Asus Zenfone 3 Ultra Review

The past few months, I’ve been at a bit of a crossroads with my devices. I want to dedicate more time to reading books and comic books, which I’d naturally do on a tablet. However, I’ve been trying to slim down the number of duplicative devices that I own (headphone experiments aside). The tablet I’d been using was my NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet, the 2014 model with 32gb of internal storage and an LTE modem. It’s a nice sized device, and has survived a war and a recall with only a few scratches.

However, when I’m on the go, it’s a bit cumbersome to carry a second device like that. This is a first world problem, but having to remember to keep a second device charged, apps updated, etc. is like having a second child to feed. I can’t count the number of times I felt like reading or watching Netflix, went to grab my tablet, and it was dead. Charging it for a half hour isn’t too bad, but then performance slowed to a crawl as applications (or even less convenient — the operating system) updated. Most of my reading is done in the hour or so before I go to sleep, so this type of slow down meant I wouldn’t get time to read for another day.

My main phone since last December has been my Nexus 6P: it’s still fast, the camera is still great, and the battery life hasn’t gotten significantly worse. Truth be told, I wasn’t planning on upgrading at all in 2016, until Asus announced their Zenfone 3 line at Computex in May. Among their lineup was the standard 5.2 inch Zenfone 3, the larger and faster 5.7 inch Zenfone 3 Deluxe, and the object of my desires: the 6.8 inch Zenfone 3 Ultra.

I waited for the lineup to be officially announced for the US market with support for US cellular networks, and while the Zenfone 3 (rebranded as the Zenfone 3 Laser) and the Deluxe made it over, the Zenfone 3 Ultra has not been released outside of Southeast Asia. Worse yet, the international Deluxe model supports all US networks, while the international Ultra does not. The Ultra supports some of AT&T’s bands, but not the main ones. I’ll break this out later on, but I decided to order an Ultra from Expansys USA.

I used the Zenfone 3 Ultra for about four months on Cricket (AT&T)’s network primarily in San Antonio, Texas. During this time, I’ve also spent plenty of time in New Braunfels, Austin, Waco and Ft. Worth Texas and Orlando Florida.

Inside the box, you’ll find the phone itself, manuals, SIM ejection tool, the wall socket, a USB-A to USB-C power cable, and a pair of headphones. The charger included inside does not have a North America friendly plug, but Expansys was kind enough to include an adapter. The included headphones are specially tuned for this phone, and they sound great when combined with the right source file. Asus also includes replacement ear tips if the standard ones don’t fit quite right.

The Zenfone 3 Ultra includes two nano-SIM slots, and the second slot can be used for either a Nano SIM or a Micro-SD card. It features support for the SDXC standard, so new and larger Micro-SD cards will be work just fine. If you’ve got two SIM cards, the phone handles them great: you can display contacts stored on either SIM card, set a default card to use for SMS messages or calls, and use either one (not both) for data.

The Xperia X Compact inside the Zenfone 3 Ultra

On the front of the phone, the top features the front facing camera, earpiece, and proximity sensor. The bottom has the capacitive back key, physical home button/fingerprint sensor, and the capacitive recents key. Others will differ, but I’m glad that Asus didn’t use on screen buttons, since that would just waste screen real estate. One of my few complaints with the phone is the home button: it’s nice and tactile now but it will inevitably wear out over time. I’m fine with having the fingerprint sensor in the home button, but I wish Asus had used a capacitive home button similar to the HTC 10 or the OnePlus 3. The Zenfone 3 Ultra does feature double tap to wake and double tap to sleep, so this will lessen the impact of having a physical button. The fingerprint sensor can store up to five fingerprints, and I’ve only had errors when my hands were wet.

The iPhone 7 Plus next to the Zenfone 3 Ultra

The bottom is where the charging port and two speakers reside. Asus markets these as stereo speakers, and while they might be channeled appropriately, they’re still too close together for your eyes to tell the difference between each channel. Asus is marketing this as a multimedia device, so I’m a little confused as to why they didn’t opt for front firing speakers. The charging port is a USB-C port, and is capable of data transfer at USB 2.0 speeds. The bottom also features a microphone for voice calls.

The Nexus 6P next to the Zenfone 3 Ultra

The left features the power button, while the top has another microphone and the 3.5 mm headphone jack. The volume keys are actually on the back, which has been interesting to get used to. It was a bit cumbersome at first, but I’ve gotten used to it over the past month. It is a little strange to have the volume keys and power button not on the same plane, so Asus could have used a design similar to the LG V10 which has the volume keys and power button all on the rear of the device. The 23 megapixel camera is also on the back, including the dual tone flash and laser autofocus.

The HTC 10 next to the Zenfone 3 Ultra

One potential red flag is that the 6.8 inch screen is “only” 1080P. With smaller phones featured 1440P displays, it may seem a little strange for the Zenfone 3 Ultra to feature a lower resolution. I’ve got 20/20 vision, and I can say with 100% certainty that I can’t tell the difference between the 1440P panel on my Nexus 6P and the 1080P panel on the Zenfone. I’m happy Asus went for the lower resolution because it means less battery drain. One problem I have with the display is the brightness: at its dimmest, the display is too bright for use in a dark environment. At the same time, using the phone outside in the Texas sun is a difficult unless you have it set to at least 80% of the maximum brightness. One neat feature is a Blue Light Filter for night time use. I’ve talked about this feature in the past, and it’s great to see it built in to more and more phones. However, I wish the filter Asus included was more on the red side. As is, it’s not effective enough for me, and there have been times that I’ve forgotten to turn it off in the morning and not noticed until later. There are also different presets for other display modes, including a standard SRGB tuning, Asus’s own “Super Color” mode which saturates the display a little, and a completely manual mode so you can tune the display to your liking.

The battery inside the Zenfone 3 Ultra is a 4600 mah battery, and is able to be charged up to 60% in 45 minutes if you have a Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 charger. In my everyday use, I use the device for listening to music, reading one to two hours every day, and about an hour total a day of browsing the web or social media. With this workload, I can use the Zenfone 3 for two to three full days before needing a charge, which I am more than happy with. I’m not going to give a screen on time because that’s a misleading metric: if you do nothing on the device except read books, your screen on time could be as much as three days. If you do nothing on the device except watch a few movies, your screen on time would only be a few hours. If you’ve got the right cable, you can use the Zenfone 3 Ultra to charge other devices. This led to an interesting moment where I plugged the phone into my laptop with a USB-C to USB-C cable, and the phone started trying to charge my laptop.

Being a multimedia device, Asus put special emphasis on the audio. While the speakers are too close for proper separation, they still sound great with no distortion even at max volume. The phone feature the Apt-X Bluetooth codec, so if you’ve got a pair of headphones with the codec your audio will sound almost as good as it does over a wire. If you do opt for a wire, it will sound even better.

The front facing camera on the Zenfone 3 Ultra is an 8 megapixel sensor and able to record video at 1080P. I had no problems with the front camera, even in low light, which is all I can really ask of it. The rear camera is a 23 megapixel Sony sensor, and it also does pretty well. However, launching the camera is a bit of a chore: I was spoiled on the Nexus 6P by being able to double press the power button and going straight to the camera, no matter what else I was doing. On the Zenfone, you can in theory double press the volume down button when the phone is off to launch the camera, but it every few times I launch it like that the camera app crashes. If you already have the screen on, you’ll have to manually open the camera app, or press the toggle in the quick settings bar to open the camera. The second or two delay doesn’t seem like much, but it could very easily lead to you missing that perfect moment. Photo processing is a little slow, especially with HDRs. Camera performance has improved slightly with software updates, so hopefully Asus can get the issues nailed down. As for the picture quality, I will let the photos speak for themselves:

The rear camera includes a Super Resolution feature where it takes four pictures and stitches them together to create a 92 megapixel photo. Again, I will let those pictures speak for themselves:

The rear camera is capable of capturing video up to 4K resolution. I didn’t take the opportunity to film quality test footage before I broke the camera (more on that later), but the personal videos I took all turned out great.

One criticism Asus faced with their Zenfone 2 line was how many pre installed applications came installed out of the box, and I’m happy to say that’s not the case on the Zenfone 3 line. There are some applications I disabled since I would rather use Google’s apps or a third party from the Play Store, but I wouldn’t call any of them bloatware. Here are the apps I’ve disabled:

-Do it Later

-File Manager

-Gallery

-Instagram

-Laser Ruler

-Minimovie

-Mobile Manager

-Music

-Photo Collage

-Quick Memo

-Share Link

-Zen Circle (Asus’s own social network)

-Zenfone Care

Mobile Manager is Asus’s own versions of a cleaner app, which you shouldn’t use. Laser Ruler is especially cool: it uses the laser autofocus sensor to measure distances. I did some testing, and the ruler feature was accurate. Nonetheless, I haven’t used it since my testing and I’ve turned it off.

Asus also offers a theme store, with plenty of paid and free themes to change the theme of your lock screen, home screen (if you use Asus’s launcher), the quick settings drop down, icons, wallpaper and the weather widget. There are even themes for shows like Family Guy, if that’s something you’d like. I do wish it was possible to theme the dialer, settings and other first party apps though. One feature I had issues with is the battery saver: there are four preset performance levels, and a custom option for you to manually configure what you want to keep on and off. This worked as intended, but the default Battery Optimization settings flagged Android Auto and Google Maps as high battery use app, so every time I would get in my car the connection wouldn’t work quite right. Luckily, this was easy to turn off as well, and I’ve had no connection problems since then.

The Zenfone 3 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 652 processor, with different 32 gigabytes of storage and 3 gigabytes of RAM, 64 gigabytes of storage with 4 gigabytes of RAM, or 128 gigabytes of storage with 4 gigabytes of RAM. I haven’t actually seen the 128 gigabyte model on sale anywhere, but it is listed on Asus’s site. I purchased the 64 gigabyte model and with all my usual apps installed and my Google Play Music library all downloaded, I still have 37 gigabytes free. Your requirements will of course vary, and there’s always the Micro-SD card if you need more space.

The Snapdragon 652 processor is built very similarly to the 810 that was featured in most of last year’s phones, and I didn’t have any problems with the phone slowing down outside the aforementioned camera bugs. On paper it may not be as fast the Snapdragon 820 and 821 that are featured in this year’s flagships, but unless you’re doing heavy gaming you’re not likely to notice a real difference. The phone does get a little warm after extended use, but not nearly as bad as my Nexus 6P did under similar conditions.

Now, what is it like to actually use phone this large? Truth be told, I haven’t had any issues with the size outside of people making jokes. It fits fine in the front pockets of all of my jeans, slacks and gym shorts, and within a day of using it, picking up my Nexus 6P felt like picking up my old iPhone 4. I had the opportunity to get comparison pictures next to other Android phones, and it was kinda scary how large the phone looked next to the others.

The one concern I had was how the device would be to actually use on US networks. On AT&T, the only LTE band that the Ultra features is Band 5, which isn’t heavily used. Same with the 3G and 2G bands that the phone has: it does technically work on AT&T, but there’s no way for me to say it will work for you. I will say that in the cities in Texas I’ve used it in, it’s done well. It’s a little concerning to see the phone go from 3G to 4G at a regular rate, but in actually use it’s perfectly fine. Because the bands it does have on AT&T are fairly rare, few other phones are actually connected to the network over those bands. Because of this, I can use the phone with no problems. In fact, I’ve been tethering my laptop all day today, and I haven’t noticed any slow downs. Same with streaming my music from Google Play or movies from Netflix. As far as phone calls, it connects quickly and I haven’t experienced any issues with static or dropped connections.

There are a lot of “ifs” that go into this device, at least in North America. If you think you can comfortably use a phone this large, and if you use AT&T, and if the antenna towers in your area use the correct bands, and if you can find a retailer, and if you are okay buying it without a warranty, I’d say it’s worth a try. Unfortunately for me, I dropped it in just the right place that now the camera won’t work. Since I purchased it from Expansys USA — which closed down in late 2016. Fortunately, they are still handling warranty claims, and I am able to get a refund for the phone.

Despite my minor gripes, I enjoyed using the Zenfone 3 Ultra more than I have any other phone. If you want a phone that is also comfortable for reading and watching videos, this is it. If you’re in North America or Europe, I can’t say for certain how well it will work on a day to day basis, so if you are going to try it make sure the site you buy it from has a good return policy. If you think this phone is too big, there are plenty of smaller options. I 100% understand the merit of having a device that you can use with one hand and fits in your back pockets. That device isn’t for me though. I type with my thumbs, so the width of the Zenfone 3 Ultra is perfect for me. I love, LOVE being able to comfortably read web articles or books on the phone, without needing to worry about another device.