Asus ROG Phone 5 Review: mobile gaming at its best By HT Tech

Hello folks welcome to the ex tech show, and it's time to talk about the dog, ford5 ASUS the latest generation, gaming smartphone and look we've already done a first impression, video for the device, so you guys can check that out. We'll put up a link for you guys in the description, but in this video it's verdict time should you buy this phone or not, but before we answer that all important question don't forget to hit that like button and if you're feeling a little more adventurous do hit that subscribe button as well. So you keep getting regular updates. Okay, so ASUS ROG phone five, a totally maxed out phone, every spec, you can imagine this phone has, but we're not going to dwell too much on the specs, because what it really comes down to. Is that experience? What is it like to game on this phone? What is it like to use it on a daily basis and trust me when I tell you this, the experience actually begins with the unboxing. So when you open up this box, you're greeted by this Akira, uh, artwork yeah, and then it's brought to life by using the augmented reality on the camera's app, and then it just becomes a total full-blown anime.

So a nice little Easter egg there for anime fans for sure, but other than that other than that gimmicking cool stuff, the gaming man, and we've both gamed on this for a little while now and for me personally, it's been a great experience yeah, it is like I had said in the previous video as well in our first impressions. It is overpowered and that's been my overarching uh diagnosis for this review, this phone, just in every which way possible, whether it's just normal everyday scrolling or whether it's gaming performance, whether it's taking a picture. Everything is just super quick. It's just it responds immediately and that's where things like that 300 hertz touch response rate and everything come into play. It's really just a quick experience and outside I think one plus.

I don't think any other phone brand actually offers this sort of speed, at least in India. So it was never a doubt that performance would be great here, especially when it comes to gaming, thanks for that very powerful snapdragon, 888 processors, and it's not like ASUS, is also skimping out in other areas of performance. So it's not like they're offering you lpddr4x ram or UFS 2.1 storage you're getting the full works over here. So this variant has 12 12gb of lpddr5 ram and 256 GB of UFS 3.1 storage. So when it comes to multitasking when it comes to storage, speeds, rest assured you're in very, very good hands over here.

But I'll tell you this. Of course, I have game on smartphones that have uh the snapdragon 88 like on this one, and I've also learned on other phones, but there's something about the ASUS ROG fight. Now, whether it's that high 144 144 high refresh rate you're, getting or like you said, the 300 hertz touch sampling rate, I don't know what it is, but it just feels so much smoother. So for me, if I was a hardcore gamer which I'm not, but if I was one I can see why this would appeal to them by now. I'm sure you've noticed that glowing uh logo, the ROG logo at the back, and the reason it's glowing is that this phone is currently in something called x mode and that's something we've also seen on previous ROG devices.

Uh. That's basically is who's saying you know what you want to take this phone from normal to extreme, just press that x mode button, and it'll. Take you there just basically optimizes everything towards gaming like if you want to have a good gaming experience, that's the mode! Ideally you should be on, but then, of course, there are disadvantages. It will eat up into that battery life as well. So that's why ASUS has also introduced something called dynamic mode.

I believe yeah, which is giving you more of a balanced performance and if battery is really a concern for you, although it shouldn't be because it does pack in a 6000 my battery, but if it is because if you are excessively gaming, then there's also that battery saving special mode that will just focus on enhancing and also saving battery life as well yeah and considering the 6000 my unit is played into two cells. You do get quicker charging here, so it does. It does support up to 65 watts, but in the box uh you don't get that you'll have to buy that separately. If you want that superfast charging, the most you get 30 watt charge, which is still okay yeah, but it's better than a lot of other brands. Do at this price point, but still 65 watt, at least to have that option.

That's a good thing! So a 6000 my battery, which is pretty generous uh in my testing. It really depends on what you're doing uh with this phone right on that display. So if you're going to use it with that 144 hertz, refresh rate turned on all the time. If you want to crank the brightness to the max, you will notice a quick, quick dip in the battery life right, but I did that on purpose, just to see how much stress it could handle. But if you let's say switch over to 90 hertz and then maybe set the brightness to 50, do a little of gaming use it as your daily driver.

Essentially, it's easily a one and a half day battery life without any issues, and even then I was pretty much torture testing it so yeah. I was pretty happy with the overall battery life and because uh like he mentioned that battery has been split into two. You do get really superfast uh charging. Now we only got a 30 watt, fast charger and the numbers were pretty respectable so from zero to 40 50. It took just under 40 minutes and from zero to 100 about 1 hour 20 minutes for a 6000 my battery with 30 watt charging.

That's not bad. The one thing that obviously separates this phone from your regular flagship phones is, of course those gaming centric features that you get and as always, this does come with those air triggers that just really give you that competitive edge, and I'm going to be honest, I'm not the best gamer 70 of the time I get my ass kicked in Call of Duty mobile, but with those triggers I've killed people that I know. Ideally, I should not have been able to kill, because that is giving me that great edge and it's so quick, it's so responsive, and I think it's been improved this time as well. Like last time. It was good as well, but they've done some tweaking and as always, it's more customizable.

It's got more uh motion touch controls, but overall it just really works. Well for me, the very fact that these air triggers act as a sort of advantage over other players with non-air trigger phones, um that, I think, is reason enough for you to buy it if you're someone who does enjoy playing mobile games a lot. But that being said, if you do want to buy this device just as a daily driver, you can totally do that as well. It has a completely normal theme that ANZUS provides that if you want to use it as just a daily driver, you've got that gaming, cleaner, ROG skin as well that yeah you should ideally go for. If you want that cleaner aesthetic, the good thing about being a gaming phone, is that it does come with a lot of accessories and ASUS did send us that uh proactive pool of five- and that was pretty cool because you're, a big fan of that you use that.

So once you attach that something really special happens, it gives you extra controllers in addition to that air triggers as well. So that's like talking about competitive edge, now you're in a completely different ballpark altogether. Exactly imagine you have one two, three, four physical controllers already plus your thumbs, so that's almost six touch points for control, which is way more than anyone else is using possibly on any phone. So, of course it does help with cooling. So once you attach that it will lower the temperatures to give you more optimal performance uh in our testing, it reduces the temperature by three to four degrees, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a big difference between let's say 28 degrees and 32 degrees.

Right yeah, you don't want that throttling issues, it's a good you know accessory to buy, but then that being said, you also get a lot of inbuilt stuff over here that helps with the thermal. So this time around you've got a center design CPU, which is supposed to help with thermals more plus you get that uh graphite wiper chamber as well, which will again help with the heat dissipation system, because last thing you want uh when you're doing intensive gaming is for your phone to throttle and then just start to lag up, but with the engineering that ASUS has done inside. It's not going to happen, but one more thing about the proactive cooler does come with its own headphone jack, which I really like. Plus. It also has the same RGB uh glowing light which matches the lighting from the inside, so attention to detail issues always does it very well now, while I do like the outlandish sort of design that ASUS has put on the back with all that uh led dot matrix.

This is the new dot matrix system yeah, but it is quite heavy. This phone is quite large and quite heavy in the hand. It's 10 millimeters thick and weighs 237 grams, so it is definitely a chunky monkey uh. But yes, that's mostly because ASUS doesn't want that any of the internals inside to thermal throttle. It doesn't want any sort of heating issues going on, so they've said you know what, let's just make it a little: thicker, that's fine and also to be fair to them.

They have had to cram a lot of technique inside this, but uh the display itself. It's pretty big right. So it is a six point. Seven eight inch, six point: seven eight inch display uh and honestly I thought my hand could pretty much handle any phone display size, but I think I met my match with this one. This is very big, so if you have smaller hands this size will definitely terrify you yeah.

It's basically like buying a small tablet, yeah. Let's just look at the design aesthetics as well on the front with this display, so you do get slightly bigger bezels on the top and bottom compared to the sides and honestly, that's okay. Now, if this was the state in any other phone, I would have said no that's very wrong, and then you need to do a slimmer bezel, but because this is a gaming phone, it makes sense of it because, let's face it, if you're going to be doing a lot of gaming on this you're going to be doing it in landscape mode, and you need those bezels to offer you that respectively and good grip, so you don't get those accidental touches either. If you did get those curved edges over here, it would have kind of taken away from the experience of properly gaming. Those big bezels really uh, allow ASUS to tune really nice stereo speakers proper dual front facing none of that doesn't double up.

It doesn't double up on the earpiece. These are proper stereo speakers with excellent uh stereo separation as well. Not only are they loud, but they offer you some really, really good bass, so, whether you're playing or if you're watching content, you never need to use that headphone jack you've got it yeah, but you don't need to use it. I mean I understand if you're a proper gamer. You will appreciate that headphone jack, because it does now come with that really high audio codec, but nonetheless those stereo speakers are fantastic.

Okay, anyway, coming over to that display now- and this is a Samsung AMOLED panel- it is 1080p uh, but because it is a Samsung panel AMOLED panel, you can expect like perfect vivid, colors and deep blacks and all of that but brightness. I wasn't too keen on it, because it does go up to 800 nits of peak brightness, and it's okay, if you're gaming or watching content indoors, but outdoors, it will take a little of a hit uh, but for indoors is absolutely fine and, like I said it does get that really super high refresh rate 144 hertz. So this is a very, very snappy display yeah. But if you are, let's say daily driving this device for one day and saying, let's say not playing games uh, you can totally just go to the settings, turn it on auto, and then it'll just change the refresh rate based on what you're doing yeah it does give you options as well: 60, 120, 144 hertz and that auto switch as well uh. But apart from that really, really buttery smooth display.

I had no issues with that whatsoever, and it also gets a scanner underneath it, a fingerprint scanner underneath it which, in true ASUS ROG phone fashion, like every other thing on this device, is superfast and super quick to respond. Okay. So now, let's talk about the most important thing about any gaming smartphone and that's the camera yeah, not really, but this isn't a bad camera right. We've been testing it and I think gaming phones generally have this get a bad wrap for their camera. Centric features, but I think ASUS has delivered pretty well.

I mean this is pretty much the same camera setup that you've got on the ROG phone three as well, so they haven't really changed things. Much so specs wise you're, getting a 64 megapixel primary camera, you're, getting a 30 megapixel ultra-wide lens, and you're, also getting a macro sensor, and I think that's precisely uh the nail on the head. The fact that this being a gaming phone that camera gets looked at a lot more and people just say: oh, but the camera is not nice yeah. You know for a daily driver, it's more than a respectable camera. You'll get nice colors you'll get nice contrast pictures you'll get nice sharpness, because it's a 64, megapixel sensor and ultra-wide shots also are pretty okay, yes, color sometimes is a bit off yeah, but that's something that happens, but look anytime.

Furthermore, you switch from your main sensor to another sensor or another lens. Exactly there's going to be a difference in color you'll never be able to get that exact same color. You know we're able to precisely match it uh. But yes, I did also notice that in some ultra white clicks that I took, the colors are beautiful right, especially with landscape shots, so the sky was looking, really punchy, really blue and the leaves and the trees. All looking very colorful, but then when I punched up the sky went totally gray.

It just did not match so. Consistency might be one issue with this camera, but then the same can be said about a lot of other non-gaming camera smartphones as well yeah, and that's exactly it that this phone is not being built for the camera, but they're still nice enough to give you a nice high resolution sensor. So if you want you can take those pictures, edit them to your liking and put in your own color profile or whatever you like on it, but for the most part they're just there, because that's just something you do in a 2021 smartphone. So this is one of those smartphones where we can just keep on talking and talking and never finish. But sadly we do have a time frame.

Uh YouTube, algorithm, isn't very nice to people who keep overly long videos. So we're going to sum this up now right and let's first talk about the pricing, so the ROG phone five starts at forty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine rupees. So that's for the eight gt ram, 128 GB variant, this one, the 12 GB ram variant with 256 db storage goes up till almost 58 000 rupees, so just 57 999 rupees uh, but for a phone that starts under 50k. I think they've packed in a lot of good stuff over here and honestly, the only person who probably wouldn't go for a smartphone like this right is someone who's, just isn't into gamer design and gamer aesthetics. But for me personally, yes, this is a gaming centric phone, but I found that it did everything else, absolutely fine as well right.

So it does everything. Fine and honestly, the way I look at it is that you get all these extra gaming features as a bonus. It's an add-on sign me up. Yeah, that's basically, my um take on this device as well that if you're someone who looks for utility this phone has it all. It gives you everything and that's why I think pound for pound the ROG phone five is the best smartphone you can buy out there right now.

There are barely any compromises on this device. It packs in every feature. You could want and then some which you probably won't even ever use um. Possibly the only thing you aren't getting is an IP rating, yeah um and that's a little of a shame. But again it's understandable because of the way the ports in this are designed.

So they can't really make everything water resistant, but it's still it gives you the full works. There 's's no compromise in this, but anyway uh that's about it. Let us know what you think about the new ASUS ROG 405 in the comment section: uh, we'll catch you guys in the next one. Thank you so much for watching you.

Source : HT Tech