- If there's one thing you should know about me,
I love gaming, I'm a gamer.
I wear gamer clothes, and now, maybe I've got a gamer phone.
We have Asus's new ROG phone 7 and 7 Ultimate.
And these are looking pretty good.
High refresh rate screen, coolers built in, that's it.
Amazing performance out of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
It, it's looking like the all around package.
Let's dig into it, and see what we've got.
So we have two boxes here.
We have the ROG phone 7 and the 7 Ultimate.
The phones are very similar,
so we'll take a quick look at both.
But let's focus on the unboxing of the Ultimate
'cause this thing is crazy.
It looks like a drop ship
or a container in a Halo game or something like that.
And I'm a, I'm a big fan 'cause I'm a gamer.
All right, so we got this flap here,
and it looks like it's gonna be a stand for the phone.
But let's dig into this main box.
It's in a little bit of rough shape.
Labs must have had a great time taking a look at this phone.
All right, let's see if what's in this box.
Maybe it comes with a case that'd be sick.
Got our sim popper.
Oh, it's actually got a kind of neat design.
Inside, oh we did get a case.
Unfortunately, it's not that clear plastic one
that I love getting with all those budget phones,
but this is definitely something.
This definitely is not gonna protect your phone at all.
We have the phone, but let's dig underneath to see
what's in here 'cause obviously it's a pretty big box.
This is the included 65 wat charger.
So it's nice that it includes such a big charger,
so you can keep the phone going.
If you're gaming, you don't wanna take long pauses
to have to fill it with power.
That's not fun.
There's also a nice sleeved USB C to C cable.
What is that?
Eight feet.
All right, let's see what else is in here.
Wow, a nice little carrying case for
I'm assuming the arrow cooler and free candy.
Nice, let's see what the arrow cooler looks like.
So the 7 Ultimate, the main difference is
that it does come with this arrow cooler.
We did have labs test it out,
so make sure to stay tuned for that.
But as for now, I think it looks pretty cool.
You can see the fan deep inside there, lots of little fins.
So in theory, it should do pretty well
with heat dissipation, and that's everything in the box.
So let's take a look at the phone itself.
The ROG phone 7 Ultimate, no longer pros.
This is such a huge advancement, it's ultimate now.
Ooh, okay, we got a little bit of goo on it
from the adhesive but nothing too crazy,
and it does feel really good in the hands.
So they call it the 2.5 D screen.
So it's got that slight bit of rounding,
but the front screen itself is actually flat,
which I do appreciate.
I get accidental touches all the time because I guess
I don't know how to hold the phone that's slightly curved,
but the actual feel of it in your hand with it still being
that bit curved, while the screen isn't feels really nice.
As for the design on the back, I do enjoy it.
I like the kind of cyber-punky look.
It's pretty tasteful.
It's not anything too, too crazy.
Just has some lines.
It's nothing too like obscene.
We do have our triple camera system with flash.
I like the little bit of an angle that they've added
with this little identification bar.
I guess I'm gonna call it.
And then we have what I'm guessing is an attachment
for the arrow cooler.
Not a hundred percent sure what that is, but we'll find out
and the passive matrix oled.
Walking around the phone here.
On the right side, we have our power button
and volume rocker.
I also like the accent of the blue on the power button.
Tasteful, nice.
On the top we have just a mic hole and antenna lines.
On the left side here we have a USBC 3.1 port,
which is awesome.
So it does quick charging display port 1.4,
and you can see here it has pogo pins
for attaching the arrow cooler
or any other sort of accessories on the side.
Pretty convenient to have a charging port
on the side as well as the bottom,
so that depending on how you're holding it,
you can still keep your phone charged while you're playing.
I know that's a big annoyance for me is that
depending on how you're holding your phone,
your hand's kind of blocking that cable, and I have to
decide whether to hold the phone weird, or not charge.
And you know, I don't wanna stop gaming.
Further down on the left side here
we have a blue sim tray port.
Again, I really like that accent color.
I know for a fact it's on SD card slot,
which is disappointing.
And lovely, it is a dual nano sim on the bottom.
Would you believe it?
We have a headphone jack.
Gamers are plugged in and then we have another USBC.
This is not a super fast charging display port one,
but still gives you the speed
you'll probably end up needing most of the time.
I don't know if I like it being off to the side here.
It also feels like maybe it should have been
on the other side because what can be convenient
with it being off center is that if you're holding the phone
in landscape you can still charge using this port.
But it seems like the phone was meant to be
up the other way because all of the font
is actually upside down if you hold it this way.
So you'd have to flip it over if you wanna,
you know, show off,
but I guess you're then not covering the headphone jack.
Then on the front here, the main event,
the 6.78 inch, full HD plus, AMOLED HDR plus, 165 hertz,
one millisecond response time, 720 hertz touch rate sampling
phone screen with chin and forehead.
But the benefit is the camera doesn't cut into the display.
'Cause touch rejection is usually pretty good on phones,
but if you don't have to worry about it,
and you know, your friends just aren't
gonna touch a phone screen,
that's the best way to do it.
And one thing I just realized,
we didn't see any speakers around the phone,
and that's because they have front facing speakers.
You can kind of see there's a little bit of a slit
at the top and at the bottom, those are speakers.
And boy howdy do they have some buzzwords.
5 magnet 12 by 16, super linear,
front facing, DIRAC HD sound.
This is I guess maybe top of the line.
We're going to hear and find out later.
As for weight, I wouldn't say it's too heavy,
feels like kind of any flagship, but we'll wait
and see exactly how much it does weigh.
(object thudding)
With our man Linus.
250 grams, is that heavy?
Slightly.
The only thing that's kind of disappointing
about the RG phone seven and seven ultimate is
that neither are super water resistant.
They're only IP 54,
which means good against splashes but don't submerge it.
Lemme take a quick look at the regular ROG phone 7
see if there's any major differences.
Does it come with a case?
It does!
That same kind of plastic shell is included
with this phone, comes with the same 65 watt charger,
but instead of the storm white we have the Ultimate in,
the only color the Ultimate comes in.
But this one we have in it phantom black,
so we'll see how that looks.
Yeah, taking a look at it,
I like this black, it's pretty snazzy.
The back is quite a bit different.
So it has this kind of iridescent, see through plastic
that does look pretty snazzy,
but I could tell already it is quite finger printy.
This one here is just a solid plastic.
So not transparent whatsoever,
but you can't see fingerprints.
That's kinda the nice thing about a white phone,
and this material, which you'll also notices the difference
is it doesn't have that PAMOLED screen or the attachment
for the arrow cooler.
And the accents instead of being blue are this red,
which is cool.
As for ports and buttons, all the same
as the ROG phone 7 Ultimate,
again just with the red accents instead of the blue.
I forgot, we gotta try the case on.
I'm assuming it's the same phone size.
Let's try the 7 Ultimate case on this.
(phone thudding) (person laughing)
Don't do that.
Don't drop it.
Yeah it, I'm not a huge fan of it.
The nice kind of 2.5 D curve is gone
'cause now this is sharp rail.
All right, let's turn these on,
and see if, you know, it can game.
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35 seconds ago, before that ad read,
I said the cases were the same.
They're not.
We may as well try it on to see what the difference is.
Maybe my mind will be completely changed.
Maybe this case is way better,
the one that's included with the ROG phone 7.
No.
It's still bad. (person laughing)
Since the phones are so, so similar
with the same specs between them and everything like that,
we're just gonna focus on the ROG phone 7 Ultimate
because it can use the arrow cooler,
and I think that's pretty cool.
Powering it on here.
We can see it's got a cool custom background
in skin for the clock.
Big fan of a good clock skin.
When we swipe in here, we can see yeah, they've definitely
skinned this version of Android with their gamery look.
It looks like Armory Crate,
if you have any Asus accessories on your PC.
I'm not a huge fan of the whole circle look.
it's actually one of the reasons I don't like Sony phones.
But luckily enough, when I gave logistics this phone
to set up for me, they were actually presented
with an option of choosing stock Android or this Asus skin.
So if you don't like the look of this, don't use it.
As for bloatware and all the stuff like that,
nothing too crazy.
Again, some of these apps are going to be from labs,
but Messenger, Instagram, Reddit.
Seems like there's only four or five different apps
that came with the phone, so that's nothing too crazy.
As for specs, the ROG phone 7 Ultimate
only comes in one configuration,
which is 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage.
But if you don't need that much,
and you just want the RG phone seven,
you can't get a 12 gigs of Ram and 256 gigs of storage.
Be aware there is no SD card expansion,
so you're gonna be stuck with what you got.
As for processor, it does have the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2,
as I mentioned earlier,
which is an absolute beast in performance.
If you dunno what that means, that's fine,
we'll take a look at that later on.
It also supports wifi 7 and 6 E.
This will be a great option 'cause it's gonna stay
a bit future-proof for you and has Bluetooth 5.3,
So you'll get the low battery usage,
better audio quality, everything like that.
I'm not gonna pretend to be a master Bluetooth.
I dunno what's going on.
What's the difference between 5.2 and 5.3?
What just Bluetooth 6, like I don't get it.
And we can see it has a 6,000 milliamp hour battery as well.
And what's really cool about that is
it's actually a dual 3000 cell battery.
So by having two different batteries,
you can kind of start to drain them and then
fill them back up quicker as they're a smaller capacity.
Just know that your phone will charged faster,
and you'll get to play longer because of it.
And finally this is running Android 13
with again, the skin over top if you'd like.
What is nice is it does come with two years of OS updates
and four years of security updates.
Though there is an asterisk after the security updates.
I don't know what that means, but be aware.
I've just been informed that the batteries
are actually balanced in the phone.
Perfectly balanced.
(phone thudding) (person groaning)
As all things should be. (person laughing)
Now that we've heard about specs,
I know you just wanna know about gaming,
but, ba, ba, but we gotta do Crab Rave.
All right, let's see if this five magnet speaker
actually does anything.
("Crab Rave" playing)
It sounds really good, like holy smokes.
It gets really loud.
The one thing is is when I had it at max volume,
the bass did start to kind of distort a little bit,
but once I lowered it down,
even just a couple taps, sounded way better.
And when you have it in your hands facing you,
it sounds really, really good.
Really, really impressed.
As the screen gets pretty darn bright,
so it does get up to 1200 knits, which is great.
We did have labs check it and on both the 7
and the 7 Ultimate, it gets up to around 470 knits.
And while the Ultimate does get two knits higher at 472,
that's just within margin of error.
Screen quality's definitely fine.
It would be great if it was a little bit higher than 1080 p,
but I understand the trade off
to get the higher refresh rate and better battery life.
It's a AMOLED screen, so the colors are really punchy
and look very, very vibrant,
and of course the darks look great.
For cameras on the 7 and 7 ultimate,
we have a 50 megapixel main camera, a 13 megapixel
ultra wide, and a five megapixel macro camera.
Odd, again, I don't really see the use
of a macro camera all that often.
A lot of the times ultra wide cameras can just shoot macro.
I would rather have a telephoto,
but we'll see if it's any good.
And then if we're wondering, this is a flash
that makes your pictures brighter in the dark.
As for the app itself,
I mean it looks like every camera app ever.
Let's take a photo with this man camera here,
and see how it looks.
All right, now let's try the ultra wide,
which I am a fan of.
I think it's a fun camera to have.
Wow, looks pretty good.
Sven is a little bit soft in the face, and...
(person laughing)
The red of the clock is a little bit orange
and a little bit fuzzy, but nothing too crazy.
Everything looks a lot more lifelike,
and I didn't actually change any settings though.
The Vancouver sign in the back does look
a little bit more mangled, which is interesting.
Colors again look pretty decent.
The red of the sign, the darkness
of the background is not lost.
Of course we gotta take a picture
with the five megapixel macro.
The little love tiger.
Same problem we had with the unit hertz.
I wish it told you what four to six centimeters is
'cause I don't know, and having to look over
is silly in my mind.
At least if you get close to an object
in the main camera modes,
it does warn you that you should either
move back or switch into the macro mode.
But it would be great
if it just moved into the macro mode automatically.
These look pretty good.
Our little subject's looking handsome as always.
This is an 8K video, 24 FPSs.
One thing to note is it does punch in a bit
when you switch to 8k.
All the cameras do have EIS,
so not optical stabilization but electronic.
I would say pretty darn solid.
And again, most people aren't probably gonna be filming
at 8K, but there was no lag or hitches
or anything like that.
And the mic is good, but I wouldn't say is like
as good as the Samsungs, Googles, and Apples of the world.
Now let's check out the selfie shooter 'cause you know,
sometimes you wanna snap a quick selfie
and send it in the discord server
with all your pals when you get a big dub.
So let's see how this looks.
It does look very clear.
It's a 32 megapixel camera, so of course it should.
Brightness and color temperature looks good.
For sharpness, I know some will kind of overcompensate
with the sharpness, and it's like whoa.
But this one here looks pretty good.
One thing to note is taking a video right away,
it's really punched in.
I actually looked around for settings to punch it out.
It's like if you were this close to me at a grocery store,
I would take a step back.
So something to be aware of, if you have short arms
that might not be very impressive,
but the exposure changing for my face does look good.
It's time.
No, not an update, no.
What do they call it if I wear two Monocles?
Bionocle
(people laughing)
It's done.
Paying Genshin, man this game looks good.
This is everything on max and we're running at a solid 60.
Genshin doesn't allow for more than 60 FPS,
so we can't fully utilize the 160 hrt screen.
But this looks great, and if you don't wanna take my word
for it, here's some information from labs.
Like most of the phones we've tested with
the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, this phone performs excellently.
In Dolphin Emulator playing Mario Cart Wii,
the 7 and 7 Ultimate were both locked at 61 FPS.
For Genshin Impact, it was 60 FPSs give or take a frame
here or there on both the 7 and 7 Ultimate.
Call of Duty Mobile locked at 95
and Unhappy Raccoon 60 FPS give or take a couple
with the 7 performing slightly worse than the 7 Ultimate.
But with all this gameplay and stuff like that,
how much did the battery actually last?
Well labs checked that out as well.
Both the 7 and 7 Ultimate were able to last up to 35 hours.
That's really impressive if you're just gonna be like
on a bus or on a plane for a long trip and just watching
a video on your phone at you know, a low brightness.
And for what the minimum battery is,
the phone was able to get 3.3 hours.
So if you're a big mobile gamer and you just want to
absolutely play at it's the best all the time,
don't expect this to last super long,
but if you're somebody who's just gonna
hang out and watch a video on their phone for a while,
this will last you ages.
So without the cooler started with a temperature
of 25 degrees and got to a peak of 40,
but with the cooler, it started at 23 degrees
and got to a peak of 41.
And the score of the test was actually higher
without the cooler than with the cooler.
What it all comes down to is that pretty much
the 7 and 7 pro are identical.
Performance was extremely similar between the two.
And the frame here or there that was different
is probably just margin of error or you know,
luck of the draw and, but what's interesting is that whole
the cooler making the phone perform worse.
Maybe that little bit of power draw
means the SOC can't fully perform.
I'm not sure, but maybe, just maybe,
the looks make it worth it.
Let's throw it on and see.
Just, uh, force it on here.
It tells you the cooler temperature
and the system temperature.
Which 93 degrees Fahrenheit, I don't speak freedom units,
but I mean it sounds high.
It does give you a nice cooling effect
from the fans on your hands though, which is nice.
And it gives you an additional four buttons.
So you have this kind of grip trigger
and then index finger trigger as well.
Nice, so the app looks pretty cool.
So it has a smart mode, a cool mode, frosty, and frozen.
So cool is just steady airflow, smart will change it based
on whatever it wants to do, and Frosty is high speed.
But I cannot do frozen unless I'm plugged in.
It doesn't even actually tell you what it is.
All right, in the settings for air triggers,
we can see that there's different squeeze gestures
for Google Assistant or X mode, which is just you know,
pushing the phone into higher performance levels
and then the squeeze force levels, the amount
of force needed to do all these different features.
We do have lighting controls so you can have your like
notifications for incoming call,
for music, X mode, charging.
What's nice is you can also change the lights on
the left and right side of the unit,
so you can have two different colors.
Yeah, it's pretty neat looking.
What's really cool is this Arrow active portal.
So if you click on that, it'll actually
open up the phone to help rapidly dissipate heat.
Pretty tricky to see, but it is open.
My iPhone can't do that.
I don't know if you can hear it super clearly,
but it is decently loud. (fan blowing)
Though, if you're on the bus,
and this is, you got your fan on, just bump the stereo.
(person laughing)
What's cool is that the cooler
actually has some extra ports on it.
So you have the passthrough for the USB,
and it adds another headphone jack.
So that's cool if you don't wanna have,
you know, something come off the side here
'cause again your hands are gonna be here.
You still get to use a headphone jack.
Here we go.
Let's try frozen mode.
(fan blowing)
Like you put this on beside your bed,
ASMR white noise for you.
Let's try going back into Genshin Impact to see
if we get even more performance.
Wow, still runs smooth, and we know for a fact
it didn't make a huge difference anyways, thanks to labs.
Overall, this phone can game,
it can take pretty decent photos,
it makes neat sounds, and the cooler's hard to get off.
A thousand dollars, that's the regular 7.
There's actually no pricing we have for the 7 Ultimate yet.
And even release date is just kind of Q2,
though I assume the 7 will come out this month in April.
Depending on how much the Ultimate goes for,
some of these features are kind of neat.
Like that PAMOLED screen that you'll rarely see is neat.
This little port that opens up to go off the phone is neat.
This arrow cooler is neat.
For myself, I think this is a pretty solid package.
I love the option of using the Army Crate scanner
or just stock Android.
And of course with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2,
you're gonna get solid performance,
and battery life as we saw is you know, solid.
What do you think?
Let us know down the comments.
Thank you so much for watching and make sure to subscribe.
If you wanna check out a video,
check out the Unihertz Luna phone.
That was weird.