Asus ROG Phone 5 review: The MOST POWERFUL Android phone By CNET

From the front there's not much to see with this phone, but from the back with its light up logo. Well, this doesn't look like an ordinary phone, and it's not it's. The ASUS ROG phone 5. Rog stands for republic of gamers, and this is the fourth generation of the ASUS gaming phone line, and I have to say they really knocked this one out of the park. Overall, this isn't a major redo of its design, but rather another round of tweaks making this phone yet another step closer to an ideal. Every improvement from the screen to the speakers is done with one goal in mind: to make this the ultimate gaming phone to give you the absolute control over the most minute detail from the battery to its performance.

Perhaps the biggest change this year is there's not just one. There are three. The first one is the regular ROG phone five. It comes in black with a graphic dot, matrix pattern and hot pink 80s, punk rock highlights seriously. You just need to throw on some Blondie or talking heads to complete the effect.

Then there's the BMG phone 5 pro not pictured here, because I didn't get sent one. It comes with a detachable fan in the box, aka the aero active cooler 5, but instead of the light up logo on the back of the phone there's a color display for showing off graphics and, finally, there's the ROG phone 5 ultimate. It has a matte white back black hair lines and neon blue accents, all of which stole my heart as soon as I laid eyes on it. Furthermore, it has a back display just like the pro, but it's black and white, and with these displays you can show off graphics and text for things like charging or battery incoming calls gaming and more. In fact, you can make your own custom graphics from text or photos to show on that back display.

I should note um here that during the filming of this review, that the ultimate slid off a stand and then onto the desk and then onto the ground and gave it this wonderful spiderweb crack pattern that you see it was so beautiful, and now it's ruined like the pro version. The ultimate also comes with an proactive cooler, five in the box, but what really makes this phone ultimate is what's on the inside and that is 18 gigabytes of ram. Look. My new work laptop only has 16. Okay.

So what do you do if you have a gaming phone? You game? I play driving games, offloading games, group games, problem-solving games, zombie games, vertical games, role-playing games, gum, singer games, foxy games and whatever game this is sometimes I played games with the fan attached. Other times I played games using the nifty game pad accessory that you could buy and other times I played games, oh natural. Now. Sometimes I played games indoors and other times I played outside, and here are some takeaways. The screen is amazing.

You can set its refresh rate up to as high as 144 hertz, but I found the auto refresh rate worked best as it didn't kill the battery as quickly also. I realized at the time I'm recording this video that in China, the red magic 6 just launched with a 165 hertz screen the battery. Oh, the battery is absolutely incredible. It has a six thousand William hour capacity and is actually made up of two 3000 William hour batteries. This design means you can fast charge it or what ASUS calls hypercharge it with a 65 watt charger.

After a day of normal use, I had about 40 of the battery left. I was even able to make it to the end of two days. Barely I had to plug it in around dinner time, but really the battery life depends on how heavily you use it, especially for gaming battery tests for the RPG phone 5 for continuous video playback on airplane mode clocked in an average of 20 hours and 15 minutes, and that's with the screen locked at 120 hertz with the screen refresh rate set to auto. It averaged a time of 28 hours in four minutes. That's the longest time of any phone we've tested this year and that's the second-longest time for any phone in the past few years, just after the lg v60, but what's brilliant about the ROG phone is you can control the battery so many ways you can set limits for how much it charges you can choose slow charging speeds, you can even schedule when it charges.

One of the coolest features is that, while you're gaming, you can have the phone plugged into power, and it will use power from the cable instead of charging the battery, and that means the phone won't get as hot, which won't affect the gaming performance. This is something we saw on last year's Sony, Xperia 5, mark ii. Speaking of control, there are so many ways to control and interact with the games you play among. This is a thing called air triggers, which are these sensors located on the sides of the phone. Now this is nothing new, but what's new this year, is the sensors span from edge to edge of the phone, so it makes it so much easier to find those buttons, and I find myself missing less when I hit them and if you're, using the not pictured here pro version or the ultimate version of the phone there's an extra sensor located on the back side for input, add the proactive cooler, 5 aka the fan, and you get 2 more inputs for games.

That said, a lot of mobile games have a very simplistic control scheme, but I imagine having so many options to map game controls will really appeal to people who are big until esports, for example, but it isn't all fun and games. There are some drawbacks. The kg phone 5 weighs more than the iPhone 12 Pro max Samsung Galaxy, s21 ultra and last year's ROG phone 3. All of those phones are heavy, but the BMG phone 5 is the heaviest phone I have ever tested and after a long bout of gaming, you really start to feel that weight and even more so if you have a case on it or a fan or a game pad accessory. I know this is a gaming phone, but I do wish the cameras were better.

You get three of them on the back a main 64 megapixel camera. They use a pixel binning to improve image, brightness and reduce noise, there's also a 13 megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 5 megapixel macro camera. The main camera takes some decent photos in bright light, but when you get into dimmer situations like indoors, the image quality really suffers. If it's dark, the phone has to go into its night mode, just to take a picture which works. Okay, I really wish ASUS would just remove the macro camera and use the money they save from that to improve the ultra-wide camera, also with so much processor, power, ram power and GPU power.

I just wish the ROG phone could take advantage of that to make better photos. The kg is capable of shooting 8k video at 30 frames per second and the story here is the same as photos in good light. You can get some decent video, but as soon as the light gets darker video image, quality suffers and autofocus hunts like crazy and there's not a night mode like there is for photos to help the video out. Instead, you end up with something that looks like a bad photoshop filter was applied to your video. Another downside is there, isn't any water or dust resistance and for the price of this phone? I think there should be- and that brings me to my last gripe price.

Well, it might be my last gripe. To be honest, I don't know, and the reason is I don't know what the US pricing is for these phones, the RPG phone 5, starts out at 799 euros, and you can get different amounts of ram and storage going up to 999 euros. Then, if you want to jump up to that, ROG phone 5 pro the one that we don't have, that's going to cost you 1199 euros and then there's this bad boy with the 18 gigabytes of ram. This is gonna, be 1299 euros. When you convert all this to us dollars, it means that the ROG phone 5 could cost 950 for the baseline model and this phone would cost 1540.

But those probably aren't the actual us prices and that's where it's hard to put a value on these phones yeah. If the baseline ROG phone was 700 or even 800, it would be an excellent value, but I don't know if it is and if the ultimate was 1200. I could say without hesitation that that is an excellent value. But who knows and that's all I got, and now I want to hear from you guys what do you think of the new ROG 5 series? Are you considering getting one? If so, which one would you get throw your thoughts in the comments.

Source : CNET