Asus ROG Phone 3 Review: The Spec King Returns! By Marques Brownlee

What's up guys MHD here, so I don't know if you remember, but the winning est phone of my smartphone awards last year was the ASUS ROG phone 2, the spec king, so that thing won the best big phone of the year that had the best battery life of the year and won the most improved award. So how do they follow it up with this? This is the ASUS ROG phone 3. , so I've been using and testing this phone alongside the OnePlus word for a couple of weeks now and basically, what you need to know is. It follows very closely in a lot of the same footsteps as ROG phone 2, similar design and specs and choices, but just bumped up a notch for 2020 and really there are two incredible things about this phone that continue to stick out, and that is the battery and the specs. So this design, as you can see its kind of funny when I first saw it, I was like oh no wait. They're toning it down.

Even more remember the first ROG phone was totally wild. The second ROG phone was a little toned down from that, and so I saw this third one, and I got a little afraid they might have started neutering the whole gaming aesthetic to make it more of an everyday phone. But as soon as you pick it up, you quickly realize oh just kidding. This is absolutely 100. Still a super unique design that they've committed to for this phone.

It's still got the RGB lit logo at the back. That can glow for notifications, still got the traced lines and the little exposed slot for the heat sink and the carbon chamber. Cooling system on the side still has the custom tappable air triggers on the side which improved actually this year with better sensitivity and precision and more custom mapping options, and it still has even the offset USB-C port on the bottom. So you can charge wall gaming and the cable doesn't get in the way and really, above all, it's still absolutely huge. It's just so massive.

This is. This is actually, I think, too, big a phone for me to want to carry it daily, and I really don't say that much. I think this phone finally found that point for me, somewhere between the biggest flagships of Samsung and OnePlus. We arrived at this and I think it's the gigantic footprint that makes it too big, but you all know what it did win the best big phone of the year for a reason, and a lot of that was how well they use all this space. So they kept the stereo front-facing speakers in this phone, and they are actually incredible.

The stereo image they produce and the volume they achieve thanks to having all this space is second to none. Some of the absolute best speakers I've heard in the phone. The only thing is the volume curve I found kind of weird like they really don't start getting loud until you're at like 80 volume, but that's not a huge deal. They can honestly fix that quickly with a software update now again that predecessor, the ROG phone 2, was that do everything in one package phone- and this is still an incredible spec sheet, and we'll get to that in a second. But it does have a few things, notably missing this year.

First, it doesn't have a headphone jack built in on the ROG phone 3. , there's, also no official IP dust or water resistance rating and there's also no wireless charging, probably because they really wanted to keep that RGB glowing logo. On the back now the headphone jack, I was a little confused by because it's a gaming phone- and you would still think someone who wants zero lag- will accept nothing less than wired audio, but it also does come in the box with this little accessory. That gives you USB and a headphone jack on the side. So I guess it kind of makes up for it, but I do miss wireless charging in a phone that I use every day, just because at this point most phones I use and test have wireless charging.

I have wireless chargers everywhere, so I do miss that all right have a look at this spec sheet. Just look at it, I mean. Is there a single thing on this list that isn't absolutely bleeding edge top of the line? It's got the new snapdragon 865, plus that's just starting to show up in phones now, by the way that chip is clocked at up to 3.1 gigahertz in a phone 16 gigs of ram. It's a 1080p 144 hertz OLED display up to half a terabyte of UFS 3.1 storage and a 6 000 William hour battery. Every single one of those numbers is the biggest or the highest.

You can basically find or put in a phone, it's all top shelf parts, but something that I think a lot of people forget us. You also have to consider the best way to transition from all those big numbers to actual user experience. Is great software and ASUS software? It's okay to me! It's getting better, but it's definitely not perfect, really, there's a lot of subtle things like animations and unlocking and transitions and just occasional places in the UI, where it hiccups just a tiny bit, and I notice it now. That's just me and a lot of people haven't used a bunch of other high-end high refresh rate phones. They may never notice this stuff, but most of the time this phone is super smooth right up.

Next to the other 144hz phone, I've used as the smoothest phone I've ever tested. So that's worth noting and overall performance, as you would expect from that. Spec sheet has been great and yes, I did leave on 144 hertz maxed out all the time, because there really isn't much of a downside right you can. This phone is going to let you go between 60, 90, 120 and 144 hertz. I leave it maxed out, because you can't really hurt the battery much it's so huge, and it's only a 1080p screen, so the specs can clearly handle it.

So yeah I paid for all the hurts might as well use them. But let's talk about that battery, so this phone again has a 6 000 William hour battery, which is again the biggest battery I've ever used in a phone plus this year. There's also 30 watt fast charging supported, and you guys already know. I've tested many other big phones in the past. Thick boys like this, and none of them have actually gotten me through two days.

You know some of them get to the end of the day with like 40 left. Some of them will get a whole day and a half, but none of them have actually really gotten me a comfortable two days, but I was testing this a little while back and sure enough. I had a pretty light day and I actually ended a day with 52 battery left at like 10 30 p. m, and when I saw that I was like wow, I'm ending the day with more than half my battery. Let's just try it.

Let's just see if I can go a full two days on this phone, so I didn't charge it. I woke up the next day and I went through an entire new day and I got to the end of that day. I think at 9 30 p. m. Furthermore, I had three percent battery lift, and it was about six hours of screen on time.

So there was some gaming, some navigation, but two light days in a row. I made it to the end of the second day at 144 hertz. That is incredibly impressive. Again I mean I expect nothing less from a just huge battery like that, but two full days of light use easily over a day of heavy use at 144, hertz dude, if you put this down to like 60 or 90 hertz, just because you have a long time when you're not going to be able to plug in this is a legit two-day phone and icing on the cake is the fast charging too so 30 watts? It might not seem superfast, but just think about this. When you're quick charging you get the fastest charging speeds from about zero to 60 65 percent before it levels off, and you get closer to full.

That's how batteries work well, when you're charging on this phone with this huge battery, the quick couple minutes of charge from zero to 65 just got you 4 000 William hours, so charging is fast. The battery lasts forever. You can use less charge cycles, so the battery stays healthy for longer. It's just all great and honestly, it's probably a lock again for the battery award this year. Okay, you got triple cameras on the back um.

We all know we're not buying a gaming phone for the cameras. None of them in the past have had a good reputation for cameras, but didn't stop me from testing it, and my findings lined up probably exactly what you'd expect pretty mediocre set of cameras. So you have a 64, megapixel main camera, it's a big number and then a 13 megapixel ultra-wide and a 5 megapixel macro camera. To me, this macro camera in a gaming phone is the perfect example of just adding the cheapest extra camera. To just be able to say you have triple cameras.

But honestly, I really don't think people are looking to just buy the phone with more cameras. Dear smartphone manufacturers, if you have the choice between adding a bad macro camera or one that people won't very often use or just not adding it, you can just not add it so. Shots from the main camera are passable when you give it enough light, so daytime shots are fine, but as soon as you get into those tougher situations like with higher dynamic range or just low light in general, they definitely fall apart, and the ultra-wide and macro are just much softer. No matter how good the light is, I mean they did their job. The ultra-wide is definitely very wide.

It's 125 degrees and the macro lens does in fact close focus, but let's not get carried away. People aren't buying this phone for the cameras, I'm actually more confused. Why there's still a camera bump on the back of the phone at all on? Maybe the thickest flagship phone of the year? Surely they could have fit the cameras into the chassis with no bump, but I guess not all these features and all these specs packed into this phone had me reconsidering. Like the original question, when we first started getting these gaming phones, which is, does it make sense to make to buy a gaming phone? And I think the answer for a tiny group of people is yes, people that play a lot of well-optimized games on their phone and want the best possible experience for that will enjoy this phone and things like air triggers and the faster refresh rate and the snappier response time of the display and the gaming specific features like x mode x that throttles up the CPU and game genie that lets you. You know feature hub for stuff like recording the screen and silencing notifications and clearing out ram for a little of extra performance, all that stuff for that tiny group of people sure, but for the rest of us, these really just end up being glorified or really nice, media machines, media consumption phones, big screen, big speakers, big battery high refresh, like watching videos, scrolling Instagram like this is an amazing phone for that, and that's fine too.

But for those who really know what they're getting into ROG phone 3 is a beast of a phone. So that's been it thanks for watching, and thanks to expression for sponsoring this video. So in a previous video I mentioned that expression is more trustworthy because they run their servers in ram. But what does that actually mean? Well when you use the internet like normal, your ISP, your internet service provider, so Comcast Verizon, whoever it is routes your data to whatever sites you're visiting but see. The problem is because all that information is going through your ISP every time, and they can store logs on all that stuff in the US.

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Source : Marques Brownlee