- Hey guys, this is Austin and this
is the ROG phone.
So when ASUS invited us out
to their event here at Computex, I had a few big questions.
So after seeing the Razer phone last year,
there's some interesting stuff,
there's some stuff that it does well,
but at the end of the day,
it has a great display, it has an interesting build,
but it's not a great phone.
Now I don't want to be too hard on the Razer phone,
as there are some things it does well,
but at the end of the day,
I don't care how gaming-focused of a device you're making.
It has to be a good phone,
and the ROG phone, at least on paper
and sort of based on first impressions,
looks like it is that good balance.
So what is the ROG phone?
What you're getting here is on the surface
a very unique looking device.
And when I say that, I mean it.
Not only do you have an LED
that is going to be full RGB on the back,
but you've got a vent, you've got vapor chamber cooling,
and you've got what looks to be
one of the best looking displays I've ever seen
on a smartphone.
The ROG phone is rocking a six-inch,
2160 x 1080p AMOLED display.
Now that have might not sound impressive,
but what you're getting here is two things:
first of all, it's a solid panel,
it's got good viewing angles,
really impressive brightness,
it's going to support HDR,
but almost more importantly than that,
it's going to be running a full 90Hz.
Now yes, on paper the Razer phone has it beat,
but not only are you getting a much,
much nicer looking OLED panel,
but as far as I'm concerned, running at 90 frames per second
versus 120 frames per second is very hard to tell
on any display, especially when it comes to a phone.
So what you're getting here is actually a decent--
(music interrupts from phone)
I'm gonna stop pressing things accidentally.
Now if you take a look at the back of the phone,
you'll definitely see it's got some gamer style,
but I actually don't think it's that bad.
It's going to be fairly subtle,
especially when you're considering this is going to be glass
sort of blends in a little bit,
and while you do have a glowing LED logo,
it's going to be completely customizable,
and importantly, you can also turn it off
if you don't want to, you know,
be sitting in a meeting
looking like this.
The rest of the specs
are literally as high-end as you can imagine.
So this guy is rocking the Snapdragon 845,
but not just any Snapdragon 845,
it's actually a custom version which is running at
just under 3 Ghz.
They don't have the exact SKUs just yet,
but you should expect 8 gigs of ram,
and up to supposedly 512GB of storage.
Camera-wise, you're getting a set up that is very similar
to the ZenFone 5 and 5z.
A wide-angle 8 megapixel camera as well
a 12 megapixel standard shooter.
Now the main difference here
is that these are going to be supported by
Google's AR core, which should be helpful
for some AR games in the future,
but expect decent performance,
maybe not anything spectacular,
but definitely better than the Razer phone.
Am I being too mean to the Razer phone?
All this is being backed up by a 4000 mAh battery,
a pretty decent size,
especially considering that you have to have
so much power to run a phone like this.
Now there are some other things
that are definitely appreciated.
First of all, we do have USB-C
as well as a headphone jack,
and two more USB-C ports I'll talk about in a second,
but you're also going to be getting some
really impressive sounding front-firing speakers.
Hey guys, this is Austin,
and today it's time to finally build
what you guys have been asking for for months.
Those are incredibly loud speakers.
Something cool that's shared with a Pixel 2,
is that you can actually squeeze on the edges of the phone
to be able to enable gaming mode.
So on the Pixel, that will on the little assistant,
but here,
you can see it turns all red and looks cool.
And this will turn off things like notifications
when you're in the game,
enable a higher level of performance,
and just look really cool.
Now if you take a look at the top of the phone
what you're going to find
are there two little sort of ridged edges here.
Now this actually can be mapped inside the software
to be an actual button.
So as opposed to need to carry around a controller,
but some games
you might just be able to use these as triggers
because it's all when you use pressure sensitive,
it's actually kind of cool.
And one of my favorite parts,
even though it's not really all that important,
is if I actually open up the camera here,
you can see if I just press on top:
it takes a shot.
This is cool right?
It feels like a real camera,
you don't have to think about it.
Like I think I naturally sort of pressed down on this part
of the phone when taking a shot,
but it actually works as a shutter button here.
What really pushes the ROG phone into crazy town
are going to be the accessories.
So in addition to your standard USB-C port,
and headphone jack that you're going to find
on the bottom of the phone,
the side of the phone also has two more USB-C ports.
The first accessory is the Aero Active cooler.
Now this moves your USB-C port as well your headphone jack
to the side of the phone,
so when you're playing in landscape,
it doesn't sort of get in your way
when you're trying to hold it on either end.
But on top of that, it has RGB
because of course it does,
it's a phone in 2018 that has the ROG brand on it,
and on top of that, it's also going to function
as an actual cooler for your phone.
And importantly, this is included in the box.
Unlike some of the other
slightly more exciting accessories.
But I will actually say one thing,
because of the fan is going to be cooling
the entire back of the phone,
because of the vapor chamber which runs most of the way here
you're actually getting a little bit of cool air
on your fingers when you're holding it like this,
which is nice.
You can play any kind of smartphone game
for an extended period of time.
Know that it can get very hot very quickly.
There's also the mobile desktop dock,
so this is actually a pretty hardcore accessory,
which when you dock your phone inside of it,
will give you a wide range of ports including ethernet,
HDMI, DisplayPort, A ton of USB ports,
and importantly, it's also going to allow you
to use a mouse and keyboard in the game.
Now this paired with some clever software,
will allow you to use a mouse and keyboard
on literally any Android game out there.
The way it works is is that it will remap
various different parts of your display
to go along with your keyboard or mouse.
So for example if you hit the E key on your keyboard,
it can press a specific part of the display that might
reload or pick something up.
Now to be fair, the very early ROG phones that I got to try
was not super smooth as far as this went
so we'll kinda have to wait and see,
but I feel like it's a very simple piece of tech
that I'm sure they'll be able to sort out
by the time the phone comes out.
The real issue is going to be
I think this is kind of cheating,
'cause most people are playing on their actual phones
and someone can just drop their phone on the dock
and play with a full mouse and keyboard.
So we'll see about that, but super clever
and I think actually could implemented pretty well.
Something just as crazy is the Twin View dock.
Now this sort of turns your ROG phone
into something that kind of looks like a Nintendo DS.
So essentially when you drop your phone in,
it's going to give you a secondary display
which you can use for a lot of different purposes.
For example, if you want to say
stream from your phone,
you can have the actual chat in the Twitch window
up on one screen, and your actual game on the other,
but there's a lot of really cool advantages
that you can have with this,
especially considering that it does not only a
a full-size SD card slot and a USB-C out,
but it even does have a full 6000 mAh battery.
There is a lot to like with the ROG phone.
Now the idea of having a phone
that's dedicated to gaming, it first was
very skeptical to me, right.
So yes, it's going to be a nice function
to be able to have something that can do well at gaming,
but I mean at the end of the day: it's a phone.
And it has to be able to function well as a phone.
So based on what I've seen with the ROG phone,
it does perform well, but importantly,
it still doesn't really give up a lot of
functionality or features, right.
You can still fit in your pockets,
not gonna be giant, it's not gonna be bulky,
has a nice display, good performance,
all the things that you would expect.
Now the main issue, and I think the main thing
that really sort of worries me with the ROG phone
is going to be price.
This is not going to be cheap,
especially considering that it does come
with the actual fan attachment inside the box.
So of course, it's too early to know about
the actual specific pricing or any kind of availability,
although it should be out later this year,
but the thing that really worries me is
this is going to be a $1000+ phone.
Now I get it, if it's going to be in the $800-$1000 range,
I think it's actually going to be justified, right?
I mean, you compare it to something like a
Galaxy Note 8 or something, it's not going to be far off,
but if it's going to be $1000, $11, $1200,
that's going to be a lot of money
for essentially is ROG's first phone.
So I'm very curious.
What do you guys think about the ROG phone.
Let me know in the comments below,
and I will catch you guys in the next one.