I was invited to ASUS Malaysia’s office here in Kuala Lumpur to check-out the soon to launch ASUS ZenFone Max Pro (M1). The device was announced last month in India and received an overwhelming response from in India due to budget-friendly and great performance for its price.

Let’s begin with the unboxing video;

Here are my first impression and hands-on of the new ASUS ZenFone Max Pro (M1)

It sports an IPS 5.99-inch 18:9 ratio display with Full HD+ 2,160 x 1,080 resolution. It has 450 nits brightness with 1,500:1 contrast ratio. The screen is bright, wide viewing angle and great color production with 85% NTSC color gamut.

It wrapped with an unibody premium metal and packed with an enormous 5,000 mAh battery. To be surprised, the Max Pro (M1) is sleek and weighs only 180g which is lighter than most of 4,000 mAh capacity smartphone out there.

On the back is the dual rear camera, 16-megapixel + 5-megapixel (6GB/64GB variants) or 13-megapixel + 5-megapixel (3GB/32GB, 4GB/64GB variants). The secondary 5-megapixel help to create perfect portrait effect with artificial bokeh/depth-of-field.

The fingerprint scanner is located on the back and the device also supports face unlock.

3.5mm audio jack can be found at the bottom alongside with microphone, microUSB port and powerful 5 magnet speakers that have NXP Smart Amplifier. The speaker is loud and solid despite it only have one down-firing speaker.

There is a 16-megapixel (6GB/64GB) or 13-megapixel (3GB/32GB, 4GB/64GB) selfie camera with soft-light LED flash for better photo taking in dark or low light environment.

It has triple slots tray: dual SIM slots and a dedicated microSD card slot. You don’t need to sacrifice the storage expansion to make way for second SIM or vice versa.

Performance wise, the ZenFone Max Pro is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 based on 14nm process that offers powerful and power efficiency. On AnTuTu benchmark test, it scored over 115,000 points which good enough to handle the daily task and even modern games.

ASUS ZenFone Max Pro (M1) will be the first Android device by the company to run an almost Pure Android system, this allows much fast Android OS and security patches update. Android 8.1 Oreo will be available out-of-box when it’s launched.

The company claimed the ZenFone Max Pro’s 5,000 mAh battery is able to have continuous 12.4 hours of gaming or 199 hours of music playback. That’s one hell of battery monster.

ASUS Malaysia has confirmed the launch of the ZenFone Max Pro (M1) will take place on the 31st of May 2018 and set to be available on 1st June 2018 (0% GST).

The company also confident that the price positioning will be very attractive and may even undercut the closest competitor; Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. It gonna be the most powerful smartphone at this price.

Our guestimate price of the ZenFone Max Pro will be around RM 649 for the base model.

Could this be your ideal smartphone? We will provide a comprehensive review of the device when we able to obtain the review unit from ASUS Malaysia.