ROG Phone 5 Ultimate Review: The Most Ridiculous Custom! By Marques Brownlee

This is what happens when you get to the limits of what any normal person would want in a phone and then just blow right past it hey what's up MHD here. This is the ROG phone 5 ultimate editions, so there is no kg phone 4. For the same reason, there was no one plus 4 4 is an unlucky number in some parts of Asia. So we've skipped right to five, and this phone is every bit as ridiculous. As it looks, it's kind of funny, they've actually sort of been toning down the gamer phone aesthetic over the years, but they have not been toning down how ridiculous the actual phone is. So gaming phones, when they were starting out, were never supposed to be reasonable.

You know they're huge phones with pretty striking designs, RGB lights and the absolute bleeding edge maximum specs available, and so the ROG phone has been at the forefront of that for a while, and this new one definitely takes it even further. So, first, it's still got all the same. Big number fundamentals from before it is a massive phone. It's got a gigantic 6.8 inch display 144hz ammo led a snapdragon triple eight, which, while it's not a plus version like they typically launch the phone with it is absolutely the latest and greatest right now still has a massive 6000 William hour battery half a terabyte of UFS 3.1 and still has a huge pair of stereo front-facing speakers that get louder than any other phone I've tested in a long time. But now, on top of all that, there's a lot of new there's, a surprising amount of upgrades actually, first, you've probably noticed this back.

It's a matte white kind of pearl like finish with blue accents, it's not the drippiest thing in the world, but it does reject fingerprints really well and overall, the looks not too crazy. It's still unmistakably a ROG phone with those slanted lines, and they just love printing text all over the phone, so republic of gamer's logo, the number five for ROG phone, five, the quad, bear camera text and at the top it says for those who dare for some reason they love that text. But I do think the sim card tray in blue is a super nice touch and while the huge white phone still does stand out, I do feel like the whole gamer phone. Aesthetic is maturing a little from just like rainbow puke now right in the middle, and you might have caught that there is still a little of a glossy piece right there, and you might be wondering what that is. That is another screen on the back of this phone, so it's called ROG vision.

So there's this little inch and a half black and white screen that can display different kinds of information. The settings for it here are in ASUS's, armory crate app instead of in the settings app, but once you dive in here, you can turn the screen on and off and then choose what the screen lights up for. So you can see it lights up when the phone's screen is on it lights up when the phone is charging, it even lights up. When you receive a phone call and then for each of these scenarios, you can actually go in and customize the exact animations that play in each scenario to the point where you can actually create new animations and import images that you want to use and make new animations for yourself it's crazy now. This is how I got the MHD text animation here playing on the back of my phone anytime.

My screen is on its even orientation sensitive. I know it's. It's extra, there's no other phone! That does this and that's probably for reason, but hey. If you're going to go niche, you might as well go all the way down the customization, rabbit, hole and ASUS has like really committed to something unique here. So, okay, there's no doubt they've leveled up the aesthetics.

It definitely still looks like a gamer phone, but ASUS didn't just stop at the aesthetics, so that's 6, 000 William hour battery, I mentioned the one that won it the smartphone award for battery last year. It's upgraded that to a fast charging system inside thanks to two things. This really beefy heavy 65 watt charging brake. That comes in the box and the new dual battery system inside. So it's actually now a pair of 3000 William hour batteries that charge in parallel.

So this is the same concept that OnePlus was using with the 8t two smaller batteries in parallel charge faster than one huge one. So now it's a massive best-in-class battery that also charges really fast, roughly zero to seventy-five percent in around half an hour, which is plenty now, that's already great. That's already I get a day and a half of completely carefree use out of this phone at 144 hertz, which is crazy, and if you want to take it easy set it to auto mode. Those numbers start to get kind of ridiculous at 60 hertz it's easily two days, but the other thing to think about with a fast charging system like this. Are you still want to think about battery health long term, and that's also something ASUS is thinking about, so they've built in a bunch of different battery charging adjustments to address that, so there's now steady charging which charges slower for better battery health there's scheduled charging? So you can reduce the time that the battery is full and not in use.

So basically it slows charges overnight and then finishes up to 100 when it's time to get up, and you can set that to finish charging depending on when your scheduled alarm is. That is dope, and you can also manually set a charging upper limit to just straight up limit your max charge to 80 or 90, and then on top of that, there's something called bypass mode, which is such it's such a gamer, specific thing. But when you're in this mode you plug in the phone, let's say: you're gaming: it bypasses charging the battery and just puts the power straight into the system so that you're not heating up the battery as you're charging, because you're not charging, and you're not cycling the battery. So it's just going straight into the actual system. Who would have thought it's a great idea, so I'm clearly very impressed with the battery, as you can probably tell, but there's more first, they brought the headphone jack back.

Is this the first phone that I've seen that's ditched the headphone jack with one year's upgrade and then brought it back the next year? I think, so I think, so they moved it from the phone in the ROG phone 3 to the fan accessory through us blast year. Now it's back in the phone and not only is the headphone jack back, but there's a DAC behind it and there's a whole audio wizard built into the software that lets. You drag 10 different frequency response, sliders and change the audio in a crazy way, like that's just that's approaching too much customization at this point. It's awesome they've also technically leveled up the performance and the specs of the phone here too. So imagine all the highest end specs possible that can fit in the phone snapdragon 8 chip check, half a terabyte of the fastest UFS 3.1 storage check, 18 gigs of ram on this highest end version check, 144hz maximum refresh rate on the display with a 300 hertz touch sample rate check. This is about as consistently smooth of a phone as you'll get to see like 18 gigs of ram in a phone.

Is this some kind of joke like clearly, I'm not the biggest gamer? I don't really play games on my phone like that, so I'm playing games to test this, and it's obviously very responsive, but the performance difference between this and something like a galaxy s 21, something with maybe 12 gigs of ram to be fair, is pretty small. So this is like I mentioned at the beginning, the ROG phone 5 ultimate editions, which is the highest end in a new lineup of phones which I'll get to in a minute. But this has 18 gigs and then the rest of the lineup gets up to 16 gigs. So I feel like they added the extra two gigs of ram for this phone. Just for I mean it's gaming, it's bragging rights.

Yes, it's technically better, but I feel like they just want to be able to say they had the most ram in any phone which they can say now, which is kind of sad, because you can't actually pin apps into ram. Like you can on like Samsung and OnePlus phones would be nice to add on a phone like this right now. One thing you probably didn't expect to be so good about a gaming phone is the cameras because they're usually pretty bad. So this is an area where I was actually pleasantly surprised by ROG phone five. It has some decent cameras.

It's a triple camera set back here, a 64 megapixel primary 13 megapixel ultra-wide and a 5 megapixel macro camera, and I wasn't expecting much like I said, but the more photos I took with this primary camera. The more impressed I was this thing makes some nice detailed, pretty confident and contrast photos. It's the style that reminds me of the pixel. It's not quite pixel level, but it reminds me a lot of the before, also by ASUS, which did win the blind smartphone camera test. We did last year, so this phone did a perfect job, maybe just a tiny bit aggressive with the HDR.

Sometimes and I've noticed it's a little slow to focus on closer up objects, so you can miss focus a bit, but it's better than I expected from a gaming phone. The ultra-wide is definitely weaker and softer per usual and the macro it works, but the minimum focus distance isn't as close as I'd expected from a macro and the selfie camera is wildly inconsistent with exposure. So it's fine, but you know, even in the same room with back to back selfies, I could get like totally different shots like I know: you're, probably not getting this phone just for the cameras, but it's its nice that it's not super disappointing. So that's! I would give it like a b minus in the grand world of smartphone cameras. It's a b minus! It's not bad.

The reason you would buy a phone like this is because of the power you get in the palm of your hands and the ridiculous level of customization possible. You saw the audio customization behind the headphone jack. You already saw the display on the back of this phone, acting like a notification led on steroids, even though this phone already has a notification led, but then there's also these performance profiles and the armory crate that let you quickly flip over into a gaming mode or an everyday use mode or a battery saver mode, and then all the custom settings that go with it and there's even the custom buttons. Did you even remember the custom buttons on this phone? It's kind of a big deal, there's a pair of the shoulder triggers called air triggers that are tappable and, in addition, there's a second set of back buttons and from my experience, they're not as sensitive, but they do work by just kind of sliding your finger over them. Honestly, I don't even know what games I would play that are serious enough to take advantage of these.

But if you do, that's two more extra buttons on the back of this phone, so you don't have to cover that precious screen real estate with your fingers, it's crazy stuff, and on top of all of that, like I said it feels like uh. Like, like a sports car that you can also drive on the daily- and I say that because zen UI feels pretty close to stock android like they've, built a lot of the features directly into the settings without turning it into some blinded out over-the-top gamer-y. Look I mean it can be that when you want it to, but if you're, not it's a very usable daily phone now, I've said a lot of good things in the past. However, many minutes this has been so far now, if you're thinking well, what's the catch? What are the bad parts of this phone? There's got to be stuff, that's not perfect, and there is definitely, I would say a bunch of it adds up to feeling a little less premium than the highest end phones in this price bracket, and maybe that's because I've just used some other ones recently, but there's some stuff to note like the vibration motor and the haptics aren't great at all and in a gaming phone. Actually, I would expect this to be a pretty heavy focus like having great haptics and a gaming phone for immersion?s sake would feel really cool.

This is maybe one notch better than the classic old vibration motors of the past. It's nowhere near the best doesn't feel very precise or tight at all. The fingerprint reader is slow, like there's no way around it. I guess if I'm sticking with my car analogy, that would be like taking a long time to turn on. I don't know it just gets annoying after a while when it is slow to unlock a lot and then the display, while it is super responsive, we know the 144 hertz is great.

It's still slightly below a1 quality like there's a bit of the telltale rain bowing when you're off axis and while the max brightness did improve it can't still get washed out in harsh sun there's. No wireless charging call quality is definitely not that great and the rubber plug on the side. USB ports falls out really easily, and they definitely know this because they included two extra ones in the box, but I'm convinced I'm going to lose them all and also fun fact. We did manage to kill this phone to zero percent battery and when we did, it wouldn't charge back up until we plugged it in the side. USB port, which ASUS tells us is the primary USB port.

Asus also tells us that this will be fixed with an upcoming software update. So it's not perfect, like there's, there's, definitely stuff, that's quirky about it, but the thing is, I think, the easy complaint about a phone like this is that is a giant clunky form factor with like kind of thick bezels. Why wouldn't you go closer to the edge and do a hole punch, but on a gaming phone? If the idea is to be here all the time and not interrupt your view with a hole punch then having a little extra on the side to hold it and having huge front-facing stereo speakers is a trade-off that I think, makes a lot of sense. So, overall, this is a really fun ridiculous phone. So now that you've made it all the way to the end of this video, I'm assuming you have like at least a tiny little of interest in buying this right.

So this phone, this ROG 5 ultimate edition highest 10 spec, is uh 1299 euros, there's a little of conversion math, depending on where you are in the world, but that's expensive. Now. This ultimate edition includes the phone and also this incredibly extra AR unboxing experience that the phone boots into the first time you set it up. It's pretty cool and there's a fan accessory and there's some ASUS gamer swag, like a hat. There is like I mentioned, though a lineup.

So this is the ultimate the highest end version 12.99. Then there is a ROG phone 5 pro for 11.99 and there's this guy, which is just the standard ROG phone 5, which starts at 7.99 big difference uh. It skips the screen on the back, and it doesn't have the two touch sensitive back buttons, and it starts at eight gigs of ram and 128 gigs of storage, and so, if you're thinking about getting one, the base version I feel like is the most reasonable, and then I think, when you upgrade for an extra 100 euro, that first upgrade is pretty nice double the storage bump up your ram, but then this spec right here, I think, is a little crazy, a hundred extra dollars for just four more gigs of ram, which I don't know I feel like. That's, not the move, but then the price only goes up from here, as you upgrade further in the lineup, but hey you know what they say you have to pay to play. Do they actually say that? I don't know? I'm just looked.

Furthermore, I only play among us on my phone. Furthermore, I feel like at this point. There are people who are more squarely in the target demographic who are thinking about shooter games, first person. Whatever other games you play that require multiple custom buttons. This is a phone.

That's going to be really fun for that, but let me know what you think: are you the type to go all out on a crazy customized gaming phone like this, with a screen on the back the whole deal? Let me know in the comments section below also the wallpaper I'll link below, as I always do, and yes, by the way we do have long sleeved shirts in the merch store shop item kbht. com, it's good stuff, either way, that's been it thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee