Asus Zenfone 9

6owners with an opinion

67%of verdicts positive

3/1positive/negative since 2024

4 yrslongest happy owner

1happy after 3+ years

Praised for portability and battery; criticized for design and ease of use.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 4 years

I bought another zenphone 9 (such a good phone... nothing comes close 4 years later for me) with the hopes of putting lineageOS on and trying to keep it up to date with security updates. I didn't realize that ASUS disabled their bootloader unlock service API. I ran a similar process to try anytime and everything to own my own device. My current (bad) idea is to run a root exploit at each boot and then patch known vulns at runtime... at least until the moto phones with grapheneOS come out. I have a recent pixel with grapheneOS but i can bring myself to use it.

Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year

OK, it looks like they took the Zenfone 9 (which I've been using for the last year or so) and gave it minimal upgrades. Fair enough. Here are the things that they didn't change that they should have, IMHO: - camera holes in the screen are incredibly annoying. Put them in a bezel or a pop-out. - the side-mounted fingerprint reader/power button is far too happy to unlock, and then start scrolling. "Pocket mode" doesn't improve things. - I'd accept it being twice as thick if it had a replaceable battery. - There's 16GB of RAM and a decent CPU. Why not upgrade the USB-C port to run a monitor?

Likes itStill going

This is almost describing the ASUS Zenfone 9 (except for some reason they wanted only 8GB RAM, while the zen 9 has 16). The small size and clean stock Android were the main reasons I bought this, and it's still a great phone.

Doesn’t like it

Its not always that easy. I specifically bought a Zenfone 9 due to its small size and unlockable bootloader. Guess what - Asus removed the bootloader unlock tool after I purchased the device. Can't trust anyone these days

Likes it

My Zenfone 9 has a headphone jack. No SD card slot though, which I don't need. So yeah, I voted for this position with my dollars, and will continue to do so. Any phone with mandatory AI crap is Hard Pass.

Likes it

Typing this on an Asus Zenfone 9. Small, headphone jack, good battery life. I think there's a Zenfone 10 now?

Likes it

> Sony Xperia X Compact You can run custom ROM on it (the suupport is provided by Sony themselves), though maybe you need to actually build it yourself (which yeah not great, but you don't have to write the drivers, the build scripts and everything related yourself) > Samsung A40. You can run custom ROM on it (using Generic System Images) > I buy the smallest phone I can find. Apparently no ROM developer is interested in those phones. Well, I am interested in those phones :P. I currently daily driver Asus Zenfone 9 (compact in nowadays standards, but not really compact), and Qin 3 Ultra (actually compact, usable one-handed). And I definitely run custom ROMs on it.