Asus ROG Phone 5 full review By GSMArena Official

Hey, what's up guys will here for GSM arena? This is ASUS's new gaming phone, the ROG phone 5, and it's one of the most powerful smartphones you can find on the market. It also doesn't come so cheap. So is the improvement in the gaming experience worth the premium? Let's find out in our full review, the ROG phone 5 series are flagship tier devices that aim to deliver the most advanced gaming experience. You can get on a phone compared to last year, they're taller and narrower, and the gamer style. Aesthetic has been toned down a little in addition to the vanilla version. We also have the limited ultimate edition, which is almost the same as the rog-5 pro, but comes with an additional box of swag compared to the regular rog-5.

The ultimate has higher storage in ram and on the back of the device, two extra touch sensors, which you can use as game controls and a neat pooled display, which you can program, keep in mind, though, that both the ROG 5 pro and the ultimate edition, if you can find it, are much more expensive than the regular model for this review, we're going to focus on the vanilla, ROG 5. On the back, rather than a display, it features colorful, dot, matrix, RGB LEDs, which form the ROG logo. The rog5 is made from gorilla, glass, 3 and the black finish is quite glossy with red highlights the back curves into the aluminum frame and the phone feels a bit heavy in the hand. It's a bit of a beast. One of the coolest hardware features is the pair of pressure, sensitive ultrasonic air triggers on the corners of the phone, they're really responsive and can register taps swipes long presses and squeezes really expanding your options for your controls in game.

On top of that, you also get advanced motion control support. If you want, you can map pushing, pulling tilting and shaking the device to your set of game controls, which can be handy in certain situations. Another special feature, you'll find is the side port, which is out of the way of your busy hands. Besides the USB for connecting or charging there's, also an array of contact plates which connect to pins of ROG accessories. Maybe thanks in part to this port.

There is no waterproofing on the rog-5, so you'll need to be careful with this expensive phone. The rog-5 display is a 6.78 inch AMOLED with a 1080p resolution, gorilla, glass, Vitus protection and a superfast 144hz refresh rate. This isn't the highest refresh rate we've seen on a phone that would be 165 hertz, but 144 is more than enough to achieve a super smooth effect. When you're, swiping and scrolling the interface you can choose between 60 90, 120 or 144 hertz across the whole system, or opt for auto mode which will try to switch and match your content. The most exciting reason to have a high refresh rate here is for high frame rate gaming.

Even though support for this is still rather limited on android, you can still find a decent number of titles that can run at 120 or 144 fps, and the list is constantly growing. As far as the screen goes, it's really nice, since the selfie cam is hidden in the top bezel. The surface is uninterrupted by a punch, hole or notch. The picture is plenty sharp and quite contrast and colors can be super accurate, depending on your color settings, plus there's HDR 10 plus support. There are some gaming related features too.

The ROG phone 5 has a fast 300hz touch sampling rate and, along with ASUS's own back-end optimization. This means you should get amazingly low touch, latency and great responsiveness in fast-paced games. There's a special coating on the glass for reduced friction with sweaty fingers, and the display is eye care certified. So it should give you less eye fatigue during long gaming sessions. The rog-5 is brighter than last year's model, too.

We measured almost 500 nits maximum with the slider and a boost to 800 nits in auto mode when in bright conditions and there's DC dimming for low brightness situations as well. Asus knows that audio was a big part of the gaming experience. The rog-5 has a pair of identical, dedicated front-facing stereo speakers, which are 33 larger and 20 percent more powerful than last year. The resulting max volume earned a very good score on our loudness charts, which is great, but strangely less than that of the ROG phone 3. Regardless.

The sound quality here is some of the best we've heard from a phone. It's amazingly rich and dynamic thanks to psychoacoustic bass enhancement. On top of that, there are a couple of special features that can really boost your gaming experience through memo, crosstalk cancellation, designed by direct the ROG phone 5, can achieve better stereo separation and directionally of sound, which can be useful in certain genres plus there's a neat haptic feedback system that can identify certain sounds like a gun firing and translate those into vibrations. While you play, if you would rather have some privacy, you can plug traditional headphones into the 3.5 millimeter jack, which is now back after it was ditched in the ROG phone 3. The quality here is again outstanding, thanks to a high end, ESS Sabre quad deck and a class g ESS Sabre amplifier, which can drive high impedance headphones ASUS promises best in class signal-to-noise performance too.

Another way you can plug in headphones is through the jack on the proactive cooling fan, which is sold separately, unlike with the pro or ultimate edition, or even last year's model. That's not the only thing we were disappointed with connecting the fan, isn't easy, and it's even a little scary, since it requires a bit of force to pop into place. The fan of the rog-3 felt much better with this adjustable holder. If the connector pins aren't perfectly lined up, while attaching the fan you can snap one which eventually did happen to us. Thankfully we'd already managed to finish our testing.

The fan is pretty nice to have, though, on top of helping with the thermals. It keeps your hands cool and has two physical buttons on it for extra controls, as well as a kickstand. Asus is well known for its ecosystem of peripherals for its ROG phones, but a few of them won't be compatible with the new model because of its different form, factor and side port. These include the twin view doc3, which adds a second screen to the phone, and you also can't use the mobile desktop dock for connection to a monitor. If you purchase these rather expensive accessories for an older model, you can bring them over to the new one.

However, you do still get compatibility with a professional dock and the lunar game pad 3 can also work as long as you get a new bumper to fit the phone. The ROG phone 5's interface is android 11, with ROG UI. On top, it's a heavy skin that offers plenty of proprietary gaming features. The home screen theme brings that gamer style, aesthetic, which we'd expect from a device like this one, but you can also switch to a more vanilla, looking zen UI home screen. If you want, there is also an optical under display fingerprint reader for waking up and unlocking the phone with turning on the x mode will boost the phone's performance over lengthy gaming sessions, and it will cause the home screen to change and glow to a neat effect.

You have extensive control over pretty much all the game. Related settings you could ask for within the armory crate here, you'll find your game library, and you can set a specific settings and performance profile for each individual game. The options here are super extensive. You can tweak the behavior of the touch response and within the display menu you have plenty of control over the graphics settings and within performance you can choose from presets or have more hands-on control of the peak performance of the CPU and GPU. There are game, specific network settings and each game's profile also includes your settings for the air triggers key mapping as well as macros.

There is also a console tab which allows you to make system-wide changes across all of your games, while you're in game. A swipe from the left side of the screen will bring up the game genie, which is another suite of options that you can access on the fly. There is plenty you can do here, but probably the most useful are they do not disturb settings and the key mapping. If you need to quickly adjust something in game. This menu can also act as a shortcut back to the armory crate.

There's also a neat option called esports mode. It's a simple toggle that switches the phone to a predefined, neutral state approved for use in esports events to level the playing field, so to speak. As far as storage goes, the ROG 5 comes with 128 or 256 gigs on board for your media and games. It's not expandable through micros, but you can connect to an external hard drive now on to the actual performance. As you might expect, the ROG phone 5 runs on Qualcomm's, most advanced chipset.

To date, the snapdragon 888, along with 8 12 or 16 gigs of ram along with 5g connectivity. This chipset offers flagship grade power, and, on top of that, thanks to great optimization and thermals, the rog-5 can squeeze out even higher numbers than competitors with the same chip. It aces the benchmark, charts and is able to provide higher and more stable frame rates in game than most competitors, and this is even without the x performance mode turned on the rog5 thermal design is something unique. They call it gamecool5. The CPU PCB is located in the middle of the phone directly under the cooling fan.

If you have one together with a vapor chamber, cooling system and graphite sheets, this does an incredible job in keeping the phone running at high performance for long periods of time without throttling, but even without the fan on the behavior is impressive, gradually dropping performance over time with no jarring stutters. Unfortunately, as you may have seen online, these changes also compromise the structural integrity and the phone can snap in half. If you apply force in the center, don't do that? Let's move on to battery life! The rog-5 was able to score an endurance rating of 110 hours in our battery life tests. Great but less than what we'd expect from the giant six thousand millionth hour battery capacity. This is partly due to the battery's unique arrangement.

It's actually split into two separate symmetrical cells, arranged on both sides of the CPU PCB, and they charge simultaneously using MMT battery tech. The result is much faster charging. With the bundled 65 watt adapter. We were able to charge the phone from zero to 70 percent in half an hour. Now, let's go over the cameras.

The ROG phone five has a 64 megapixel quad, Bayer main cam at 13, megapixel, ultra-wide angle, cam and a 5 megapixel macro cam photos from the main cam come out at 16 megapixels, and these are pretty good. There's plenty of detail and colors look natural. They are a bit on the noisier side and dynamic range isn't the widest, but these aren't major issues. Asus marks two times: lossless digital zoom and these photos look decent enough, though a bit on the soft side, shots from the 13 megapixel ultrawide camera are again decent, but not particularly impressive corners are a bit soft and dynamic range is average. But of course you get the desired wide angle effect close-up shots from the macro cam come out at 5 megapixels, since focus is fixed, you'll need to use trial and error to get a photo to come out sharp those that do have an adequate amount of detail in low light.

The main camera does a good job. There's enough detail and pretty low noise highlights do end up clipped, though by default night mode will kick in automatically. If the phone detects that the scene is dark enough, the effects can range from barely noticeable to surprisingly effective, restoring detail and dark shadows. Low light shots with the ultra-wide cam aren't good, as is typical of these sorts of smartphone cameras. If you turn on night mode, the results are usable, selfies are taken with the 24 megapixel quad Bayer front, facing cam and come out at 6 megapixel resolution.

They are sharp with good detail and colors, and the dynamic range is nice. Here. Videos can be taken with the main cam and up to 8k resolution at 30fps. These clips offer amazing detail and we, like the balance, color saturation. The dynamic range is a bit limited, though 4k video at 30fps is much the same, just with slightly less detail.

It's plenty though, and we like these results, especially since they're much easier to work with than 8k. The ultra-wide camera can also record in 4k at 30fps, and it has decent detail and the color rendition is good, but the dynamic range is even more narrow. Video can be stabilized through as, on both cameras in all modes, even 8k. It does a great job in smoothing things out. So that's the ASUS ROG phone 5.

You get a snazzy, looking gamer style design with LEDs, an excellent high refresh rate, AMOLED, awesome, stereo speakers, killer performance and thermals extensive customizable profiles for all of your games, great battery life and fast charging. The cameras are pretty good, even though they're not quite flagship level and the shoulder triggers and the cooling fan do add a lot to the gaming experience. My concerns here are that the fan isn't included in the box unlike last year, and the connection here is a bit fragile this time around, and you don't get compatibility with older ROG peripherals, which were actually pretty cool and unique, plus overall, compared to last year's ROG phone 3. This isn't a huge upgrade. Feature-Wise.

Don't get me wrong. I do recommend the ROG phone 5. , it's probably the most well-rounded gaming phone. You can get right now, but if you're coming from last year's model, it might not be worth the upgrade and if you're looking to save some money, there are cheaper options on the market that are aimed towards gamers. Thanks for watching guys, stay safe and see you on the next one.

You.

Source : GSMArena Official