the ASUS rog phone 3 had a lot going for
it assuming of course that you are some
kind of hardcore mobile gamer you know high
refresh rate display fantastic performance but
the issue is that it was also super
bulky and heavy and a little awkward to
use if you're not you know laser focused on gaming so oh
wow this is really heavy too um so what i
was gonna say was so i have extremely high hopes for what
appears on paper to be kind of like an rog phone three
except for the more general consumer
this is the zenfone 7 pro and i think ASUS
has done an absolutely fantastic job with the look of this thing check this
out what do you think of this color brandon
right exactly like depending on the angle it
can actually look completely black or it can look black
but with like kind of a green ASUS logo or you get this shimmer
looks really cool let's get the unboxing out of the way though so
oops in here we've got a
case wow honestly feels
awful that's weird it actually includes
two cases in the box who includes two cases in
their box that is so weird this one feels uh quite
a bit better i mean it's not it's not perfect or anything but
definitely quite a bit better and i don't understand what just happened here so
there's a little flippy like doodle that seems to be
designed to what hold the camera in
place because yes that is one of the killer
features of the zenfone 7 pro okay you also get a quick charger i think it charges at up
to 30 watts or something like that get one of those yup 30 watt charger
usb type-c to type c cable and
boom an all-screen display
or an all display front or
wow what do you call that anyway the point is there's no notch
no hole punch no interruptions and ASUS
achieves this by integrating a flip up style camera
just like they did on their zenfone 6 series
now i never actually covered the zenfone 6 series
and the reason for it was that i was really not happy with the
the camera flip mechanism so that's the first thing i want to check
out and what bothered me about it right off the hop
was that when you kind of shook the device around it would kind of flap
now ASUS claims that they have well that not only was the zenfone 6 version of it
far more durable than people expected but that they have redesigned it to the
point where it can handle i think it's 200 flips a day or 100
flips a day every day for five years and apparently
it's like stronger now and there's more contact points it's a
triple camera here i will be interested to see if it's any
good and this seems to work if you don't want to flip up but like what happens if you try to
flip it up with that thing on there okay let's turn it around to selfie camera
here how does it know so this is like the
anti-selfie switch if you like hate selfies you can
just you can make it impossible to take a selfie because there is no
traditional front-facing camera on this device whatsoever anyway i'm not
a huge fan of this case so i'm just gonna i'm gonna take it off we're gonna have a look at the camera flip here
still does it it seems like they've got
some really interesting mitigation strategies in place here though check this out so
watch this if i shake it around and it pops out it's like hey hey that's
not where it's supposed to be and it puts it back interesting hey okay how about how
strong is it
okay oh wow so it gives you about five
attempts and then it does that three times before it's like hey stop
i mean if it's as durable as ASUS says it is
looks great i mean compared to being stuck with
the like crappy front-facing camera that
you'd normally have like even a non-pixel non-iphone like
tier 2 rear-facing camera is going to absolutely
destroy the front-facing camera on even
those devices like obviously this is way sharper so
the primary camera on this puppy is a sony 64 megapixel sensor with an f
1.8 lens on it you can really see like wow that is
really sharp for a selfie picture because obviously it is it shoots up to 8k video
and has optical image stabilization that's one of the differences between
the non-pro and the pro model and then the other cameras
let's uh go ahead and switch to the yep the ultra wide so this is a 12 megapixel
affair and see this is one of the things that makes
this a tier 2 camera you can really see a stark
difference in my skin tones going from one of the sensors to the other now
that's an inherent thing when you change the sensor like on
a camera these are completely different imaging
pipelines but when you're google or when you're apple you do a better job of
your post-processing to match them let's go ahead and switch to our telephoto
wow that one's got like kind of a blue or purple cast to it that really
that really does not look amazing they
actually don't even advertise how many megapixels that sensor is which is a
super weird move we could find that out relatively easily
3264 by 2448 8 megapixels on the
telephoto so if pop-up's not a choice it's
basically this versus a hole punch or a notch
really i mean me too you would think based on that pretty much every design
out there has a hole punch or a notch in it that generally consumers would prefer that
but like no i i absolutely think this is way better
whoa if you hold the volume button
it like look at this ASUS what do you
guys have in mind for this why would i want like pew pew pew i'm
taking pictures that's hilarious
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in the video description it occurs to me now i actually have not talked through
the specs of this puppy at all so it's running a snapdragon 865 processor it's
got six or eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs or
256 gigs of storage and what's cool is the storage is
actually expandable so you've got your sim card slot over here and that also
has a micro sd holder in it in terms of the rest of the physicality
of this puppy on the bottom we've got a usb type-c port as well as a
speaker got your microphones down there as well
and then over on the right i like this actually you've got your volume rocker
and then your lock button that can actually be reconfigured with double
presses and long presses to activate other things up at the top nothing but the flip
camera so there's no headphone jack now one thing about this device that
might be a little controversial is the fingerprint sensor ASUS
broke the mold and actually went with a side mounted fingerprint sensor on the
lock button and i don't know how i feel about this okay one thing i would have to one thing
i would have to see is if i can unlock it without picking up
the device so why don't we give why don't we give that a shot so if i were to just touch the side of
this phone that's not bad oh you got to kind of get
the spot right though what if i just kind of drag my oh so i
just give my phone a little tickle you know what i actually i don't mind
that i'm not a huge fan of auto wick i actually like just pressing a button to wake my
device so having the fingerprint sensor integrated there makes a ton of sense to
me there's some other nice creature comforts here one of the first things i noticed firing it up is
oh yeah got that high refresh rate display
really does make a big difference now it's not 144 hertz like the rg phone
three or anything like that it's 90 hertz but to me the difference between 60 and
90 is like an enormous leap forward whereas the
difference between 90 and 120 or 144 outside of
you know extreme hardcore gaming i really don't see it making that big of a
difference to the experience especially because it comes at the expense of battery life the other
thing that makes me really happy about the screen is that it doesn't look bad like it's
pretty it's pretty normal for manufacturers to
you know have like the vibrancy absolutely cranked right out of the box
but out of the box on this it's fine i did
end up preferring to set splendid to i think it was standard
and then a little bit of a cooler color
temperature but even in their more vivid modes it's
not intolerable like you used to see with like older samsung devices for example
it's an OLED display so you can expect you know perfect blacks and ASUS claims
and i have no reason not to believe them whatsoever
that they've achieved delta e's of less than one on this
display it actually looks freaking awesome oh one thing i want to
know is if we have stereo audio and using some extra lengths of wires
impromptu cable ties to keep this mess under control the
final step is to install the speakers don't sound great to ASUS
credit though they do have an amplified earpiece speaker so i'm really happy to see that so the screen
honestly really happy with it goes up to 700 nits for
outdoor reading that's not the highest on the market by any stretch of the imagination but it's good enough that
you'll be able to comfortably use it outdoors color accurate OLED nice fast pixel
response times and high refresh rate sounds good but
the thing that might hold me back from daily driving a phone like this
is the bulk and the weight but i guess that's kind of par for the course when
you put a 5 000 milliamp hour battery in here and that seems to be
right in line with ASUS's vision for this
device is it seems to be like the phone that you're not going to have to switch
out for a long time because you're going to be able to take great selfies because you're actually
using your rear camera to take selfies for the longest time like in three years
i doubt there will be phones with better selfie cameras than the
rear camera on this one which you'll use for your selfies the battery
it's 5 000 milliamp hours and this is really cool they've included a ton
of battery optimization tricks that normally you would have to kind of
micromanage yourself you can say i only want to charge my battery up to
80 which by the way is still 4 000
milliamp hours and that's gonna make your battery not just last a long time for the day
but last a long time for its entire life and there's some other really cool stuff
here too like you can tell it to only
top up the battery you know in the hour and a half before 7am when i normally
wake up that way it's not just sitting there holding a charge all night which is also
really bad for it now the device doesn't include wireless
charging which i think some people could see as a negative these days
from a longevity standpoint i can see why they might not include it because it
does generate more heat in the battery which can make it not last for as long
so what is ASUS created here
it's a phone that i can't find an obvious flaw in
like even just you know taking a couple quick pictures obviously this is not a
comprehensive camera test but just a couple quick pictures here i can see
greens are a little bit too boosted uh reds are a little bit muted like
yeah there's definitely still work for them to do on their color science but
it's absolutely usable like even b-tier camera
processing has come a long way and there's a lot else going for it high
refresh rate display nice big battery honestly i think jesus
kind of has a winner on their hands here this is the kind of phone that
i could see using for you know three four five years
as long as ASUS supports it so this is something that
i think some Android manufacturer i'd love to see it be ASUS needs to just
step up to the plate and say we're gonna support these devices for as
long as apple supports an iphone can you do it ASUS let's see
hopefully you guys enjoyed this first look at the zenfone 7
pro make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any more of our videos
i actually have one coming that's going to be a lot of fun we're going to unbox
this oh it's heavy oh
main gear gaming pc see ya