Tough Screen Is Tough
Up in front, the M2 rocks a 6.3-inch Full HD+ IPS LCD Display that produces decent colors, has great viewing angles, and a good amount of brightness for use in the outdoors. It’s got an 88-percent screen-to-body ratio and, yes, it does have a wee little notch up on top. While we’ve seen displays of this caliber before, the Zenfone Max Pro M2 gets a thumbs up for using a Gorilla Glass 6 panel to protect its display so that might put you at ease if you admittedly have butterfingers and drop your phone more than you’d care to admit.
The speaker on the device produces a lot of volume but is a little tinny and you’ll want to keep it to about 80-percent when consuming content to avoid distortion. Again, there’s a headphone jack so you can always default to that.
The Max Gets a Performance Boost
What we were really excited about when we got briefed on the M2 was the fact that it was now using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 under the hood; compared to the SD 636 on the M1. Now, granted this is the version of the 660 with a lower clock speed but it still performed rather admirably during our time with the phone. The SoC is paired with up to 6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of onboard storage but the unit that was handed to us was the 6GB/64GB variant, which was still more than enough to handle the day-to-day stuff without any issue.
It should also be noted that we were handed an engineering unit to try out so there were a few kinks that should be ironed out by its release date but nothing to really ruin our experience with the device.
If you’re into gaming, you’ll be happy to know that it hums along fairly well with the games we often use for our gaming reviews. Asphalt 9 ran extremely smoothly at the highest settings and NBA 2K19 had a few frame rate drops with everything turned up to the highest we could get it without Cloth Simulation on. We’ll release a gaming review for the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2 once the few hiccups we’ve encountered have been resolved and the phone runs the way it’s so supposed to when it hits store shelves.
It Still Runs on Stock Android
One of the things we loved about the Max Pro M1 was the fact that it ran on Stock Android and we rejoiced at the fact that the M2 would still be getting the same treatment. It isn’t running on Android Pie and we’ll have to confirm if it will be getting the update to 9.0 but we’ll take the simple and clean OS any day of the week over any UI overlay.
