Asus ROG Phone – – Asus ROG Phone Review

Asus is entering the smartphone market with a high-end Republic of Gamers branded phone simply dubbed ROG phone. Like its motherboards and GPUs, it’s aimed squarely, completely, myopically at gamers. Starting at $899, this is not a cheap phone, but it has a spec list that is quite impressive. It’s also sporting an extremely 90’s Gamer aesthetic that will attract some and repulse others. The ROG phone is certainly be going up against the newly updated Razer Phone 2 in the “best Android gaming phone” competition, so let’s get it on.

ROG Phone – Design and Features

When it comes to the phone’s design, the front and back of the phone tell completely different stories. The front is understated and slick, with a small but distinct flair coming in the form of two stylish copper-colored grills for the speaker and microphone.

The back on the other hand, is… well…let’s just say it’s got a lot going on. First of all it’s a shiny grey with “futuristic” jagged lines, sharp camera cutouts, and has all-caps lettering that reads “REPUBLIC OF GAMERS” and “ROG AERODYNAMIC SYSTEM.” It’s also really shiny and reflective, so much so that twice thought it had some sort of shrink-wrap plastic still on it.

It’s also got a large, RBG light-up logo dead center on the back, which can be customized in the ROG Phone’s “Game Center” (no relation to the iOS version). There’s also some vents that allow the copper heatsink to poke through as well, which is something I’ve never seen on a phone before. The whole style is clearly supposed to look futuristic and high-tech, but I think it looks more like a movie prop ripped straight out of a Michael Bay film.

Thankfully, the phone’s internals are actually high-tech. That starts with the ROG Phone’s gorgeous 6” AMOLED display that’s locked at a pleasing 90Hz refresh rate (which is higher than any other OLEDs I’ve seen). Next there’s dual rear cameras—one’s 12MP and the other’s 8MP—and both offer a fairly wide focal length. That 8MP front-facing camera also supports face unlock, which was suspiciously fast (I was rarely even able to get my finger to the fingerprint sensor before the phone had already unlocked). Like the Razer Phone it sports a generous 8GB of RAM and a 4,000mAh battery.

And from here things get weird. The phone is equipped with a side-mount connector, which can be used to charge your device while gaming in landscape mode, or to attach gaming peripherals—like the included fan (see below), or play games over Gigabit Ethernet with a USB Type-C adapter. There are a slew of peripherals on the way, including a docking station that lets you plug the phone into a 4K monitor, mouse, and keyboard and a handheld gaming solution that sports a second display (and looks like a 3DS made of giant LEGO).

The phone also features optional AirTriggers—which are pressure sensitive spots on the chassis that act like shoulder buttons for gaming. These are hit or miss depending on which game you’re playing, but I really liked using them while playing Asphalt 9, which allowed for me to drift and hit turbo without having to tap the screen. The only drawback is they can’t be tapped in quick succession, so any games that require quick double-tap style timing are better suited for the touch screen.

The ROG Phone starts at $899 for 128gb of storage, or you can go with 512GB for $1099, and neither are expandable. Both versions include 100GB of Google Drive storage. Like the Razer phone, the ROG Phone is a GSM phone so it won’t work with Verizon or Sprint.

ROG Phone – Real World Testing

Despite its large size and plump weight (7.05 oz), the ROG Phone is surprisingly easy to hold. That’s in part because of the phone’s contours, but it’s also got a grippy section on the back of the phone that’s slightly raised and made of a different texture than the rest of the back (that’d be the ROG AERODYNAMIC SYSTEM).

The ROG is loaded with Android 8.1 Oreo, and it’s heavily decked out with a custom skin and pre-loaded with Asphalt 9, Free Fire, and Facebook. While I’m not a fan of the garish aesthetic, its easy enough to choose a new theme from the included Themes app (which includes a collection called “Gamer’s Domain” for ROG Phone only). There are also a slew of features designed to make the phone more useable and customizable. One of my favorites was ZenMotion Gestures, which lets you draw on the screen while its off, such as the letter“C”—to quickly launch your camera app. I’m not convinced this is actually faster than just launching the camera app from the lock screen, but it’s damn close—and way more fun.

There are also a slew of features designed to make the phone more useable and customizable.

The ROG’s cameras are good, but not great, and both strangely offer wide focal lengths of 12mm and 24mm. It’s unusual to forgo a zoom lens, and I found it a bit limiting. On several occasions I found myself choosing to not even bother breaking out the phone/camera if my subject was too far away. You can zoom in, sure, but like most cameras, image quality quickly deteriorates the more you zoom in. Image quality is pretty good overall, I’d say overall pretty good, but the wide angle lens takes worse photos than the main lens, while only offering a negligible gain in wideness. Overall you’re better off just using the Main in pretty much every scenario, and thankfully Asus lets you choose which lens to use.

For the display, AMOLEDs can be hard to see in direct sunlight and the ROG Phone’s 625 nits brightness doesn’t do it any favors—it just doesn’t get bright enough for many outdoor situations. Which is ironic, because the speakers are custom-tailored for just such a use-case. They come with an “Outdoor Mode,” which punches up the audio and prioritizes voices—at the expense of overall sound quality. In my experience, it’s a solid solution if you absolutely need more volume but can’t use earbuds. In general the speakers can get quite loud—and don’t sacrifice much until they hit the higher limits of the volume slider.

Asus ROG Phone – Gaming

Gaming is truly, the only reason for this phone to exist—and I was delighted with how much it exceeded my expectations. It has all sorts of frills, like the aforementioned AirTriggers and “X Mode,” which is ostensibly a mode for gaming which is turned on by squeezing the phone while in portrait mode. When this mode is enabled, it mutes notifications, closes background apps to free up memory, and optimizes gaming performance.

In reality, I didn’t notice a huge difference between gaming sessions with it on or off, but just having an easy way to mute notifications was enough for me to continuously use it. I also enjoyed the entire process of entering X Mode, as the phone vibrates, the background wallpaper transformed, and the RGB logo lit up. It’s seriously just fun to watch. There’s also Game Center (below), which is basically the tinkering hub, where you can adjust the phone’s performance.

With its 4,000mAh battery the ROG phone has enough juice to handle long game sessions. After an hour of graphically intensive gaming, the battery level only dropped 26%, which you can extrapolate to be about 4 hours of demanding gaming if you don’t tinker with battery settings.

A handy feature is when you’re in-game you can swipe from the right side of the screen and you’ll find a Game Genie icon sitting inside the navigation bar. This lets you quickly turn on AirTriggers, free up memory with a tap, livestream to Youtube or Twitch, and even draw Macros. But my favorite feature is the “Real-time info” toggle, which displays an overlay of CPU and GPU usage, battery, frames per second, and device temperature. It’s the perfect kind of feature for gamers and I was more than willing to leave it on even when it obstructed a section of the display.

The ROG Phone keeps things from overheating with vapor-chamber cooling, which is the same technology employed by Razer on its new phone, and in my testing the phone never got hot, even without the optional fan. The module displayed the phone getting up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but nothing I did made it any hotter. Still, 100 degrees is hot enough, so I was eager to put the fan to the test.

Unfortunately, that snap-on fan feels cheap, and at the end of the day I think it’s a gimmick. I tested the temperature with and without the fan, and while the fan did slow the rate at which the phone got hotter, with or without it, the phone always hit the same temperature (100 degrees Fahrenheit) eventually, making its use kind of pointless.

Performance was stellar in all the games I played—whether I was mowing down the competition in Fortnite, KO’ing baddies in Tekken Mobile, or drifting to the finish line in Asphalt 9. I never noticed prolonged frame rate dip and the 90Hz refresh rate felt fluid both in games and daily use.

Thanks to the ROG Phone’s dual speakers, audio was crisp and extremely loud—though due to the speaker’s placement, I was prone to muffle the speakers with my fingers while gaming in landscape mode. Just another reason to try the AirTriggers, right?