The Zenfone 9, like last year’s 8, is that rare Android phone that prioritizes compact size over max screen size or battery. Be still my heart! But the new story this year is the phone’s camera and stabilization system: instead of just moving one element of the lens to compensate for camera shake, the entire main camera — lens, sensor, all of it — moves. It’s a unique approach to combating some of mobile photography’s biggest enemies: low light and shaky video.
The Zenfone 9 is small but powerful and continues the 8’s tradition of packing top-tier specs into a compact phone. The screen is a 5.9-inch 1080p OLED with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, and the phone uses a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset — Qualcomm’s latest and greatest. The base model includes 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and the phone is IP68 certified.
One-handed usability is a top priority for the Zenfone 9.
There’s a 4,300mAh battery that supports 30W fast charging and an adapter included in the box, but wireless charging isn’t supported. The back panel of the phone is textured composite plastic, although the frame is sturdy aluminum, and the front panel is protected by Gorilla Glass Victus. And it has a headphone jack! How carefully.
There are only two rear cameras on the rear panel of the Zenfone 9, which is just fine: there are no superfluous macro or depth sensors here. The main camera’s 50-megapixel sensor and f/1.9 lens are the stars of the show with what Asus calls a 6-axis hybrid OIS/EIS stabilizer. Below that is a 12-megapixel ultrawide that does double duty as a macro camera, plus a 12-megapixel selfie camera up front.
The main camera’s stabilizer compensates for x- and y-axis movement (side-to-side and up-and-down), but also uses information from the gyro sensor to correct for sudden forward and backward zz-axis movements. Asus says this makes the camera capable of three stops of motion compensation, compared to one stop on the Zenfone 8, which uses traditional OIS. Better shake compensation means the camera should be able to use slower shutter speeds and capture more light in low-light situations, resulting in better detail and color. This is a more stable system than the usual OIS or even the sensor-based stabilization that Apple uses in some of the iPhone 13 cameras.
50-megapixel main camera on top, 12-megapixel ultrawide on the bottom
Including this kind of stabilization requires rethinking how the camera interfaces with the processor. The cable connecting the two should have been shorter and arranged in an S-shape rather than a folded configuration. The band itself is also softer to apply less inertia to the camera assembly. All of this is, of course, hidden inside the phone and not visible, but the results are visible on the surface: with the camera in video mode, you can actually see the entire camera package moving under the fixed large outer lens element. Seriously, this is wild.
The Zenfone 9 will be sold unlocked in the US, but the price is still being worked out; in Europe it will cost €799, which is about… $800 USD (sorry about your currency, European friends). It will first be available in Taiwan, Hong Kong and parts of Europe.
Photo by Alison Johnson/The Verge
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