- The Asus ROG Phone 3 had a lot going for it.
Assuming of course,
that you are some kind of hardcore mobile gamer.
High refresh rate display.
A fantastic performance,
but the issue is that it was also super bulky and heavy
and a little awkward to use if you're not,
laser focused on gaming.
So, Oh, wow!
This is really heavy too.
So what I was gonna say was,
so I have extremely high hopes for what appears on paper
to be kind of like an ROG Phone 3,
except for the more general consumer.
This is the ZenFone 7 Pro.
And I think a Asus has done an absolutely fantastic job
with the look of this thing, check this out.
What do you think of this color, Brandon?
- [Brandon] It looks really nice.
It's also very subtle.
- Exactly. Like depending on the angle,
it can actually look completely black
or it can look black
but with like kind of a green Asus logo,
or you get this shimmer.
It looks really cool.
Let's get the unboxing out of the way though.
So inside.
(laughs) Oops.
In here, we've got a case.
Wow! Honestly feels awful. That's weird.
It actually includes two cases in the box
who includes two cases in their box.
That is so weird.
This one feels quite a bit better.
I mean, it's not perfect or anything,
but definitely quite a bit better.
And I don't understand what just happened here.
So there's a little flippy like doodle
that seems to be designed to what,
hold the camera in place?
Because yes, that is one of the killer features
of the ZenFone 7 Pro.
You also get a quick charger.
I think it charges that up to,
30 Watts or something like that. Get one of those.
Yap 30 watt charger, USB type C to type C cable
and boom! And all screen display
or an all display front
or wow! What do you call that?
Anyway, the point is there's no notch,
no hole punch, no interruptions.
And Asus achieves this
by integrating a flip-up style camera
just like they did on their ZenFone 6 series.
Now I never actually covered the ZenFone 6 series.
And the reason for it,
was that I was really not happy with
the camera flip mechanism.
So that's the first thing I wanna check out.
And what bothered me about it,
right off the hop,
was that when you kind of shook the device around,
it would kind of flap.
Now Asus claims that they have
well that not only was the ZenFone 6 version of it
far more durable than people expected
but that they have redesigned it
to the point where it can handle,
I think it's 200 flips a day
or a hundred flips a day every day for five years.
And apparently it's like stronger now.
And there's more contact points.
It's triple camera here.
I will be interested to see if it's any good.
And this seems to work if you don't want to flip up,
but like what happens if you,
try to flip it up with that thing on there?
Let's turn it around a selfie camera here.
How does it know?
So this is like the anti selfie switch.
If you like hate selfies,
you can make it impossible to take a selfie
because there is no,
traditional front facing camera on this device whatsoever.
Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of this case.
So I'm just gonna take it off.
We're gonna have a look at that camera flip here,
still does it.
It seems like they've got some really,
interesting mitigation strategies in place here though.
Check this out.
So watch this. If I shake it around
and it pops out, it's like,
"Hey, that's not where it's supposed to be."
And it puts it back.
Interesting. Hey.
Well how about how strong is it?
Okay.
Oh, wow! So it gives you about five attempts
and then it does that three times
before it's like, "Hey, stop."
I mean, if it's as durable as Asus says it is,
looks great. I mean,
compared to being stuck with the like,
crappy front facing camera that you'd normally have.
Even a non pixel, non iPhone,
like Tier 2 rear facing camera,
is going to absolutely destroy
the front facing camera on even those devices,
obviously this is way sharper.
So the primary camera on this puppy
is a Sony 64-megapixel sensor with an F1.8 lens on it.
You can really see,
wow, that is really sharp for a selfie picture
because obviously it is.
It shoots up to 8K video
and has optical limit stabilization.
That's one of the differences between the non-pro
and the pro model.
And then the other cameras,
let's go ahead and switch to the yep, the Ultrawide.
So this is a 12 megapixel of affair and,
(sighs) see this is one of the things
that makes this a Tier 2 camera.
You can really see a stark difference in my skin tones,
going from one of the sensors to the other.
Now that's an inherent thing,
when you change the sensor,
like on a camera,
these are completely different imaging pipelines,
but when you're Google or when you're Apple,
you do a better job of your post-processing to match them.
Now let's go ahead and switch to our telephoto.
Ooh, wow!
That one's got like kind of a blue or purple cast to it.
That really does not look amazing.
And they actually don't even advertise,
how many megapixels that sensor is
which is a super weird move.
We can find that out relatively easily.
3264 by 2448, eight megapixels on the telephoto.
So if popups not a choice,
it's basically this versus a hole punch or a notch.
- [Brandon] I'd take this over a hole punch.
- Really?
- [Brandon] Yeah. - I mean, me too.
You would think based on that,
pretty much every design out there
has a hole punch or a notch in it
that generally consumers would prefer that.
But like no, I absolutely think this is way better.
- [Brandon] Also it's kind of a fun party trick.
- Whoa! If you hold the volume button.
It like, look at this.
Asus what do you guys have in mind for this?
Why would I want like,
(bubbling) I'm taking pictures. That's hilarious.
Definitely a party trick.
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It occurs to me now I actually have not talked through
the specs of this puppy at all.
So it's running a Snapdragon 865 processors.
It's got six or eight gigs of RAM
and 128 gigs or 256 gigs of storage.
And what's cool is the storage is actually expandable.
So you've got your sim card slot over here.
And that also has a micro SD holder in it.
In terms of the rest of the physicality of this puppy,
on the bottom,
we've got a USB type C port as well as a speaker,
actually microphones down there as well.
And then over on the right,
I like this actually.
You've got your volume rocker
and then your lock button
that can actually be reconfigured with double presses
and long presses to activate other things.
Up at the top, nothing but the flip camera.
So there's no headphone jack.
Now one thing about this device
that might be a little controversial
is the fingerprint sensor.
Asus broke the mold
and actually went with a side mountain fingerprint sensor,
on the lock button.
And I don't know how I feel about this.
One thing I would have to see,
is if I can unlock it without picking up the device.
So why don't we give that a shot?
So if I were to just touch the side of this phone,
Ooh, that's not bad.
Oh, you gotta kinda get the spot right though.
What if I just kind of drag it,
Oh, so I just gave my phone a little tickle.
You know what? I actually,
I don't mind that I'm not a huge fan of auto wake,
I actually like just pressing a button to wake my device.
So having the fingerprint sensor integrated there,
makes a ton of sense to me.
There's some other nice feature comforts here.
One of the first things I noticed firing it up is,
Oh yeah, got that high refresh rate display.
Really does make a big difference.
Now it's not 144 Hertz,
like the ROG Phone 3 or anything like that.
It's 90 Hertz.
But to me,
the difference between 60 and 90,
is like an enormous leap forward.
Whereas the difference between 90 and 120 or 144,
outside of extreme hardcore gaming,
I really don't see it making
that big of a difference to the experience,
especially because it comes at the expense of battery life.
The other thing that makes me really happy about the screen
is that it doesn't look bad.
Like it's pretty normal for manufacturers say,
have like the vibrancy absolutely cranked,
right out of the box,
but out of the box on this, it's fine.
I did end up preferring to set splendid too.
I think it was standard.
And then a little bit of a cooler color temperature,
but even in their more vivid modes, it's not intolerable.
Like you used to see with
like older Samsung devices for example.
It's an AMOLED display.
So you can expect perfect blacks and Asus claims.
And I have no reason not to believe them whatsoever
that they've achieved Delta E <1 on this display.
It actually looks freaking awesome.
Oh, one thing I wanna know is if,
we have stable audio. - Using some extra,
lengths of wire is impromptu cable ties
to keep this mess under control.
The final step is to install this.
- Ah, the speakers don't sound great.
To Asus' credit though,
they do have an amplified earpiece speaker.
So I'm really happy to see that.
So the screen honestly really happy with it.
It goes up to 700 nits for outdoor reading.
That's not the highest on the market
by any stretch of the imagination
but it's good enough
that you'll be able to comfortably use it outdoors.
Color accurate, OLED,
nice fast pixel response times
and high refresh rate, sounds good.
But the thing that might hold me back
from daily driving a phone like this,
is the bulk and the weight
but I guess that's kind of par for the course
when you put a 5,000 million power battery in here.
And that seems to be right in line with Asus's,
vision for this device.
Is it seems to be like
the phone that you're not gonna have to switch out
for a long time.
'Cause you're gonna be able to take great selfies
'cause you're actually using your rear camera
to take selfies.
For the longest time like in three years,
I doubt there'll be phones with better selfie cameras
than the rear camera on this one,
which you'll use for your selfies.
The battery it's 5,000 million powers
and this is really cool.
They've included a ton
of battery optimization tricks
that normally you would have to
kind of micromanage yourself.
You can say, "I only wanna charge my battery up to 80%."
Which by the way is still 4,000 million powers.
And that's gonna make your battery not just,
last a long time for the day,
but last a long time for its entire life.
And there's some other really cool stuff here too.
Like you can tell it to only top up the battery,
in the hour and a half before 7:00 AM,
when I normally wake up
that way it's not just sitting there
holding a charge all night.
Which is also really bad for it.
Now the device doesn't include wireless charging,
which I think some people could see as a negative these days
from a longevity standpoint,
I can see why they might not include it
because it does generate more heat in the battery,
which can make it not last for as long.
So what has Asus created here?
It's a phone that I can't find an obvious flaw in.
Like even just taking a couple quick pictures.
Obviously this is not a comprehensive camera test,
but just a couple quick pictures here.
I can see greens are a little bit too boosted.
Reds are a little bit muted.
There's definitely still work for them to do,
on their color science
but it's absolutely usable.
Even beat here camera processing has come a long way
and there's a lot else going for it.
High refresh rate display.
Nice big battery.
Honestly, I think Asus kind of has a winner,
on their hands here.
This is the kind of phone that I could see using for
three, four, five years.
As long as Asus supports it.
So this is something that I think
some Android manufacturer, I'd love to see it be Asus,
needs to just step up to the plate and say,
"We're gonna support these devices
for as long as Apple supports an iPhone."
Can you do it Asus?
Let's see.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this first look
at the Zenfone 7 Pro,
make sure you're subscribed.
So you don't miss any more of our videos,
actually have one coming.
It's gonna be a lot of fun.
We're gonna unbox this.
Oh, it's heavy.
Ah, Oh, Maingear Gaming PC.
See yah.