Our full review of the Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra will be available soon, but it's been through our testing labs and one highlight in particular blew me away so I wanted to share it immediately.
While we have lost the diminutive (by modern standards) 5.9-inch display of the Asus Zenfone 10, the trade-off for the embiggening may be worth it as the now 6.78-inch display on the Zenfone 11 Ultra also allowed Asus to pack in a larger 5,500mAh battery (up from 4,300mAh) that delivered the longest battery life of any traditional flagship phone on the market.
An incredible 17 hours and 52 minutes in our testing! That's over an hour longer than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (16:46) and just shy of an hour longer than the OnePlus 12 (16:54). The iPhone 15 Pro Max (14:02) isn't even close after several years of Apple dominance in the phone battery life wars.
The latter is one of the most interesting developments of the current generation of flagship phones. While the Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra has come out on top, we've seen battery life skyrocket across the board on Android flagships, making it clear that Qualcomm cracked the code with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 this year. While the iPhone retains some advantages, raw multi-core performance and battery life are no longer among them.
While I left it out of the above discussion, you can see in the table that Google's Tensor has fallen even further behind. Considering it also can't match the performance of either Apple or Qualcomm's chips, this will be a story to watch this fall. There is no question that Google can compete effectively in the budget phone market, but software smarts can only take you so far and ultimately you need the hardware to compete.
However, that's a story for another day. Today I just wanted to highlight the incredible battery life of the Asus Zenfone 11 Ultra. You can pre-order the phone now directly from Asus for $899 and orders made before April 14, 2024 are eligible for a free pair of ROG Cetra True Wireless earbuds in Moonlight White ($99 value). Again we'll have our full review soon of this still mighty (but not longer mini) phone from Asus.
