Asus keeps the compact dream alive with the new Zenfone 10

What's new about the Zenfone 10?

The biggest change is the wireless charging support. Asus has somehow managed to cram wireless charging coils inside the Zenfone 10's body while keeping the same battery capacity of 4,300 mAh, which is not a small feat.

Of course, being a true compact flagship, the Zenfone 10 comes equipped with the latest Qualcomm chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, as well as improved RAM and storage, namely LPDDR5X and UFS4.0, respectively.

Another hardware upgrade is the new selfie camera; the Zenfone 10 now has a 32MP front camera with RGBW technology (adding a white pixel in the matrix to help with color reproduction, light sensitivity, and performance in general). 

Display

The Zenfone 10 comes with the same 5.9-inch Super AMOLED panel as its predecessor, made by Samsung and tuned by Pixelworks. This means that the Zenfone 10 keeps the amazing color accuracy we measured on the previous model. 

The difference is that now you can overdrive the display to 144 Hz during gaming, which will please those of you who prefer headshots to other inferior types of damage in FPS games.

Camera

The Zenfone 10 keeps the same Sony IMX766 50MP sensor for its main camera, but Asus has added some tweaks to Portrait Mode, and the field of view for the ultrawide camera is now wider. The impressive 6-axis gimbal stabilization from last year is present too, and it has also been upgraded with Adaptive mode.

You can set it and forget it; this mode will automatically choose the stabilization levels and technology (making use of both the gimbal and the electronic stabilization) to produce optimal results. 

ZenUI

There are some slight tweaks to the ZenUI, which runs on top of Android 13 (two years of major OS updates). You can now make burst shots while the screen is off, capturing time-sensitive moments without the need to fire up the camera from the screen.

The excellent capacitive fingerprint scanner is still here, with cool new additions to its smarts, such as the ability to scroll not only the notification shade but also websites. 

Price, availability, colors

There's a fresh new color this year called Aurora Green, joining the other cool options: Midnight Black, Comet White, Eclipse Red, and Starry Blue. Inside the retail box, you will find a 30W HyperCharge brick, a USB-C cable, and a protective back cover. The Zenfone 10 will be available globally (including the US) starting at $799/€799 for the 8GB/128GB version.