ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra Review: A Great Phone That Should Cost Less

The ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra nails the hardware and software experience.

ASUS phones have always piqued my interest partly because I’m a fan of ASUS products, but this would be my first time testing a Zenfone device. We did review the Zenfone 11 Ultra last year, but that was handled by another person on the team. I’m typically involved in reviewing ASUS’s ROG products as they revolve mostly around gaming, so I was intrigued to see just how much of ASUS’s gaming features bled into its more average consumer-focused phones. I’m happy to say that, as someone who loves mobile games, the Zenfone 12 Ultra can suffice as a phone that handles them well, even without being designed around gaming.

All of that is thanks to the inclusion of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset inside (you’ll also find this inside the Galaxy S25 Ultra and other phones in the series), along with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Again, though, this is not a gaming phone nor is it marketed to mobile gamers. A big focus of the Zenfone line is capturing the consumer who wants a high-quality phone with good cameras and intuitive features. I’d say the Zenfone 12 Ultra fits in that category nicely, however, ASUS is asking a lot in terms of cost for what’s being delivered.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of features here on display (the display included) that are very nice to have. But some things have me wondering if the Zenfone 12 Ultra is really worth the asking price of €1,099. That’s about $1,141.79 USD. So, it is expensive. That being said, the Zenfone 12 Ultra is a well-made phone that looks great, and functionally I feel it’s top-notch (for the most part). Does that warrant the price tag? Let’s dive deeper and take a look.

ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra Review: Design and Build Quality

I’m just going to come right out and say it without beating around the bush. The ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra is a very stylish phone. It has a sleek, minimal aesthetic that I really loved about the ROG Phone 8 series (the ROG Phone 9 carries a similar minimal aesthetic) but dials things back just a little further. Since this phone is geared toward the average consumer, you’ll find no micro-LED displays on the back and no gaming design details of any kind anywhere.

What we’re left with on the Zenfone 12 Ultra is a phone that feels premium and looks like it costs a lot (it does). One thing I think ASUS has always been really good about is phone design. With the Zenfone 12 Ultra, it hasn’t dropped the ball, not even a little. Granted, I only have most of the ROG Phones to go off of for comparison, but those have all felt and looked really high quality.

With the Zenfone 12 Ultra, the design is nice and clean. The volume up and down buttons and the power button are on the right side of the phone, with the USB-C charging port, 3.5mm audio jack, and SIM card tray on the bottom. Since this isn’t a ROG Phone, there’s no secondary USB-C port on the left side. So like I said, nice and clean with no extras. The display is nice and vibrant and appears to get very bright, and it’s an FHD+ Samsung Flexible AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate.

The screen is also made from 22% recycled glass, while the phone’s frame is 100% recycled aluminum. My two favorite parts of the design are the back of the phone and the camera bump. The camera system on the back uses the same size sensors as what’s on the ROG Phone 9 series, but the bump is shorter and wider.

As for the phone’s back, it’s a matte glass that’s nice and smooth and just feels really good to the touch. One of the main gripes I had with the ROG Phone 8 Pro when I first held it was how slick the back felt. This worried me because I was afraid it would more easily slip out of my hands. The Zenfone 12 Ultra does not feel like that at all, with the surface offering more grip as you run your fingers across it. I’d still recommend getting a case though. The Zenfone 12 Ultra comes in three different color options – Ebony Black, Sakura White, and Sage Green.

We have the Ebony Black model, and it has an almost super subtle blue tint in the right light. Like a really, really dark midnight blue. It’s very nice, and just looking at each of the colors it’s clear ASUS put a lot of thought into selecting the ones it did. Overall, the design is solid and to me, one of the best-looking phones on the market. The build quality also feels top-notch. In other words, nothing feels cheap. When it comes to the design and build quality, ASUS has knocked it out of the park.

When it comes to the display on a phone, it doesn’t take much to impress me. If it looks sharp and the colors are good, I’m happy with it. If there are any little extra bonuses, it only makes things better. In the case of the Zenfone 12 Ultra, the display is pretty good in just about every way you’d want a phone display to be. It gets bright, the details are nice and sharp, and the colors are vivid.

And then there’s the added bonus here of it being a 120Hz AMOLED panel. It can also boost up to 144Hz when gaming. So overall, there’s really nothing bad I have to say about it. Would it be nice if it was a higher resolution? Sure. I don’t think it’s necessary on a screen this size, though, and I never have. I don’t think I ever will. So while there are nicer displays on phones out there, I don’t think it’s crucial to have one for a better user experience.

In terms of brightness, the screen gets very bright when turned all the way up. I haven’t been able to test the peak brightness since it’s cold, rainy, and snowy here. But based on how bright the display is now with just maxing out the brightness bar, I don’t think the Zenfone 12 Ultra will have an issue in direct sunlight. ASUS says the peak brightness is 2500 nits which is incredibly bright. That being said, you’ll likely never see the display get that bright since that was achieved in lab testing.

The more important factor is the peak brightness in High Brightness Mode, which ASUS tells us is 1600 nits. We didn’t quite get those numbers in our own testing. But we were able to get the screen to around 1300 nits which is still incredibly bright. There’s also an ‘Extra Brightness’ toggle you can switch on to push the brightness a tad further. This does make an actual difference, too. It does drain more battery life though. That being said, this shouldn’t be a problem given the 5,500mAh battery and the 65W charging support.

It’s also using Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for screen protection, and that should help it resist scratches and maybe even protect the panel in the event of a drop. Again, though, you’re better off not taking the risk and putting a screen protector on and slipping the phone into a case.

ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra Review: Performance

This phone has absolutely zero performance issues when it comes to running any task you might use a phone for. You wouldn’t expect to have those kinds of problems anyway. With 16GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, this phone is a powerhouse. It even has the Game Genie software that ASUS uses in its ROG Phone lineup. So if and when you do play mobile games, you’ll get some of those gaming features. Just not all of them.

With this kind of hardware on board, the Zenfone 12 Ultra crushes every single task you can think of. In daily use, scrolling on the phone was buttery smooth, and launching apps or any other function never once felt sluggish. As always, at least from my perspective, gaming is where this thing really shines in terms of performance.

Although it can get a tad warm if you play demanding games for a longer period of time, that’s true of really any high-performance phone. After more than a few hour-long sessions at minimum in games like Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact, the Zenfone 12 Ultra was still able to coast along like you’d just booted up the game. You can run graphics at max, with max frame rate, and everything looks nice and feels smooth. It’s a performance powerhouse and that’s no doubt part of this phone’s high price.

Overall, there hasn’t been a single performance issue when using this phone. Though, that’s to be expected with the kind of hardware that’s inside.

Benchmarks

To put the performance on paper, we run all of our phones through a series of benchmarks to test how they handle various tasks. In the case of the Zenfone 12 Ultra, I’d say things went pretty well. We use both Geekbench 6 and the 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test to see how it handles general CPU tasks, as well as high-performance GPU tasks. Such as gaming. We also do a video export test using CapCut. Unfortunately, I could not run this test since CapCut is currently not available to download from the Play Store in the US.

If that changes in the near future, this review will be updated to include it.

First, let’s kick things off with the Geekbench 6 test. When we ran this test for the single-core CPU score, the Zenfone 12 Ultra actually performed pretty well. Outpacing the Galaxy S25 Ultra and coming out with a score of 3,170. For the multi-core CPU score, it’s the fastest phone we’ve tested so far with a score of 10,022, outside of the Snapdragon 8 Elite QRD which got a score of 10,415. For the GPU score, it performed well here too, with a score of 20,351. Though it was far behind the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the iPhone 16 Pro.

Finally, for the 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress test, the Zenfone 12 Ultra did pretty well save for the stability score, which wasn’t great. Its best loop was 6,958 while its lowest loop was 2,538. Meanwhile, its stability was only 36.5%. So, not fantastic. However, this is just a benchmark, and so far in my experience playing any games with high-end graphics, the phone has been fine. Even after long sessions. So I wouldn’t worry too much about the stability in the 3D Mark test.

Overall, the phone did just fine in the benchmarks and is likely to be one of the better-performing phones in this area.

ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra Review: Battery Life and Charging

Having used plenty of ASUS ROG phones by this point I was confident that the battery life on the Zenfone 12 Ultra wouldn’t disappoint me, and I was correct. With a 5,500mAh battery inside, one would not expect the phone to be anything short of awesome in terms of battery life. Especially when you couple that with pretty fast charging times. The Zenfone 12 Ultra shines when it comes to longevity making it possible to take this phone through about two days of use before needing to plug it in.

That is of course, depending on how you use it. If you’re like me on some days, you use your phone more sparingly and you could probably leave it off the charger for a second day without worry. On other days, like on days when I not only browse Reddit and the web but also play some mobile games, etc., I’ll need to plug the phone in at night to guarantee I have a full day of use the next day.

There were times like this for me in the past week of use with the Zenfone 12 Ultra. Where I’d used up most of the battery but not completely. I’d still have around 20%-30% battery left, but I knew that wouldn’t last me through another full day, so I had to plug it in. The nice thing is that this phone supports 65W charging (it also supports 15W wireless charging). During my test, it charged up rather fast. So all I had to do was give myself just enough time to get from 0% to 100% which was under an hour.

With my less heavy use days, I was easily able to use the phone for several hours of screen-on time throughout the day and still have battery life left. Specifically, I was able to push it to about 11 hours of screen-on time over a 32-hour period. That’s pretty good if you ask me. It’ll also come in handy on days when I use the phone a lot. Now, not everyone is going to need battery life like this, but let me tell you, it’s certainly nice to have this kind of peace of mind. Knowing for a certainty that you won’t drain your phone’s battery in under a day.

And on top of that, even if you did, you could charge it back up quickly. That’s the kind of experience you can expect from the Zenfone 12 Ultra.

Benchmarks

When it comes to battery life benchmarks, we test the battery life of every device by streaming a video until the phone gets to 1% down from 100%, or until it dies in some cases. I like to take the phone all the way down until it shuts off. So what we do is we play a 24-hour YouTube video on the phone and let it stream over Wi-Fi until it gets to this point. For my test, I pulled up this video, started a timer on my Pixel 8 at the exact moment the video started, and I let both the video on the Zenfone 12 Ultra and the timer on my Pixel 8 run until the Zenfone 12 Ultra shut down.

When doing this, the Zenfone 12 Ultra ran for a total of 23 hours, 28 minutes, and 18 seconds. It’s not the best battery life of all the phones we’ve tested since we started doing these benchmarks. However, it’s certainly high up there, and better than most. As for the charging, remember this phone has a 5,500mAh battery. It also supports 65W charging. In my testing, the phone was able to charge up to 100% in 49 minutes and 18 seconds. This is pretty good, although there are several phones we’ve tested that charge in less time.

That being said, some of those phones support faster than 65W charging. So that plays a factor in those phones charging up faster, naturally. Overall, the battery life on the Zenfone 12 Ultra is really pretty good. It charges up plenty fast, too. In short, I don’t think any users who pick this device up are going to have issues with the battery life or the charging speeds.

ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra Review: Software

When it comes to software, ASUS is probably my favorite manufacturer of Android devices. The experience can be highly customized to give the UI a personalized touch. What’s nice about the UI that ASUS uses is that it’s mostly stock. There’s very little bloatware on the device to begin with. And that’s already a huge leg up on devices from other brands.

That being said, ASUS also gives you the ability to tweak this with the ‘ASUS Optimized’ UI. This changes a few things like the way the volume slider looks and functions. You can also do the same thing for the incoming call screen and a few others. Additionally, there’s an option to split the notification dropdown. On something like the Pixel 8, when you swipe down on the display, you’ll get the notification panel. Swipe down again and you’ll get the quick settings panel.

On the Zenfone 12 Ultra, you can keep it like this. Which is great if you enjoy this experience. ASUS also has an option where you’ll get one of those panels or the other, depending on where you swipe down from. This is the way I have been using the Zenfone 12 Ultra because I like this user experience. If I swipe down on the screen in the left half of it, it brings down the notification panel. If I swipe down on the right half of it, I get the quick settings panel.

ASUS is not the only brand to do something like this. That being said, most brands don’t implement it. And it’s actually a really nice way to keep things efficient. Less swipes and all that. The UI experience outside of this is pretty similar to the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition I reviewed. Almost identical really. Save for a few things. For instance, the Zenfone 12 Ultra is running on Android 15 out of the box. So it has a few of those Android 15 features, which the ROG Phone 8 Pro did not have right away.

It also has several new AI features, many of which are catered to the camera. There are a few that are not camera-related, though.

AI features, for better or worse

Many of the AI features that are geared toward the camera I didn’t really get to test properly. However, there are several available that can enhance the photos and videos you take. For instance, the Zenfone 12 Ultra offers AI Unblur, AI Magic Fill, AI Panning, and AI Tracking features. AI Magic Fill isn’t necessarily what it sounds like. It lets you remove stuff from photos. Like people in the background and such.

AI Panning, on the other hand, is sort of like a portrait mode for moving objects. Outside of these camera features, AI has been baked into several other functions. There’s an AI Call Translator for example. This lets you essentially translate calls in another language in real-time as the call is happening. You basically select the incoming and outgoing languages, enable the AI Call Translator, and then start the call. I unfortunately could not test this out, as the Zenfone 12 Ultra is not being sold in the US.

Therefore, it did not work with my Google Fi service for voice calls. On a related note, the Zenfone 12 Ultra does support eSIM. So in countries where it does support the networks, this is a nice feature. As past ROG Phones have yet to add this. There’s also an AI Article Summary feature. I found this to be most intriguing as it lets you generate summarized versions of an article you find on the web. The AI works to create key points of the article to give you specifics. And ASUS even lets you select localized or cloud-supported AI processing.

You can obviously select localized on-device processing for more privacy. However, having the AI tap into the cloud works faster and more efficiently. One major drawback with this feature is that I could not get it to work. I have had an article processing for days now. And it’s still telling me “Please wait” while it tries to summarize things. This feature and several of the other AI features are in beta. So this is partially to be expected. Still, it’s kind of a bummer.

Additionally, the phone has an AI Document Summary and AI Transcript. Not to mention Google’s Circle to Search. There’s a lot of AI-powered functionality here. Some of it works great, and some of it doesn’t, at least in my experience.

Game Genie

This might not be a gaming phone but it does have the performance of a gaming phone. This is also an ASUS phone, so it’s nice to see that ASUS left the Game Genie in for the Zenfone 12 Ultra. What this feature does is bring up a UI overlay while in-game with several gaming-related features and settings. This only comes up in games and you activate it by swiping toward the middle from the top left corner of the display.

Once this comes up, you can switch between different performance modes like High Performance or Dynamic. There’s also a mode geared toward extending battery life. Additionally, you have options for speeding up the performance, setting up macros, and disabling notifications. There are several features missing from the ROG Phone version of the Game Genie, but it’s just nice that this is here at all. As it’s part of what makes gaming on an ASUS phone special.

ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra Review: Camera

When it comes to the camera, I’m easy to please because I remember the days of absolutely terrible phone cameras. I’m old enough to have been around since the first camera phones and back then, you were just happy to have a camera on your phone. Let’s be real though. They were terrible quality pictures.

Today’s phone cameras are by comparison, exceptional. The quality has gotten so good, it’s really hard to tell the difference between most devices in the upper mid-range and above. With regard to the Zenfone 12 Ultra, the camera is quite good. I still think the Pixel 8 camera is better, but the Zenfone 12 Ultra takes some decent photos. Most of this comes down to the software and really only comes across (to me), with certain modes.

For example, the portrait mode on photos is just not as good as it is on the Pixel 8 which is my main daily driver. In general, though, the Zenfone 12 Ultra photos are of great quality with clear details and pretty decent color reproduction. The camera also has some fun AI-powered modes like AI Panning. What this does is let you take a photo of a moving object, such as a car, and it attempts to keep the subject as in focus as possible. Once the photo is taken, you can tap a button to increase this focus and blur more of the background.

Similar to a portrait mode photo, but with a different kind of blur. The kind of blur you would see if you were photographing a fast-moving object. In terms of specs, the Zenfone 12 Ultra uses a 50MP main camera with a Sony Lytia 700 sensor and an updated gimbal stabilizer. It also has a 13MP ultrawide-angle sensor with a 120-degree field-of-view and a 32MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and built-in Optical Image stabilization.

For the front camera, it uses a 32MP RGBW sensor. Nothing wild. It can record in up to 8K at 30 frames per second, too. If you want the best combination of clarity and smoothness, however, stick to 4K at 60 frames per second. As this ends up looking pretty good resolution-wise and it has little to no stutter. The zoom is pretty good but not nearly as good as you’ll find on phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. And that comes down to both the sensors used and Samsung’s camera software.

Additionally, there’s an AI Portrait Video feature to blur the backgrounds of videos and an AI Voice Clarity to hone in on the vocals of videos where there’s lots of background noise. This is really nice if you shoot a lot of videos with your phone. Especially in busy areas where there are lots of people or lots of ambient noise from the surrounding area. Such as a large city. Overall, though, the camera is pretty good and I have no real complaints.

Should you buy the ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra?

Now, the big question. Should you buy this phone? This device isn’t perfect, but then again, no phone is. There will always be a fault or two to find with a new device, even those on the top end. That being said, there are only a few faults here with the Zenfone 12 Ultra. It’s a great device. However, the few faults it does have are big enough that it might turn some people off.

The camera is pretty good but it won’t be good enough for those who demand the best. The phone also has pretty limited global compatibility. ASUS could change that in the future. That being said, ASUS was pretty clear before we received the review unit that the phone was not going to be sold in the US. Which means it has no reason to make the phone work here either. That’s a shame, because it’s a really nice phone, albeit a bit expensive for what it is.

So here’s my take. If you live in the US or the UK, you should obviously skip this phone. Even if you could find a way to get your hands on it. It likely isn’t going to work on your wireless carrier. And at the end of the day, the whole point of a phone is to be able to make calls. If you live in a region where this will be sold, I think it’s a decent option. So long as you don’t mind the high price tag. Then again, I do think there are options that could be considered a better value.

The Pixel 8, Pixel 9, and Galaxy S25 series are all excellent. These also work in a lot more regions, and cost less for the base model device.

You should buy the ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra if:

• You live in a compatible region and you like ASUS products
• Stock Android with high customization of the UI is important
• You want good gaming performance

You shouldn’t buy the ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra if:

• You live in the US or the UK
• There are better options available for a lower price
• You already have a fairly new phone