All right, this is the Asus Zenfone 10. honestly, if you task me with making my own phone and I didn't have to care at all about how well it sells, but I'd actually want to use it I think this is what I would make. Okay, so y'all remember the Zenfone 9 from last year, right? It won my best small phone of the Year award easily and almost won my MVP for the whole year with so much going for it. the smallest size, the latest chip, outstanding battery life a plus performance Rock Solid Cameras and fluid and clean software and a headphone jack.

I mean all of it was wrapped up in a 700 package in the US I Mean they just do not make phones like this anymore. So now we've got the Zenfone 10 here and I think this one is nearly perfect. First of all, they kept basically all the great stuff actually. Yeah, all of the great stuff from the last phone.

all the fundamentals that made it so good. It's the latest chip Again, it's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. it's still awesome performance, still world-class battery life. Yes, it still has a headphone jack, but they've also directly improved upon the three minor nitpicks that I actually did have with last year's phone.

The first nitpick was that phone didn't have wireless charging. A lot of people said oh, this would have been a great phone, but it doesn't have wireless charging. Now we've got it. That was basically the only missing spec.

Zenfone 10 now has the same size battery and I'm happy to report that the Snapdragon 8, Gen 2 and software combo is still giving world-class battery life. I'm literally getting seven eight plus hours of screen on time every single day and I basically never kill it in under 24 hours. So now it's wired charging at 30 Watts with the charger included in the box and now 15 watt wireless charging. so there's basically no weakness here.

Happy to see it. The second nitpick I had was actually the finish on the back. so I still have my original Zenfone 9 here same color but I don't know if you remember I Use this for about a month during my review period and it got absolutely chewed up. It's darker all the way around the outside, around the corners, mostly from wearing black pants.

you know the material wore off and stained. The soft touch of the back of the Zenfone 9 was very easily worn down very quickly and I understand most people just immediately put a case on their new phone so I'm not can ignore that. But I Also think if you're going to make a phone with like a nice soft touch finish, you want to be able to touch it, you should. It would be nice if you could use it like normal and not have this insanely accelerated aging.

So Asus told me there's a slightly different material on the back of this Zenfone 10. it feels a little bit a little bit more coarse if anything, but it's still got this soft touch finish. It's still got this slightly gritty texture and from the looks of it so far, it's more durable. and you can also see there's a new Asus logo down here in the corner and some slightly cleaned up text on the back of the phone.

but I still think it looks nice and there's a bunch of color options now. I've been showing you the Eclipse red, which is the one I've been using, but there's also a blue. there's a green, a black, and a comet white. that's the only one I'm nervous about that might not hold up as well, but still if I'm judging just by the way this red has gone, it's more durable than last year, which is awesome.

It still rolls over into those flat matte black metal sides and a little cutouts for the headphone jack and the power buttons fingerprint reader. This is really nicely built, assuming it continues to hold up the way it has. This is also fixed. So then the last little nitpick was that these aren't Flagship cameras.

Truly a nitpick because this isn't a flagship price phone and honestly, these are very good cameras. Asus has done a great job with their software tuning for years and their cameras now, but they have updated the cameras in the Zenfone 10. it's still a 50 megapixel primary camera with a great contrasty software processing and a lot of dynamic range. But now there's an even more improved hybrid gimbal stabilization system.

It's part of the reason why the rings on the back of this phone are so big. There's a huge six axis stabilization system taking the handshake out of still shots and also delivering some of the most impressive Shake resistant video I have ever seen. So even without making the sensor bigger or higher resolution, you end up with sharper handheld exposures and sharper low light shots because the whole camera system is better at canceling out hand movement. And also since there is no telephoto camera, they did work on software Zoom improvements.

The difference isn't really dramatic and it's still not as good as having a dedicated Zoom but it's better than nothing once you get past about four or five x. all that packaged up into a slightly more subtle looking pair of black rings on the back of this phone. I'd consider that another win. If I could still nitpick about cameras, I would actually nitpick a little bit about the front facing camera.

It's still got this little silver ring in the corner kind of reminds me of the Samsung a54 and it just makes it stick out a little bit instead of being a seamless cut out like some other phones. It's not a disaster, but it's there so it's not perfect. There's also technically some other little stuff that they did as well. uh, you might have seen it's 144hz display now they can say that on the spec sheet, but it's only 144 Hertz while gaming in certain games.

but really, it still spends most of its time at 120 hertz and it's super smooth. And it's Ltpo, which is great, but as you can see, they're technically allowed to say it's 144 Hertz capable now and they also added a little extra capability for the smart key on the side. The power button can now do quintuple Duty It's a power button. it's a fingerprint reader you can double tap to open the camera, you can long press for whatever you want I do Google assistant and you can swipe up and down for that notification slider and just in general Asus Software is still still so good.

It's clean, it's nearly stock Android and they just got you know a few extra optimizations and extra features in there that they've added that are generally very useful things like battery health features and the the little Edge tool shortcut they've got going on. I Wish you could open apps. This is another little nitpick I wish you could open apps full screen from The Edge tool, but that only lets you open apps windowed on an already small phone. But maybe the most unique thing I've seen that really feels like something like I would do if I was making an Enthusiast film that most people wouldn't care about.

but still really cool is the ability to customize the software experience way more specifically. So when you first unbox and set up the phone, you can actually go through the menus and choose which parts of the phone you want to be like stock Android and which parts you want to be Asus customized from things like the launcher to the Quick Settings I've never seen this in any any other phone setup. only Asus does it I Love it and they wrap up all these improvements and little nitpick fixes in a phone that is the same price as last year. Again, who does that? Uh, the price was kind of confusing I think a little bit to some people, but basically it's still the same price as last year 6.99 in the US But then the Europe pricing includes taxes and import fees, so it ended up at 7.99 Euro.

Either way, literally still a great deal. So my final nitpick? My, really? My last thing that I would like to see improved with these Zen phones that would really put it over the edge and nearly a perfect phone is software support. So Asus right now promises basically two years of software updates for the Zenfone which is okay, but it's this is not the full life cycle of a phone like this. You'd ideally have it for three or four years, and having it fully supported for those three to four years would be really nice.

but other than that, well done. Asus Clearly there is no perfect phone, but this one is pretty close. Thanks for watching! Catch you guys in the next one! Peace.