- There's something a little funny
about someone who hasn't upgraded
their phone in two years.
Unboxing this.
This is the ROG phone
and it is just about
the most excessive mobile device
that I have ever encountered.
It's equipped with a Snapdragon 865 Plus processor,
anywhere from 12 to 16 gigabytes of memory,
512 gigs of storage,
a 144 hertz OLED display
that actually touch samples at 270 hertz
making for supposedly
a nearly instantaneous feel
to your touch inputs.
It comes with, where's the phone?
Power brick, apparently charges really fast.
It's got a 6,000 milliamp-hour battery,
comes with a type C,
the headphone jack adapter.
Yeah, they took out the
the headphone jack, it's got some.
Well, that's really nice.
It's got some extra rubber stoppers
included for the port.
Oh, the phone was in the outer shell.
There it is ladies and gentlemen.
Now, one of the design goals for ASUS,
with the ROG Phone 3 was apparently
to keep the form factor the same
as the ROG Phone 2
in order to improve compatibility
with their previous generation accessories.
So you can expect to use
the same like game pad adapter
and like their grip
and even there twin-view dock
which we did a video about
last year on the Linus Tech Tips channel.
Although it should be noted
that if you use your last generation dock
you're gonna be limited to 120 hertz
instead of 144 hertz
which is what the new ROG Phones 3 runs at.
In terms of the design,
I'd actually say they did a pretty good job
of maintaining the gamer look
but without overdoing it.
Actually, previous ROG phones,
I felt like they had
kind of overplayed the gaminess of it.
And the thing is, it's a phone.
So most of the time,
I would think you're probably
using it as a phone as opposed to
as a mobile gaming console.
And even mobile gaming consoles,
like, they generally don't look
like way over the top.
You can be sitting on the bus using them.
So I think this is,
I think they could dial it back a touch more,
but this is definitely a step
in the right direction.
Let's go ahead and,
actually, let's go ahead
and have a look at all the ports and everything.
So on the right,
you got your stacked up lock button
and volume rocker right here.
These are the pressure-sensitive air triggers.
So these are for gamers.
So you got your shoulder buttons right there.
Up on the top,
you got a whole lot of not much.
Apparently, the phone has a four mic array
for noise canceling.
So that's pretty nice.
You got a SIM tray here actually,
oh, does it have micro SD expansion?
And the answer is no.
Dual SIM, yes.
Micro SD expansion, no.
With that said,
512 gigs is a friggin lot of storage.
As for why they didn't do a
one terabyte option,
apparently it was because
the only one terabyte drive available
was UFS 3.0,
not UFS 3.1.
And they were after just nothing
but raw speed.
Down here we've got two USB type Cs
but it should be noted that one of them
which is actually, there we go,
handily marked on here
is a USB type C and the other is;
do not insert a USB type C cable to this port.
Do not do that.
So that's the, the red one.
On the bottom,
we've got another USB type C,
it's offset again,
just like the previous one,
and as I alluded to before,
there is no headphone jack right here,
dual front-facing stereo speakers.
I love the HTC One,
and I'm expecting big things from them.
Apparently, they have tuned the crap
out of these speakers
for like great bass response
or something like that.
We're in the middle
of the setup process here.
I'm gonna go with classic.
Thank you ASUS,
as of I believe last generation
or might have been the first ROG phone
offers the ability to set it up
with a not horrendous gamer-looking skin,
which I personally really appreciate.
Now, we're gonna get dropped onto the
cringy startup video.
I cheated on this video a little bit.
I have already been through this,
the startup process
and it is hilarious.
Scan the ROG totem.
- [Man] Why?
- Don't question it.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Start it.
- Playing a game is part of the setup?
- Yeah.
(upbeat music)
Sounds pretty good.
ASUS, I do.
I love you guys very dearly.
But what the hell did I just watch?
Welcome to the republic of gamers,
no, I'm good, thanks.(laughs)
Oh, that's actually kind of
a clever design for the stock case
so it'll protect it from,
getting dropped on a corner or whatever
but it still leaves the air triggers exposed
and it allows this to be mounted.
Let's take a look at this puppy now.
This is the Aero Active Cooler 3,
there you go.
It's labeled under there,
and it's got a little kickstand.
It's got a little cooling fan
and it's got a pass-through
for your USB type C
as well as your headphone jack.
So the idea is you can go ahead
and pop this puppy open like that,
pop your phone in there like that.
Pop those dual USB-type season
to the bottom there
and there we go.
You've got your phone propped up,
and you're ready for
some hardcore gaming.
Bind X mode level three performance, uh, yes.
So not only are they using a Snapdragon 865 Plus,
but apparently,
they allow you to manually specify
if you want it to go into
a higher performance tier and stay there
because it's got active cooling
on the back of the phone.
How loud is it, though?
Oh, it's audible.
Here, I'll hold it up
to my microphone here.
Can you hear that?
It's really heavy.
Wow, I actually hadn't really even
thought about it up until now.
But I guess that's kind of what happens
when you have
quite literally every feature
built into the things
so it has an in-screen fingerprint sensor.
You can go ahead
and set up a fingerprint here.
So it's an optical rather than ultrasonic one.
You can tell from the lights,
how's the speed of the fingerprint?
Unlock though.
Well, not bad.
That's acceptable.
Not the fastest I've seen.
Oh, we should get some games.
We've got a game,
let's say what's a game
that all the kids play?
7.9 gigabytes.
Yeah, no wonder you need a 512 gig freakin phone.
Okay, let's have a look
at our Game Genie stuff.
That's actually pretty handy.
So you can see your CPU times,
what frame rate you're running at, clock speeds,
whether X mode's enabled.
You can lock down your brightness.
Oh, cool. Check that out.
So you got a little overlay
that can show you
some of those key specs if you want.
You can turn off calls.
Yes, there's just a one touch
screen recording button.
One thing to note though is that
unlike the previous ROG phone,
they have not integrated Twitch streaming.
So apparently that was
because they just had issues with it
from the briefing call.
That's really cool.
Just being able to like
quickly record like that,
speed up button.
Okay, so I'll probably
just like closed background tasks
and stuff like that.
Still, free ASUS software.
This is actually,
surprisingly smooth and usable.
It looks like YouTube live streaming
is ready to rock though.
Battery, more than two days remaining.
That's what happens
to the 6,000 milliamp-hour battery.
Refresh rate, you can set to auto.
Interesting. Let's go straight to 144 hertz.
Oh, that's smooth.
One thing I needed
to change right away
the first time I fired this thing up
was to go to,
I think Natural was the one
that didn't look ridiculous
in their splendid settings.
That puts us in sRGB mode
for using the operating system.
Things aren't so over the top.
The first couple of pictures I took on it,
I was like,
wow, this camera is horrible,
but it was actually just the display
that was horrible.
I mean, the cameras still not
gonna be competitive
with something like the latest iPhone,
but it's a lot better
than what we've seen
on previous ROG phones,
that's for sure.
I'm gonna take a beautiful selfie.
Well, it's a selfie anyway.
That's something.
If I actually played a lot of mobile games,
sound is really good.
Like almost nothing uses,
proper dual amplified stereo speakers
anymore like this.
It's always just like
an amplified earpiece speaker
for the other one.
And there are some pretty good ones out there
but this is two real speakers facing you.
6000 milliamp-hour battery.
- [Man] That's pretty awesome
- That's a lot of battery, 30-watt charging,
no wireless charging.
And when pressed,
ASUS basically said,
well, everything is trade-offs.
That's something that I would consider
to be a basic flagship feature these days
but they didn't include it
because they just wanted to make
as much space for battery as possible.
That was a lot of the justification
behind removing the headphone jack as well.
The cold hard truth is,
if you want my take on
why brands are removing headphone jacks,
it's because if you can afford
to buy our product,
you probably have Bluetooth headphones anyway.
So like honestly though,
almost everyone here in the office
has switched Bluetooth headphones at this point.
They don't sound as good,
but boy, are they convenient.
I love that I'm screen recording,
downloading games in the background
and running this game at 120 FPS
and this thing is just going,
like it's going.
Yep, we're running at 117, 120 FPS.
Like i said i really, I don't feel it
as much as I do on a large display
but it's definitely butter smooth.
(laughter) Take that loser.
Oh, no, turns out I didn't know
how to steer.
How do my shoulder buttons do in this game?
Did they do anything? I'm in ninth.
Oh, I suck maybe this is why
I'm hating on all the mobile gamers
cause I'm just not good enough
to beat them.
The chassis is starting
to heat up a little bit though
now that my GPUs at like 70% plus usage,
CPU at 40.
This is a pretty demanding game,
especially at these frame rates.
Oh, and now it needs another 600 Megs.
That was just, that was just the intro.
Oh Lordy. That's fine.
All I wanted to see was high refresh rate
and it was definitely high.
I'm not even gonna deploy a parachute.
That's for wimps.
On epic quality,
we're actually still only seeing
about 22 to 25 FPS.
Oh yeah. What's up now?
What's up now?
I don't even know what's up now?
Wow. Wow.
Wow. Gotcha.
How do I pick things up?
I don't know.
I don't know how to pick things up.
I don't play this game.
Hey, what's up?
What's up now? No way.
These can't be real people.
There's gotta be bots.
This is terrible.
It's gotten a little toasty.
That 80% CPU usage,
it's definitely running a little hotter now.
That's fine because all I really wanted to know
is how the game ran
between 25-26 FPS at Epic quality.
Oh, I get it.
They call it Epic quality
because Epic Games, I get it.
What a jokester you are Mr. Sweeney.
Oh, that's while recording though.
How is it without recording?
Oh, now my CPU usage be much lower
and my FPS is like, no not quiet.
Okay, we did till like 28 there for a second.
Okay, that's pretty cool.
We were still getting very playable frame rates
while recording though.
From my first impressions,
the bottom line here is pretty simple,
the ROG Phone 3 is exactly as advertised.
It's got a gigantic high refresh rate,
high brightness OLED display.
It's got a massive battery.
It's got gamer-optimized features,
like being able to quickly screen record,
turn your CPU up to the maximum speed,
configure your air triggers
and all that good stuff.
They've got a bunch of accessories.
I love that they gave thought
to intergenerational accessory compatibility.
And really the bottom line for this one is;
do you need a gaming phone?
Like, not does anyone need a gaming phone?
There's people out there,
I mean, do you need a gaming phone?
And if you do,
this is looking like a pretty swell option.
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