introduction
Small smartphones are weird. And not just inherently: if the screen is the primary point of interaction with the device, why would you want to less its? But also because everyone on the internet (and especially YouTube) seems to love them, and yet – the sales numbers for the little phones out there generally range from unimpressive at best to downright catastrophic. Just ask Apple about the iPhone 13 mini, see how that conversation goes.
The tiny smartphone should, in theory, at least make sense to people with small hands. But, anecdotally speaking, most of those folks we’ve met still have “regular” sized devices, at the cost of struggling to use them one-handed if possible.
This is the setting where Asus launched the Zenfone 9 in the game last year. It’s one of the smallest smartphones to launch in 2022, alongside Samsung’s similarly sized Galaxy S22, and its size is certainly trying to be one of its main selling points – which is why we talk about it so much. But it’s not just a small smartphone, it’s a small one flagship smartphoneand again, while not alone in this sense, this field is decidedly far from crowded.
On paper, it’s every little smartphone lover’s dream. The small size doesn’t mean any compromises in performance, and while there’s one less camera available than you might expect, the specs for those present look solid too. Ditto the battery capacity for the size.
Things that sound great on paper don’t always adequately translate that greatness into real life, so we were curious to see what the case would be with the Zenfone 9. Away from our labs, in the real world, how would it perform as our one and smartphone only, used for a long time? Let’s find out together in the next pages of this long review.
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