Asus ROG Phone review

Asus ROG Phone review: The perfect mobile weapon for your ROG arsenal

Design

The ROG Phone is a beautiful device, with rounded edges, copper accents, etched lines, a diamond-cut bezel and an illuminated logo on the back. Okay, beautiful might not be how the average person would describe it, but it certainly has that gaming PC aesthetic that many hardcore gamers find sexy. For those that aren’t into these types of design choices, you might find it a bit boxy. It’s still pretty comfortable to hold though. 

The brilliant 6-inch AMOLED screen consumes 84.5 percent of the front surface, highlighted by two long, front-facing speakers – one at each end of the screen – providing clear, crisp audio. Asus says this phone is one of the world’s first to use sixth-generation “2.5D” curved edge Corning Gorilla Glass to protect the screen. Smooth 3D Curved Gorilla Glass protects the back.

Along the bottom you’ll find a USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. A special connector resides along the left side which includes USB Type-C connectivity, but you absolutely cannot attach a USB Type-C cable to this port. Instead, the entire connector is reserved for the included AeroActive Cooler fan attachment. Protecting this connector is a small, removable rubber cover that’s easily lost. 

The external add-on fan is silent while active and includes a USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The idea here is to make sure your USB Type-C and headphone cables don’t jut out into your hand when you’re playing games horizontally with the fan attached.

The phone includes two SIM card slots, fingerprint scanner, and several special touch sensors. There are two touch sensors on the right residing towards the top and bottom and another touch sensor on the left side towards the bottom (more on those later).

Display

The ROG Phone’s AMOLED screen packs a 2,160 x 1,080 maximum resolution, an 18:9 aspect ratio, a 1ms response time and a 90Hz refresh rate, meaning the phone can support frame rates of up to 90fps, providing fluid, smooth movement — perfect for gaming. It also supports 10-point touch input, Gaming HDR and Mobile HDR.

By comparison, the Razer Phone 2 has a higher refresh rate of 120Hz, enabling a higher frame count than the Asus phone. Yet given mobile games rarely go over 60fps anyway, both refresh  rates are arguably overkill.

What’s really refreshing about this display is that it includes a Glove Mode to increase sensitivity for gloved hands. I only tested this mode using relatively thin gloves, but the device remained responsive nonetheless, allowing me to perform general tasks without dirtying the surface. Even gaming worked to some degree although I ripped off the gloves for better traction.

The ROG Phone is relatively bright too. With a maximum brightness of 550 nits, I had no problems catching Pokémon outside with the sun beaming down on the screen. 

Software

The ROG Phone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo, using the company’s ROG UI skin. For those prefer stock Android, you’ll probably find the UI a bit bloated. It’s also disheartening to see that the phone doesn’t ship with Android Pie, though an update is expected in the hopefully near future. Of course this is the same situation with pretty much every gaming phone, including the Razer Phone 2. 

Minor qualms aside, the UI works well enough. At the center of it all is the Asus Game Center app, which serves as a hub for the phone’s gaming options. Here you can monitor temperature, CPU stats, GPU stats, memory stats, and storage capacity. You can also configure the external fan’s speed, switch on and customize Aura lighting, and manage game profiles.

The Game Center’s Game Genie component is accessible by tapping on the “…” icon. Here you can switch on an in-game toolbar that allows you to toggle on lock mode, disable alerts, get real-time info (frames per second, GPU use), lock the screen brightness, and “speed up” performance by clearing unnecessary junk from memory. To load this toolbar within any game, simply swipe in from the right as if pulling up the Android navigation bar and tap the controller icon.

Hardware

The ROG Phone is powered by an overclocked Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, with four “big” Cortex-A75 cores running up to 2.96GHz and four “little” Cortex-A55 cores running up to 1.77GHz, though most of the game processing is handled by the Adreno 630 graphics chip included in the SoC.

Overclocking makes chips run slightly warmer, so Asus designed what it calls the GameCool system, which uses thermal conduction and diffusion to compensate. This system includes a “3D vapor-chamber” residing at the bottom of the hardware stack, a copper heat spreader covering the motherboard and components, and a carbon cooling pad at the top to increase the heat dissipation. The included external AeroActive Cooler connects to its dedicated port on the left and snaps into place on the right to silently blow cool air on to the phone’s back panel to “enhance” heat dissipation.

The phone includes an X Mode you can toggle on to increase the minimum speed of all eight cores: The “big” cores jump to 1.2GHz and the “little” cores increase to 1.3GHz. This helps the Snapdragon chip better process user interactions and application requests. X Mode also boosts the CPU and GPU bus clocks but does not actually increase the Adreno GPU speed given its frequencies are “hardcoded” within the Snapdragon chip.

Specification