Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra Hands-On: A Tempting Media Showcase

Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra

Pros

• Powerful enough to handle graphically demanding apps
• Subtle design
• Excellent sound quality

Cons

• Short software support timeline for its price
• AI features are restrained
• Some features unavailable at launch

When the Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra arrived at CNET's office, I was particularly excited to try it because I thoroughly enjoyed the company's ROG Phone 8 Pro gaming phone when I tested it in January. It's obvious that the Zenfone 11 Ultra's design was inspired, in part, from the ROG phone. But thankfully, the Zenfone 11 Ultra's starting price wasn't. At $900 (£870, AU$1,359), the new Zenfone is $100 cheaper than the regular ROG Phone 8.

Unfortunately, over the course of my week with a review unit running pre-release software, the phone's data was repeatedly corrupted, which made it impossible to review fairly. When Asus addresses this issue, I'll update and expand this hands-on story into a fully rated review. In the meantime, I have many thoughts about how the Zenfone benefits from its new similarities to the Asus ROG phone line.

Read more: Best Phone to Buy for 2024

Both phones run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, feature an expansive 6.78-inch display, a long-lasting 5,500mAh battery, 65-watt wired charging, 15-watt wireless charging and excellent speakers with a built-in headphone jack. Both also have a similar camera system; including a 50-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 32-megapixel 3x telephoto camera. 

All of these features came in handy during a long weekend trip I took to Washington, DC. The bright and big display was perfect for playing the game Dead Cells, and the phone's AudioWizard paired with my Beats Studio Buds to drown out the sounds of screaming children on my flight. I took lots of pictures with it during my first visit to LaGuardia Airport's new Chase Sapphire Lounge. I found the Zenfone a joy to use.

It's unfortunate that Asus commits to only two years of major software updates and four years of security updates for the Zenfone. That's extremely short compared with what Google, Samsung and OnePlus offer for their similarly priced phones. 

The Zenfone 11 Ultra is now available to preorder with an early bird deal that includes a $100 set of wireless headphones until April 14. But I'd recommend waiting until Asus tightens up its software before purchasing. And again that's unfortunate, because this phone otherwise has the potential to stand out against rivals from Samsung, Google and OnePlus.

Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra: A Big, Powerful Transformation

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Design, screen, battery life

The Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra is taller than the Zenfone 10 but otherwise shares many of the same design elements from the ROG Phone 8, including a similar camera bump on the back in the top right corner, dual speakers on the top and bottom, and a USB-C and headphone jack on the bottom.

Whereas the ROG phones have darker hues with LED lights on the back, the Zenfone 11 Ultra's rear is adorned with a triangular pattern and comes in four colors: skyline blue, eternal black, desert sand and misty grey (the color of my review unit).

The 11 Ultra's large display is bright and visible whether I used it on a sunny day outdoors or in a dark Brooklyn bar. By default, the display runs at an adaptive refresh rate ranging from 1 to 120Hz. But even when I set it to run constantly at 120Hz, the 11 Ultra still made it through a full day of use easily.

One way the Zenfone differs from the ROG line is that while the 11 Ultra can reach 144Hz, Asus allows that refresh rate to be used only for games. On the ROG Phone 8 Pro, I was able to run at 165Hz at all times, which looked smoother. But for most tasks outside of gaming, I didn't notice the difference between 120Hz and 144Hz. It all looks very smooth.

All that screen real estate makes the Zenfone excellent for streaming movies and TV shows. I found the screen particularly good for videos filmed in wider theatrical aspect ratios because a there's a quick zoom that fills the screen without cutting off much of the video's edges.

Its 6.78-inch screen is bigger than the 6.7-inch displays found on the Galaxy S24 Plus and Pixel 8 Pro and a smidge smaller than the 6.82-inch screen on the OnePlus 12 and the 6.8-inch screen on the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

The Zenfone 11 Ultra's 5,500mAh battery lasted a day and a half between charges, even on my most intense days of use. On a day where I used the phone from 8 a.m. to midnight, I racked up 5 hours and 31 minutes of screen-on time, and the battery dropped from full to 31%. The Zenfone 11 Ultra supports 65-watt fast charging and 15-watt wireless charging. Like other new Android phones, the 11 Ultra lacks support for the magnetic Qi2 standard. Asus said that some of its accessory partners are making cases for attaching magnetic accessories.

Android 14 software

The Zenfone 11 Ultra runs Android 14 and -- like the ROG Phone 8 -- allows for enabling or disabling much of Asus' customizations based on your preference. I find that even with all of the Asus options enabled, it's still largely similar to a pure Android experience. The biggest differences are the option to split the notification pulldown, placing notifications in a pulldown from the top-left of the screen and control center toggles in a pulldown from the top-right. In other words, it's similar to iOS 17 on the iPhone.

Even though this isn't an ROG phone, Asus includes the Game Genie overlay for toggling gaming-specific settings. These can include higher performance modes, the aforementioned 144Hz refresh rate, setting up macros and blocking alerts during gameplay.

Asus' AudioWizard is my favorite option to play with on the Zenfone 11 Ultra, as its Dirac Audio settings provide a noticeable punch to a song's bass. I kept the "Dynamic" setting turned on a lot, but there are also more subtle profiles for music, cinema and games available. You can also further tweak Equalizer settings if you want something more custom. I found these settings to be quite effective regardless of how I used the phone to play music.

If you use a music service that supports lossless and spatial audio like Apple Music or Tidal, the built-in headphone jack makes it easy to take advantage of the format without Bluetooth compression. These settings and options make the Zenfone perhaps one of the best flagship phones for plugging in any combination of audio equipment that you like, whether wired or wireless.

These features are all powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which in our benchmark performance tests helped make the Zenfone one of the most powerful phones we've tested this year. Its Geekbench 6 CPU scores are comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S24 line running on the same processor. In our 3DMark Wild Life Extreme gaming test however -- which is a very demanding graphics test -- the Zenfone outperforms the entire Galaxy line with numbers roughly equivalent to Asus' ROG Phone 8 Pro. It largely affirms that inside the Zenfone is a lot of the same power that we saw in the more expensive ROG gaming phone.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Asus took a low-key approach for both the Zenfone compared with Samsung and Google. The Zenfone has an AI noise-canceling feature for voice calls that works on both standard phone calls and voice calls in apps like WhatsApp. I answered a number of phone calls while loud above-ground subway trains rushed overhead, and while the feature didn't fully eliminate the sounds from my conversations, it did reduce them.

The Zenfone also has Semantic Search that lets you use more flexible phrases when searching for apps, settings or photos. For instance, when I needed to find out how much screen time I used the phone for, instead of having to remember the "Digital Wellbeing" setting where this timer is located, I typed in "screen time" and the correct setting appeared within a list of other options.

The Zenfone also has a number of AI features that are currently in beta. For instance, its AI Wallpaper Generator creates some rather generic looking backgrounds based on a limited number of prompts, which means you won't be creating anything heinous by typing in a phrase like "Merge together the lion, the witch and the wardrobe" like you could using other AI image generators. There's a Call Translate feature that I couldn't test as it currently seems frozen on Chinese. And while it's nice to see a Recorder app that provides live transcriptions, such a feature isn't precisely new to phones. For instance, Google's Pixel Recorder app has allowed for offline live transcriptions for two years.

Cameras

The Zenfone 11 Ultra's cameras are quite good.

My weekend trip kicked off with a visit to LaGuardia's Chase Sapphire Lounge. I ran all over the first floor with the Zenfone taking photos. But it was the food photography that impressed me the most. My photos of the four egg dishes I ordered had a wonderful texture just as they were in real life.

When I took the phone to Tysons Corner Center mall in Virginia on what turned out to be a rainy day, those photos accurately captured the colors of the entrance plaza and the glossy wet surroundings. A selfie photo I took had good detail in my frazzled strands of hair.

Asus clearly put emphasis on video stabilization on the Zenfone, and filming out the window of a very rocky Lyft car ride I was able to capture what appears to be a smooth voyage down the street. If you look closely at the bottom left of the frame below, you can see how much the car was actually shaking. By default, the phone uses an Adaptive setting that crops in and out of the image based on how much the phone is shaking. You can also enable a HyperSteady option that stays consistently cropped inward to accomplish the effect more consistently.

I also took some night mode comparison photos between the Zenfone 11 Ultra against the $1,000 Pixel 8 Pro, using the dark environment of the House of Wax bar in Brooklyn and CNET's NY podcast studio. In most cases, I found similar results across both the Zenfone and the Pixel.

Among my bar photos, I found the Zenfone smoothed out some of the blurriness of the dark room corner. But among my studio photos, the Pixel did a much better job at depicting a brick wall and plant lit only by an iMac and light spilling in from an adjoining studio.

In the photos below of CNET's grass wall, results are comparable between the Zenfone, the ROG Phone 8 Pro and the Pixel 8 Pro.

The bottom line... for now

The Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra's larger size coupled with newer specs make it a standout portable entertainment center. With a processor that can easily handle demanding games, audio options that make your music sound great no matter how you want to listen and an expansive screen that's bright for movies or web browsing, the 11 Ultra should appeal to anyone that uses their phone primarily like a small television.

But unfortunately for the price, it's hard to ignore the short software and security timeline. If you're looking for a phone that's great for streaming videos and music, and you also appreciate having decent cameras for photography and videos, the Zenfone could be an appealing option, as long as you plan on moving to another phone in three to four years.

However, if you hope to use your next phone until it's completely broken, there are a lot of other great Android phones from Samsung and Google that will get software support through 2031. And if it's AI that you are looking for, Google and Samsung also appear to be placing most of their energy into that space, even though we're still figuring out exactly what we want AI to do on our phones.

Yet we can't forget, this is probably the only flagship phone being offered right now that includes a headphone jack. That in itself might help it stand out.

How we test phones

Every phone tested by CNET's reviews team was actually used in the real world. We test a phone's features, play games and take photos. We examine the display to see if it's bright, sharp and vibrant. We analyze the design and build to see how it is to hold and whether it has an IP-rating for water-resistance. We push the processor's performance to the extremes, using standardized benchmark tools like GeekBench and 3DMark as well as our own anecdotal observations navigating the interface, recording high-resolution videos and playing graphically intense games at high refresh rates.

All the cameras are tested in a variety of conditions, from bright sunlight to dark indoor scenes. We try out special features like night mode and portrait mode and compare our findings against similarly priced competing phones. We also check out the battery life by using the phone daily as well as running a series of battery drain tests.

We take into account additional features, like support for 5G; satellite connectivity; fingerprint and face sensors; stylus support; fast charging speeds; and foldable displays, among others that can be useful. And we balance all this against the price to give you the verdict on whether that phone, whatever price it is, actually represents good value. Though these tests may not always be reflected in CNET's initial review, we conduct follow-up and long-term testing in most circumstances.