Asus ROG Phone 3 review By GSMArena Official

Hey, what's up guys will here for GSM arena? Asus is a pretty popular name in gaming hardware and that extends to phones too. This is the ROG phone 3, their newest flagship. Is this the gaming phone to rule them all? Let's find out in our full review the ROG phone 3 is a flagship phone made of premium glass and metal. As expected, you get the gamer style aesthetic here, including a glowing led logo this year. The bold design elements are a bit more toned down and the finish is glossy not matte. One special touch is the triangle accent on the back, rather than some sort of decal, it's actually a window through which you can see the phone's, huge, copper heat sink.

The looks and form factor of the rog-3 are quite similar to last year's model, just a bit thicker and heftier this time around, but just like on the ROG phone 2, there's no IP rating. This fancy hardware is vulnerable to dust and water. Asus is known for its extensive selection of gaming accessories for its ROG phones, most of which you'd need to buy separately, but you do get an proactive cooler 3 in the box. It's a fan that attaches to help cool down the phone and your hands too. Plus it doubles as a kickstand.

You can reuse some accessories from last year, like the lunar game pad too. The case and paddles don't fit on the rog3, so you have to use it as more of a standalone Bluetooth controller. However, if you really want to make the phone look like a Nintendo Switch, ASUS has just announced their new lunar game pad 3. Last year's twin view. Dock 2 is fully compatible here as well, and it gives you a giant, Nintendo DS, sort of vibe.

Although in-game support for a dual screen is pretty scarce. At the moment, you can find a couple of games that can utilize the second screen, the just announced twin view. Dock 3 also works much the same way, but the second screen has a higher refresh rate. Another peripheral you can use with the ROG 3 is the mobile desktop dock. It allows you to connect the phone to a TV or monitor and play your games on the big screen.

You can use this with a controller or even plug in a mouse and keyboard which, for some games can feel almost like cheating. The ROG 3's display has seen some upgrades over last year, despite keeping the same size. It's a 6.59 inch OLED panel with a 1080p resolution, but what makes it stand out is It's superfast 144, hertz max refresh rate and 270 hertz touch sampling rate. This means that moving objects should appear much smoother to the eye. You have options for 60, 90, 120 or 144 hertz, which are enforced across the whole system, where possible and there's also an auto mode that will adjust the refresh rate based on the particular app the low 25 millisecond touch.

Latency means that the phone is quick and responsive perfect for gaming, or even just swiping around the display performed admirably in our tests too. You get the excellent contrast. You'd expect from an OLED and max brightness is great up to around 460 nits, with the slider and 720 nits in auto mode. In bright conditions, new support for HDR 10 plus across the major streaming platforms- and there are several color presets to choose from some of which are quite color, accurate. Like most phones, you see these days with OLED screens.

The ROG 3 employs an under display fingerprint scanner for waking up and unlocking the phone. It's quite fast and responsive. There's an always-on display, as well as a notification led up at the top plus. You can program the glowing logo on the back of the phone to shine for notifications. So when it's time to check your phone you'll know the ROG phone 3 has a dedicated, front-facing, stereo speaker setup.

It's powerful. Each speaker has a 7 magnet design and an independent amplifier plus ASUS has partnered with the Swedish audio company Dirac for the phone's cutting edge audio software, which is specifically tailored towards gaming. Certain sounds and frequencies, like footsteps, are amplified plus, there's advanced crosstalk cancellation to have better separation of the channels for cleaner directionally, and one of the coolest features is the bass boost which uses psychoacoustics to trick the air into recognizing louder and deeper bass. Tones up to two octaves deeper than what the speakers of this size are otherwise capable of. Overall, the max loudness of the rog-3 speakers is a little less than what we measured on the rog-2.

But it's not by much, and the audio quality here is awesome really on a different level compared to most smartphones. There is no 3.5 millimeter jack on the ROG phone 3, but there is a dongle included to plug in traditional headphones and there's actually an audio jack on the proactive cooler fan. So if you have that attached, you're all set the ROG phone 3 has plenty of storage on board and is of the superfast UFS 3.1 variety. You can choose from 128 256 or 512 gigabyte options. This isn't expandable via micros, though there is support for plugging in an external hard drive.

If you wanted to do that, the ROG 3's user interface is based on android 10 and as you'd expect from a device marketed for gamers. It brings bold aesthetics with geometric shapes and contrast colors and a ton of options related to gaming. One feature: that's back from last year is the high performance mode called x mode when you toggle it, the UI transforms and the LED on the backlights up, x mode has different tiers and the highest performance level is only available. If you have the fan plugged in if the gamer style, UI isn't quite your taste, there is also an option for a squeaky clean, more traditional, looking interface and themes, there's something called power master, which is a centralized place for managing app power, consumption and charging options to increase battery longevity, and there are in-depth controls dealing with both screen, recording and screen capture great for anyone serious about recording their gameplay speaking of gaming. One handy set of features on the rog3 lies with the game genie.

This is an in-game overlay, that's easily accessible by swiping on the edge of the screen. It provides quick access to a bunch of gaming related options like do not disturb and brightness or live-streaming. It can also enable a floating toolbar that displays performance, stats, fps and temperature. Plus you have key mapping options for the air triggers the two touch sensitive areas on the corners of the phone that are great for games like shooters. In addition to that, there are motion, control options, key mapping for controllers and even macros.

You can set up for input combinations if you thought that was all you're way off. There's a whole gaming portal called the armory crate, which, on the surface, is a convenient and cool looking hub for accessing all of your games, but it's even more than that. One cool feature it allows for is creating a custom performance profile for each individual game or app. This includes CPU GPU screen refresh rate and temperature control. You can import and export these profiles and share them online too.

Within these profiles, if you want to go even further, you can enter advanced hardcore tuning. This lets you tinker with specific values for the phone's internals. We've never seen this level of hardware control before without rooting the phone. There are also plenty of general system-wide settings, as well as controls for the cooling fan, lights and accessories. Plus you have access to the game.

Genie from here and all that entails finally finding games that make the best use of the rog-3's. Various features can be tricky, but in the armory crate there is a menu that lists games organized by supported features complete with links to the play store. Take these with a grain of salt, though particularly with high refresh rate support, that's up to the individual developers to make possible. Now, let's move on to the phone's actual performance, the ROG phone 3 is powered by the newly announced snapdragon 865 plus chipset. This is the first time we've seen this ship, and it's the fastest.

You can get on android. It provides support for 5g network speeds and compared to the regular 865 offers a 10 bump in clock. Speed of its prime CPU core, as well as an increased GPU clock speed. As far as benchmarks go the ROG phone 3 does an excellent job, as you would expect it sits at the top of the charts. As far as CPU performance goes and as far as graphics tests go, it beats the rest of the android competition, only falling short of Apple's hardware.

All in all, it's not a night and day improvement over the regular snapdragon 865, but it is quite noticeable. One interesting observation we had was that the x performance mode didn't seem to boost the maximum performance scores or fps rates. Very much. Instead, ASUS seems to be aiming more towards high, sustained performance over time, which is useful when you're, actually sitting down and playing games. The phone is already great at combating thermal throttling, thanks to its heat sink and fan attachment, but the x mode, tweaks performance parameters and thermal tolerances to help make sure that an hour or two into gaming, you don't run into some heat related slowdown at 6, 000 William hours, the ROG phone 3's battery is among the largest ones.

You can get on a flagship today with it. The ROG 3 scored an impressive endurance rating of 120 hours in our battery life tests, with its screen at the highest refresh rate and bumping the refresh rate down to a standard 60 hertz led to an even better score of 133 hours. Charging speed is decent, especially for such a big battery with the 30 watt power delivery charger. We were able to charge from zero to 43 in 30 minutes. It's not all about the gaming.

You might want to take the occasional picture too. The rog3 is equipped with a triple camera setup on the back there's a 64 megapixel quad, Bayer main cam, a 13 megapixel ultra-wide cam and a 5 megapixel macro camera. The main camera's photos come out in 16 megapixels, and these are perfectly decent. There's plenty of detail and colors look natural. We did have some trouble with the HDR, though, which is quite inconsistent.

Even when forced on so dynamic range is sort of hit or miss. You can capture photos at the full 64 megapixel resolution, though this doesn't offer as much benefit as you might imagine. There isn't much more detail and the file size is huge. Zooming is available and is advertised as lossless, though it is a digital zoom, taken from the main cam at two times. This looks decent with a surprising amount of detail, though they're a bit too soft to be called lossless portrait shots also come from the main cam they're very clean.

Looking with nice subject, detection and separation and convincing refocus backgrounds the 13 megapixel shots from the fixed focus, ultrawide cam are perfectly decent, but a bit on the soft side close-up shots taken with the 5 megapixel macro. Cam are okay, the results are usable, but the resolution is nothing impressive and since focus is fixed, you need to use some trial and error to get a sharp photo in low light. Shots from the main camera were pretty good. They're. Surprisingly, low noise, good enough detail and decent dynamic range, there isn't night mode supported here which you can set to be enabled automatically if the conditions are dark enough, depending on the particular scene.

Night mode can be surprisingly effective, often managing to bring back a lot of detail from the dark shadows. The ultra-wide cam's performance is pretty poor in low light, as expected, because of its dim lens. If you turn on night mode, you may end up with a usable result. These take a long time to shoot and don't expect anything mind. Blowing selfies are taken with the 24 megapixel quad Bayer front, facing cam these six megapixel shots are good, focus is fixed, but these tend to come out sharp with nice detail, colors and dynamic range 4k.

Videos from the main cam can be taken in up to 60, fps and quality is quite decent. You get a good amount of detail with vibrant colors. The sharpening might be a bit overdone, though there is even an option to capture video with this camera and 8k a trendy feature these days, and on top of that, this mode has electronic stabilization, which we haven't seen before the quality. Here is great. You can shoot in up to 4k at 30fps with the ultrawide camera.

These are pretty good, though the dynamic range is noticeably more narrow than the videos from the main camera, even though there is no optical stabilization to be found on these cameras. In fact, all the footage looks quite smooth. If you turn on the electronic stabilization, it does a splendid job. There's an extra stable, as called hypersteady, which only works in 1080p resolution. It is very impressive, though, effectively smoothing out things like running, so that's the ASUS ROG phone 3.

From top to bottom. The upgrades it brings are pretty much geared toward improving the gaming experience. You get a large and responsive high refresh rate OLED display a cool, looking gamer style design, awesome, stereo speakers tuned toward the audio you'd, hear in games, excellent battery life and a cutting edge chipset that can give high class performance over long gaming sessions. There are a couple of nitpicks to be had here, though. First is the camera quality which isn't flagship level but for the gamer crowd.

I don't think it's such a high priority, and it gets the job done. The other thing I want to mention here is the focus on a super high refresh rate. The high fps is awesome for gaming, but since it's up to game developers to enable it on their end, you're never sure whether a game would support 144, fps or not. The play store doesn't make it easy to find the right game titles either. So you have to rely on info posted on forums online and things change all the time.

Overall, though, I think this phone offers an awesome premium gaming experience that pushes the boundaries of what's possible on an android device, it's not for everyone, but for the hardcore mobile gamers out there. The ROG phone 3 deserves a recommendation. Thanks for watching guys, stay safe and see you on the next one. You.

Source : GSMArena Official