Asus Zenfone Max Plus announced with huge battery and Face Unlock

Hot on the heels of Sony’s CES 2018 smartphone announcements, Asus has just unveiled the Zenfone Max Plus, a phone with a 4,130mAh battery.

That’s apparently big enough for it to last through 21 hours of web browsing or 13 hours of video playback, and it can even be used as a power bank to charge other devices.

Big batteries will apparently be the hallmark of the new Zenfone Max range, but the Zenfone Max Plus has the potential to stand out in a number of other ways too.

The Asus Zenfone Max Plus is a big phone in a compact body

The Asus Zenfone Max Plus is a big phone in a compact body

More than just a big battery

For one thing it has a Face Unlock feature, letting you unlock the phone just by looking at it, but it also has a 5.7-inch 1080 x 2160 18:9 display with a 79.8% screen-to-body-ratio, which Asus reckons means the phone - at 73 x 152.6 x 8.8mm - is only the size of a standard 5.2-inch handset.

The Zenfone Max Plus has a metal body and a dual-lens rear camera, with one 16MP f/2.0 lens and another 8MP wide-angle lens. There’s also a 16MP snapper on the front.

Rounding out the specs there’s a 1.5GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6750T chipset, 3GB or 4GB of RAM, up to 64GB of storage, a microSD card slot and a fingerprint scanner, and the phone runs Android Nougat.

A 3GB version of the Zenfone Max Plus with 32GB of storage will arrive in February in the US for $229 (around £170/AU$290). There’s no word yet on if or when the UK and Australia will get the phone though, or on where the 4GB of RAM version will be available.

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James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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