 7 Plus and various other recent phones. Both of those are 12-megapixel shooters; one has a f/1.7 aperture, the other has up to 2.3x optical zoom. You can also record 4K video. It’s impressive on paper, and in any sort of good lighting, the Zenfone’s cameras do capture good detail, little noise, and largely accurate, if not super vivid, colors. It’s quick to focus, too.
It’s not Galaxy- or Google Pixel-quality, but it’s more than solid for an affordable device. It’s more capable than the Moto G5 Plus, for sure.
Here’s an example of a portrait. Plenty good enough for Instagram, I’d say.
The zoom is particularly impressive. (Hence the name.) To give you an idea, here’s an image with no zoom…
…and with the zoom maxed out. It’s a fun trick. Just know the camera becomes much more unstable the more you zoom in, and you lose much of the detail you’d get otherwise.
The main problems come, as always, when you take the camera into darker settings. There, you typically get mushy colors and too much noise for comfort. And even in good lighting, the camera’s exposure can make photos skew a little too dark. In either case, the included optical image stabilization can be iffy, meaning you’ll still have to keep your hands steady to get a totally clean shot. But overall, the high points here are surprisingly pleasant.
As for the front camera, it’s a 13-megapixel shooter, but it’s merely passable, not exceptional. Per usual, megapixels don’t matter as much as the tech behind them.
The Zenfone 3 Zoom is quietly one of the best midrange phones you can buy. The battery life is unprecedented, the camera is great value at its best, the display is lively, and the whole thing runs fine. Nevertheless, the Moto G5 Plus remains a better overall value in the $300 range — it doesn’t have to deal with wonky, out-of-date software, it works on all carriers, and all of its fundamentals are good enough. Plus, it’s $30 cheaper. Depending on your priorities, though, I wouldn’t blame you if you followed the battery life.
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