Today we find out what in the world went wrong with the world's most powerful smartphone. I
was just minding my own business bending it in half when it actually bent in half. To be fair,
most phones I try to bend do not break. This ROG 6 Pro is an anomaly and today we investigate to
find out why. Speaking of investigations, huge thanks to KiwiCo for sponsoring this
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Now I think it's time we get back to our autopsy. Let's get started.
[Intro]
In front of us we have the durability tested ROG Phone 6 Pro, with the predecessor from last year,
the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate – both of which failed my durability test catastrophically. Come on,
Asus. Getting inside the ROG 6 Pro should be a bit easier than usual since now we don't
have to worry about cracking the back glass. I can't imagine it getting any worse than it is
right now. Cracks can only get so small. The whole thing is just an intricate web
of finger splinting chaos. There is some adhesive holding a laminated glass to the
phone. Nothing super strong. The ROG 6 Pro is only ipx4, so definitely not watertight.
Here we get our first glimpse of the 2 inch rear display ribbon cable, as well as the two gold
contacts for the NFC pad, which is also glued to the back glass. No wireless charging on this one.
There is, however, a strange white sticker which gives us a direct pathway to the back side of the
glass. Kind of interesting. We'll look into this more in a second. We also have the only undamaged
portion back here which is the camera lenses. Moving over to the phone we can see it's divided
into 5 internal sections, the middle of which is the motherboard and also right where our unit
snapped in half – at the USB-C accessory port and the power button, both placed right in the
middle of the frame. There is an extremely strange pass-through chamber, a hole that goes directly
from the back glass all the way through the phone to the vapor chamber behind the screen. However,
I don't think this cavity's existence would cause any structural issues by itself. I think
the biggest culprit is still the USB-C and power button holes since they both remove structure from
the frame at a critical point. But it'll still be interesting to explore this hole more thoroughly.
The ROG Phone 5 Ultimate does not seem to have one.
I'll remove 4 screws surrounding the motherboard so we can take off the metal plate. Then
I'll pop off some of the upper extension ribbons just like a little Lego. Also, I didn't know
this yet, but there are additional ribbon cables attached to the underside of the motherboard that
are screwed in under metal brackets. Apparently if you do this for real and actually care about
the phone functioning afterwards... You should remove the upper and lower section of the phone
hardware on either side of the battery to flip the motherboard over and get access to those screws
before joinking the ribbons, or you know, if it's already broke, yoink away. With the motherboard
out we see it's dual stacked just like on the iPhones. We also get our first look at the 3,300
milligrams of vibrantly blue thermal paste that Asus is calling Boron Nitride – an aerospace grade
thermal compound kind of cool. It was probably doing a really good job before the accident.
I'll remove 6 more phillips head screws along the bottom section of the phone, along with
popping out the blue SIM card tray. Kind of cool to see this blue theme going on. Thumbs
up for that. The bottom plastic also contains the x-axis vibrator motor. And with the plastic gone,
the rat's nest of wire starts to come loose, but it's still stuck under the lower loudspeaker.
After another screw is removed, the lower loudspeaker is free from the phone. And while it
does have the waterproofing mesh over the opening, it does not have any internal foam balls. There's
one more screw holding down the lower USB-C port. And after that's gone our complex conglomerate of
ribbons is free from the phone. Reminds me of the old HTC days. May they RIP. HTC phones were
some of the most difficult to take apart because of the ribbons. Nobody should ever go full HTC.
There's no rubber ring around the USB-C port. I also think there are too many letters in this
video. The battery setup inside the ROG (see what I mean?) is pretty interesting. We already knew
there were two of them, but two batteries in a phone is pretty normal these days. Iphones have
two cells. OnePlus phones have two. And electric vehicles have thousands. But this time the cells
are detached, spaced out and connected with a permanent ribbon, so one battery cannot
be removed without the other. This means the 4 screws at the top plastics need to come out next.
The top plastics do contain the upper loudspeaker, which this time around does
have the foam balls inside. There are two more screws over on the left by the larger camera,
but before those come out though, let's get rid of the batteries. The batteries
are very strongly stuck in place with adhesive. There are no magical pull tabs.
But unlike Samsung, these are still within pryable territory, ideally with a plastic pry tool.
The split cells give us a typical capacity of 3000 milliamp hours each for a total of 6000.
Pretty cool that it can charge at 65 watts, with the only slight downside of it also snapping in
half. But like with any video game, you win some and you lose some. It's always fun to see things
up close and personal from the inside though. Moving back up to the top to remove the cameras.
We have the itty bitty 5 megapixel macro camera which does not have OIS. The other two are mounted
together inside the same housing. We have the main 50 megapixel camera on the left and the 13
megapixel ultra wide camera on the right – both of which have smaller footprints than we would
normally see in a flagship. And surprisingly neither of them have any optical image
stabilization. We haven't had a phone without OIS in years, and especially not on a flagship that
costs $1300. I'm almost more disappointed by the lack of OIS than I am at snapping in half.
Let's go deeper. It looks like the copper vapor chamber is pretty massive. And just like on
OnePlus, Asus has sandwiched their chamber between the frame and the screen. Lucky for us though our
screen is already mostly removed. Pulling it the rest of the way from the body reveals a few
things. First, that the strongest thing on this whole phone is the Victus glass on the front.
It remains intact while even the AMOLED panel underneath it is cracked. Nice work,
Corning. We can also see the optical fingerprint reader near the bottom of the screen. This lets
light through to the fingerprint scanner. There is no lens on the scanner itself,
just a sensor. And historically, in my own experience, that type of sensor-only arrangement
without a lens doesn't tend to scan very well, and might be why it didn't read my finger good.
Let's take out that vapor chamber. There's quite a bit of silverish graphite tape below the screen,
probably to help spread the heat from the vapor chamber uniformly
across the display area so heat can escape out the front of the phone
without it being concentrated too much in one spot. With the chamber out we find a white
sticker that directly correlates with the cavity we found earlier. I wonder if this cavity is ROG
sticking with its historical roots and providing a pathway for heat to escape out the back glass,
even if there aren't any physical vents this time around. The thermoelectric cooler would also not
sit over this cavity, so it's a rather interesting arrangement and an interesting placement. Let me
know what you think it's for down in the comments. The plastic tunnel walls also do not have any LEDs
inside, so it really does just appear to be a conduit from the vapor chamber to the rear of the
phone. Speaking of vapor chamber, I seem to have grabbed it in the wrong spot and smurfed my thumb.
Sometimes we open these up and see actual liquid inside before it evaporates. Initially I don't see
any moisture which isn't a big deal. There's such a small amount in here it could easily evaporate
between the time I slice it and the time I peel it back. But with a larger cut lengthwise through the
chamber, we do see some really small droplets. Pretty cool. The processor, while it was alive,
would warm up the droplets which misted away into the far edges of the chamber only to get
wicked back again through the copper mesh as they cooled down to repeat the process.
It's like a water cycle in a tiny ecosystem, without the ecosystem.
Kind of like earth in 50 years. I mean, it's a pretty cool phone,
minus the bending in half part. These structural issues of course can be remedied with a case
and by being nice to it. But the lack of optical image stabilization, though, makes me kind of sad.
Our buddy, Boron, says hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. Come hang
out with me on Instagram if you're bored. And thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.