Design
The design, it's kind of funny, when I first saw
it i was like oh no wait they're toning it down even more. Remember the first
ROG phone was totally wild then the second ROG phone was a little toned down
from that and so I saw this third one and I got a little afraid they might have
started neutralizing the whole gaming aesthetic to make it more of an everyday
phone but as soon as you pick it up you quickly realize this is absolutely 100
% still a super unique design that they've committed to for this phone. It's
still got the RGB lit logo at the back that can glow for notifications, Still
got the traced lines and the little exposed slot for the heatsink and the
carbon chamber cooling system on the side. Still has the custom mappable air
triggers on the side which improved actually this year with better sensitivity
and precision and more custom mapping options and it still has even the offset
usb-c port on the bottom so you can
charge while gaming and the cable doesn't get in the way and really above all
it's still absolutely huge it's just so massive this is actually i think too
big a phone for me to want to carry it daily and I really don't say that much.
I think this phone finally found that point for me somewhere between the
biggest flagships of Samsung and Oneplus we arrived at this and I think it's
the gigantic footprint that makes it too big.
Speakers
We see here in the design that how well they use
all this space so they kept the stereo front-facing speakers in this phone and
they are actually incredible. The stereo image they produce and the volume they
achieve thanks to having all this space is second to none. Some of the absolute
best speakers i've heard in a phone. The only thing is the volume curve i found
kind of weird like they really don't start getting loud until you're at like 80
% volume but that's not a huge deal they can honestly fix that quickly with a
software update
Whats Missing in the ROG Phone 3
Now again that predecessor, the ROG Phone 2 was
that do everything in one package phone and this is still an incredible spec
sheet and we'll get to that in a second but it does have a few things notably
missing this year first of all it doesn't have a headphone jack built in on the
ROG phone 3. there's also no official IP dust or water resistance rating and
there's also no Wireless charging probably because they really wanted to keep
that RGB glowing logo on the back
Now talking about the headphone jack, I was a
little confused by because it's a gaming phone and you would still think
someone who wants zero lag will accept nothing less than wired audio but it
also does come in the box with this little accessory that gives you USB C and a
headphone jack on the side so i guess it kind of makes up for it but I do miss
wireless charging in a phone that I use every day just because at this point
most phones I use and test have wireless charging and I have wireless chargers
everywhere so i do miss that
Whats New in the ROG Phone 3
All right just look at the specifications, its
absolutely bleeding edge top of the line.
It's got the new Snapdragon 865 plus that's just
starting to show up in phones now by the way that chip is clocked at up to 3.1
gigahertz in a phone! It has 16 GB RAM plus it's a 1080p 144 hertz OLED
display, Up to half a terabyte of UFS 3.1 storage and a 6000 mAh battery every
single one of those numbers is is the biggest or the highest you can basically
find or put in a phone it's all top shelf parts
User Interface and Performance
Something that I think a lot of people forget is
you also have to consider the best way to transition from all those big numbers
to actual user experience is great software and Asus software it's okay to me
it's getting better but it's definitely not perfect really there's a lot of
subtle things like animations and unlocking and transitions and just occasional
places in the UI where it hiccups just a tiny bit and I notice it now that's
just me and a lot of people haven't used a bunch of other high end, high
refresh rate phones they may never notice this stuff but most of the time this
phone is super smooth right up next to the other 144hz phone i've used as the
smoothest phone i've ever tested so that's worth noting and overall performance
as you would expect from that spec sheet has been great and yes I did leave on
144 hertz maxed out all the time because there really isn't much of a downside
right you can this phone is going to let you go between 60 90 120 and 144 hertz
i leave it maxed out because you can't really hurt the battery much it's so
huge and it's only a 1080p screen so the specs can clearly handle it.
Battery
Let's talk about that battery so this phone again
has a 6 000 milliamp hour battery which is again the Biggest battery i've ever
used in a phone plus this year there's also 30 watt fast charging supported and
you guys already know i've tested many other big phones in the past thick boys
like this and none of them have actually gotten me through two days.
Some of them get to the end of the day with like
40% left, some of them will get a whole day and a half but none of them have
actually really gotten me a comfortable two days but when I was I was testing
the ROG Phone 3 a little while back and
sure enough I had a pretty light day and I actually ended a day with 52 % battery left at like 10:30 pm and when I
saw that I was like wow i'm ending the day with more than half my battery!
Let's just try it, let's just see if i can go a full two days on this phone so
i didn't charge it. I woke up the next day and I went through an entire new day
and I got to the end of that day I think at 9:30 pm, I had 3% battery Left and it was about six hours of
screen on time so there was Some gaming , Some navigation but two light days in
a row I made it to the end of the second day at 144 hertz that is incredibly
impressive again I mean I expect nothing less from a just a huge battery like
that but two full days of light use easily over a day of heavy use at 144 hertz
dude if you put this down to like 60 or 90 hertz just because you have a long
time where you're not gonna be able to plug in this is a legit two-day phone.
Fast Charging Support
Icing on the cake is the fast charging, So 30
watts it might not seem super fast but just think about this when you're quick
charging you get the fastest charging speeds from about zero to 60-65 percent
before it levels off and you get closer to full that's how batteries work well
when you're charging on this phone with this huge battery the quick couple
minutes of charge from 0 to 65 just got you 4000 mAh hours so charging is fast
the battery lasts forever you can use less charge cycles so the battery stays
healthy for longer it's just all great.
Camera
The ROG Phone 3 got triple cameras on the back,
we all know we're not buying a gaming phone for the cameras none of them in the
past have had a good reputation for cameras but didn't stop me from testing it
and my findings lined up probably exactly what you'd expect. Pretty Mediocre
set of cameras so you have a 64 megapixel main camera it's a big number and
then a 13 megapixel ultra wide and a 5 megapixel macro camera to me this macro
camera in a gaming phone is the perfect example of just adding the cheapest
extra camera to just be able to say you have triple cameras but honestly I
really don't think people are looking to just buy the phone with more cameras.
Shots from the main camera are passable when you
give it enough light so daytime shots are fine but as soon as you get into
those tougher situations like with higher dynamic range or just low light in
general they definitely fall apart and the ultra wide and macro are just much
softer no matter how good the light is I mean they did their job the ultra wide
is definitely very wide it's 125 degrees and the macro lens does in fact close
focus but let's not get carried away people aren't buying this phone for the
cameras i'm actually more confused why there's still a camera bump on the back
of the phone at all on maybe the thickest flagship phone of the year surely
they could have fit the cameras into the chassis with no bump.
Conclusion
I guess not all these features and all these
specs packed into this phone had me reconsidering like the original question
when we first started getting these gaming phones which is does it make sense
to make to buy a gaming phone and I think the answer for a really small group
of people is yes people that play a lot of well-optimized games on their phone
and want the best possible experience for that will enjoy this phone and things
like air triggers and the faster refresh rate and the snappier response time of
the display and the gaming specific features like X mode that throttles up the
CPU and game genie that lets you you know feature hub for stuff like recording
the screen and silencing notifications and clearing out ram for a little bit of
extra performance all that stuff for that tiny group of people sure but for the
rest of us these really just end up being glorified or really nice media
machines media consumption phones big screen, big speakers, big battery, high
refresh like watching videos, scrolling Instagram like this is an amazing phone
for that and that's fine too but for those who really know what they're getting
into ROG phone 3 is a beast of a phone so that's been it about the all new Asus
ROG Phone 3. Hope you liked the In Detail Review and i will very soon post the
Camera Samples of the ROG Phone 3, until then stay tuned.
Full Phone Specifications
