Successor to the ASUS Zenfone 9, a new addition to the “Zenfone” lineup, ASUS Zenfone 10 is here  with the top of the line flagship Snapdragon® 8 Gen 2 and a 5.9″ display, boasting impressive performance within such a compact shell.

Overview:

Specifications

Source: GSMArena

Design

The ASUS Zenfone 10 has a stunning design, with a CORNING^® GORILLA^® GLASS VICTUS^® in the front, an Aluminium Frame and a matte finish plastic back. The aluminium frame is supposed to be ergonomic, with rounded out edges unlike the Apple iPhone 14, which makes it extremely easy to hold in hand, also given the fact that it is a small phone weighing only 172 grams. Being a small phone, it is pretty easy to reach the corners of the display with one hand, which is a big plus for many users.

The display has a hole-punch cut-out for the selfie camera in the top left and the fingerprint sensor can be found in the power button on the right-hand side instead of under the screen. Since it can read a large portion of your finger, the reader is pretty good. Any side-mounted fingerprint reader, however, is less precise and functional when the phone is placed on a desk. 

However, being a compact phone with Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 under the hood, thermal optimization for extended workloads like gaming can be a bit unforgiving for the handset. Unlike last year however, the new SoC is much more optimized, leaving the phone with plenty stable performance compared to the Zenfone 9, which dropped points significantly during extended benchmark periods.

Overall, it is a very easy to use compact phone with very lightweight feel along with it’s matte finish and ergonomic aluminium rails making it very easily handleable. The screen to body ratio is amazing at approximately 85%, which is impressive for a device this size.

Display

With a 144hz Super AMOLED panel from Samsung with HDR10+ support and 1100 nits peak brightness there is very little you can go wrong with. A hole-punch cut-out at the top and an amazing screen to body ratio, it is a very neat package.

A 1080p panel in phone nowadays does not seem impressive because most of the flagships boast a 1440p panel or sometimes even 4k! But, in the case of this handheld, the 1080p display is a huge plus. As it is small in size, even with the resolution of 1080 x 2400, it’s ppi to approximately 445, which is very good. Along with it, comes the boost in battery life, which will always thank the low number of pixels it has to light up.

The 144hz claim is misleading however, because although it is capable of reaching that number, it is only 144hz while gaming, in certain games. It is also not an LTPO display, like most of the other modern flagships, meaning that the display refresh rate cannot drop down to 1hz to save battery. During daily usage, the refresh rate switches between 60hz, 90hz and 120hz depending on the usage.

Cameras

The back of the phone hosts 2 flashy looking camera modules. Though in design they look big, they do not hold a lot of hardware, certainly not flagship level camera hardware. 

The main camera features a 50 Megapixel Sony IMX766 sensor with a 1/1.56″ sensor size and 1.0µm pixel size. The Quad Bayer technology combines four pixels into one for low-light photography. It offers great dynamic range and an improved hybrid gimbal stabilization system from the last year’s phone. The ultrawide camera offers a 13 Megapixel sensor with a 120° field of view. 

It is the part of the reason why the camera modules on the back are so big; the phone is equipped with a 6-Axis Hybrid Gimbal Stabilizer 2.0, ensuring stable and smooth footage, which take hand shakes out of all still shots and delivering one of the most stable video outputs in the market. So even with the not-quite-so flagship hardware, you end up with sharp shots because the phone is capable of removing any shakes you encounter while taking photos or videos.

It supports 1080p FHD at 30/60 fps, 720p HD at 30/60 fps, 4K UHD at 30/60 fps, and 8K UHD video at 24 fps for video recording. It also has time-lapse and slow-motion video recording capabilities.

The front camera has a 32 Megapixel sensor that produces an 8 Megapixel image with 1.4mm pixels. It can record 1080p video at 30/60 frames per second.

Battery

The Zenfone 10 has the same 4,300 mAh battery capacity as last year’s model. However, the Zenfone 9 was already a superb performer in terms of durability, and the Snapdragon® 8 Gen 2 is a chip that is noticeably more economical than the previous generation, so strong results from the Zenfone 10 may be expected as well.

The Zenfone 10 boasts a 4,300 mAh battery under a compact form factor, which is certainly impressive. It supports upto 30W wired charging with Power Delivery 3.0 and Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4.0 technology.

One of the main complaints with the Zenfone 9 was the lack of wireless charging and Asus has fixed this in the new model, by adding 15W Qi charging support.

Performance

With Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line flagship Snapdragon® 8 Gen 2 , the Zenfone 10 leaves no complains in the performance department.

The ASUS ZenFone 10 offers Qualcomm’s Snapdragon® 8 Gen 2 chipset built on a 4 nm architecture. 1×3.2 GHz Cortex-X3, 2×2.8 GHz Cortex-A715, 2×2.8 GHz Cortex-A710, and 3×2.0 GHz Cortex-A510 make up it’s Octa-core architecture. Along with the chipset, it manages graphics performance for gaming and multimedia with the Qualcomm Adreno 740 GPU. The phone runs on the latest Android 13.

AnTuTu Benchmark 9
1298660

Software

The Zenfone 10 runs on the latest Android 13 but Asus only promises two major android updates to take it to Android 15 in 2025. This isn’t great, and lags behind other manufacturers like Google, Samsung and Apple. It slightly makes up for it by promising four years of security patches to 2027.

There are so many customizable choices offered by Asus regarding the software experience that it can be a little overwhelming. The Android skin is very plain, even closer to ‘stock’ Android than on a Google Pixel. The only exception is the Asus Gallery; aside from that, all default apps are from Google.

You can choose the stock look, or pick ‘Asus optimised’ elements such as an altered quick settings design, power button menu,  clock size, incoming call display, and volume adjustment options. The side key can also be set to react to swipes, to pull down the notification shade, which can be handy.

Availability and Price

The base 8/128GB model of the phone begins at €799 in Europe and $699 in the USA. Though we have no news regarding it’s release in Nepal, we can estimate that the base model will be priced around Rs. 130,000