From the front.
There’s not much to see with this phone.
But from the back, with the sled up logo.
Well, this doesn’t look like an ordinary phone.
And it’s not.
It’s the ASUS ROG PHONE 5.
[MUSIC]
ROG stands for Republic of gamers.
And this is the fourth generation, Of the astute gaming phone line, and I got to say the really knock 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.
I want 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 RG 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 are talking heads to complete the effect.
Then there’s the RG phone five pro Not pictured here because I didn’t get sent one.
It comes with a detachable fan in the box, aka the arrow active cooler five, 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 RG phone five Ultimate.
It has a matte white back, black hairlines and neon blue accents, all of which stole my heart as soon as I laid eyes on.
It has a back display just like the probe, but it’s black and white.
And with these displays you can show off graphics and text.
For things like charging your 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 here that during the During the filming of this review, that the Ultimate slid of a stand and then on to the desk and then on to the ground and gave it this wonderful spider web crack pattern, that you see.
It was so beautiful and now it’s ruined.
Like the Pro version ,the Ultimate also comes with arrow active cooler 5 in the box, but…
What really makes this phone ultimate is what’s on the inside.
And that is eight teen gigabytes of RAM.
Look, my new work laptop only has 16 Okay, so what do you do if you have a gaming phone again, I play driving games, off reading games.
Group games problem solving games, zombie games, vertical games, role playing games, gum, slinger games, Foxy games and whatever game this is.
Sometimes I play games with a fan attached.
Other times I played games using the nifty gamepad accessory that you can buy Other times I play games, 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 it refresh rate up to as high as 144 hertz, but I found the auto refresh rate worked Best as it didn’t kill the batteries quickly.
Also, I realized at the time I’m recording this video that in China, the redmagic six just launched with 165 hertz screen.
The battery is absolutely incredible It has a 6000 milliamp hour capacity and it’s actually made up of two 3000 milliamp hour batteries.
This design means you can fast charge it or what a Soos calls hyper charged 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 dinnertime but really the battery life depends on how heavily you use it especially for gaming battery test for the RG phone five for continuous video playback on airplane mode clocked in an average of 20 hours and 15 minutes.
And that’s what the screen locked at 120 hertz.
With a screen refresh rate set to auto, it average a time of 28 hours and 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 LD, the 60 but what’s brilliant about the RG phone is you can control the battery Currys so many different ways.
You could set limits for how much he charges you can choose slow charging speeds.
You can even schedule when the charges Is 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 Sony Xperia five bar two.
Speaking of control, there are so many different ways to control and interact with the games you play Among these 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 last 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 backside for input.
Add the arrow active cooler five, aka the fan, you get two more inputs for games.
That said, a lot of mobile games have a very simplistic control scheme, but I imagine having so many different options to map Game controls will really appeal to people who are getting into eSports for example.
But it isn’t all fun and games there are some drawbacks.
The RG phone five weighs more than the iPhone 12 pro max,Samsung galaxy 21 ultra and last year’s RG phone three.
All of those phones are heavy but the RG phone five is the heaviest phone, I’ve ever tested.
After a long bout of gaming, you really start to feel that way and even more so if you have a case on it or a fan or a gamepad accessory.
I know this is a gaming phone but I do wish the cameras are 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 the lights.
There is also a 13 mega pixels, ultra-light camera and 8 mega pixels macro camera.
The main camera takes some decent photos in bright light.
But when you get into the 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 with works okay, I really wish a Soos would just remove the macro camera and use the money they saved from that to improve the ultra wide camera.
Also with so much processor power, Ram power and GPU power I just wish the RV phone could take advantage of that to make better photos.
The RV 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 piece Decent video, but as soon as the light gets darker, video image quality suffers and auto-focus hunt’s like crazy and there’s not a night mode like there is for photo’s to help the video out.
Instead you end up with something that looks like a bad photoshopped filter was applied to your video.
Another downside is there isn’t any water or dust resistence, 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 U.S. pricing is for these phones The RG phone 5 starts out at 799 euros and you can get different amounts of RAM and storage going up to 999 euros.
Then do you wanna jump up to that?
RGB phone 5 Pro, the one that we don’t have that’s gonna cost you 11,109.
99 euros.
And then there’s this bad boy with the 18 GB of RAM.
This is going to be 1299 euros.
When you convert all of this to US dollars, it means that the RG phone five 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 rd 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 12 $100, I could say without hesitation that that is an exit 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 RSG?
Five series?
Are you considering getting one?
If so, which one would you get?
Throw your thoughts in the comments.
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