When listing a phone’s specifications, we don’t usually start with the battery, but we’ll make an exception in the case of Asus’s new ZenFone Max. The 5.5-inch smartphone has an enormous 5,000 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery — a huge capacity compared with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S6, which comes with a 2,550 mAh battery, or the iPhone 6 Plus, which has a 2,915 mAh battery.
Even better, you can use the ZenFone Max, which was launched during an Asus event in India on Thursday, as a spare battery to charge other devices.
The rest of the specs put the device squarely in entry-level category — a 13-megapixel camera on the rear and a 5-megapixel selfie cam on front, a pretty lowly Snapdragon 410 processor and 2GB of RAM.
While the ZenFone Max’s 5,000 mAh battery capacity is more than generous, it’s not unheard of. Engadget points out that the Chinese Innos D6000 offers a 6,000 mAh battery, and a more powerful processor, Snapdragon 615, for $290.
Asus will start selling ZenFone Max in October, but details about price and availability in markets other than India were not revealed.