The Zenfone 3 Max ships with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with ZenUI 3.0. The thing with ZenUI is that it is well designed and has some genuinely useful features. Unfortunately, what ruins it is the number of pre-installed apps that it comes with, both from Asus and third-party developers such as Facebook.
What Asus really needs is restraint in this department. They should probably make most, if not all of these apps, optional so users can choose if they want to have them or not. It takes a while to uninstall, hide, and disable many of these apps and also some of the annoying features of ZenUI and only then does it become usable. Unfortunately, most people will never go through the trouble of doing this so their user experience will forever be marred by these unnecessary apps that add very little value to the phone.
Asus Zenfone 3 Max user interface
In terms of performance, the Zenfone 3 Max performed respectably in daily use. Despite rocking only a Snapdragon 430, application performance was perfectly usable and many apps opened, closed, and scrolled smoothly. Even in Chrome, only the heaviest of web pages with a lot of ads would bog it down.
Asus Zenfone 3 Max UI settings
Unfortunately, the lack of performance is felt while gaming, where the Snapdragon 430 on the Zenfone 3 Max has nothing on the Snapdragon 650 on the Redmi Note 3. While the latter can play any of the modern 3D games just fine, the Zenfone 3 Max struggles in most of them, with only the most basic 2D games being playable.
The multimedia performance was also more or less satisfactory. The display is good enough for watching your movies and TV shows on the go and the headphone audio quality is also just fine. The loudspeaker sounds tinny and doesn't even get particularly loud but is fine in a pinch when you just want to watch a YouTube video in a quiet place.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
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