you know there's something a little funny about someone who hasn't upgraded their phone in two years unboxing this
this is the ROG phone and it is just
about the most excessive mobile device
that I have ever encountered
it's equipped with a snapdragon 865 plus
processor anywhere from 12 to 16
gigabytes of memory 512 gigs of storage
a 144 hertz OLED display that actually
touched samples at 270 Hertz making for
supposedly a nearly instantaneous feel
to your touch inputs it comes with
what's the phone power brick apparently
charge is really fast it's got a six thousand milliamp hour battery comes
with a type seat a headphone jack adapter yeah they took out the headphone
jack it's got some well that's really nice it's got some extra rubber stoppers
included for the put there it is ladies
and gentlemen now one of the design goals for ASUS with the ROG phone 3 was
apparently to keep the form factor the same as the ROG phone 2 in order to
improve compatibility with their previous generation accessories so you
can expect to use the same like game pad
adapter and like their grip and even
their twin view dock which we did a video about last year on the Linus tech
tips channel although it should be noted that if you use your last generation
dock you're gonna be limited to 120 Hertz instead of 144 Hertz which is what
the new ROG phone 3 runs at in terms of
the design I'd actually say they did a pretty good job of maintaining the the
gamer look but without overdoing it actually previous ROG phones I felt like
they had kind of over played the game rhiness of it and the thing is it's a
phone so most of the time I would think you're probably using it
as a phone as opposed to as a mobile gaming console and even mobile gaming
consoles like they generally don't look like way over the top you can be sitting
on the bus using them so I think this is I think they could dial it back a touch
more but this is definitely a step in the right direction let's go ahead and
actually let's go ahead and have a look at all the ports and everything so on
the right you got your stacked up lock button and volume rocker right here
these are the pressure sensitive air triggers so these are for gamers so you
got your your shoulder buttons right there up on the top you got a whole lot
of not much apparently the phone has a for mic array for noise cancelling
though so that's a pretty nice you got a sim tray here actually Oh does
it have microSD expansion the answer is
no dual SIM yes microSD expansion no
with that said 512 gigs is a friggin lot
of storage as for why they didn't do a one terabyte option apparently it was
because the only one terabyte drive available was ufs 3.0 not ufs 3.1 and
they were after just nothing but raw speed down here we've got two USB type
C's but it should be noted that one of them which is actually there we go
Handley marked on here is a USB type-c
and the other is do not insert a USB
type-c cable to this port do not do that
so that's the the red one on the bottom
we've got another USB type-c it's offset again just like the previous one and as
I alluded to before there is no headphone jack right here dual
front-facing stereo speakers a la the HTC One and I'm expecting big things
from them apparently they have tuned the crap out of these speakers for like
great bass response or something like that or in the middle of the setup
process here I'm gonna go with classic
thank you a soos as of I believe last
generation or might have been the first ROG phone offers the ability to set it
up with a not horrendous game arelooking skin which I personally really
appreciate now we're gonna get dropped onto the
cringy startup video I cheated on this
video a little bit I have already been through this startup process and it is
hi larious scan the ROG totem ditch
don't question it oh yeah oh yeah yeah
sounds pretty good
this is I do I love you guys
very dearly but what the hell did I just
watch welcome to the Republic of gamers now I'm good thanks oh that's actually
kind of a clever design for the stock case so it'll protect it from you know
getting dropped on a corner or whatever but it still it leaves the air triggers
exposed and it allows this to be mounted
let's take a look at this puppy now this is the arrow active cooler 3 there you
go it's labeled under there and it's got a little kickstand it's got a little
cooling fan and it's got a pass-through for your USB type-c as well as your
headphone jack so the idea is you can go ahead and pop this puppy open like that
pop your phone in there like that pop those dual USB type-c Xin to the bottom
there and there we go you've got your
phone propped up and you're ready for some hardcore gaming a bind X mode level
3 performance high yes so not only are they using a snapdragon 865 plus but
apparently they allow you to manually specify if you want it to go into a
higher performance tier and stay there
because it's got well active cooling on the back of the phone how loud is it
though oh it's audible here I'll hold it
up to my microphone here you hear that
it's really heavy Wow
I actually hadn't really even thought about it up until now but I guess that's
kind of what happens when you have quite literally every feature built into the
thing so it has an in screen fingerprint sensor you can go ahead and set up a
fingerprint here so it's an optical rather than ultrasonic one you can tell
from the lights how's the speed of the fingerprint unlock though oh not bad
that's acceptable not the fastest I've seen oh we should get some games we've
got a game let's say what's a game not all the kids play 7.9 gigabytes yeah
no wonder you need a 512 gig freaking phone
let's have a look at our game genie stuff that's actually pretty handy so
you can see your CPU temps what frame rate you're running at clock speeds
whether X modes enabled you can lock
down your brightness oh cool check that out so you got a little
overlay that can show you some of those key specs if you want you can turn off
calls yes there's just a one touch
screen recording button one thing to note though is that unlike the previous
ROG phone they have not integrated twitch streaming so apparently that was
because they just had issues with it from the briefing call that's really
cool just being able to like quickly record like that new speed up button
okay so that probably just like closed background tasks and stuff like that
still for a su software this is actually
surprisingly smooth and usable
it looks like YouTube live streaming is ready to rock though battery more than
two days remaining that's what happens to 6,000 milliamp hour battery refresh
rate you can set to auto interesting
let's go straight to 144 Hertz all that stuff one thing I needed to change right
away the first time I fired this thing up was to go to I think natural was the
one that didn't look ridiculous in their splendid settings that puts us in sRGB
mode for using the operating system things aren't so over the top the first
couple pictures I took on it I was like wow this camera is horrible but it was
actually just the display that was horrible I mean the camera's still not
gonna be competitive with something like the latest iPhone but it's a lot better
than what we've seen on previous ROG phones that's for sure I'm gonna take a
beautiful selfie well it's a selfie
anyway that's something if I actually played a lot of mobile games the sound
is really good like almost nothing uses
you know proper dual amplified stereo speakers anymore like this it's always
just like an amplified earpiece speaker for the other one and there are some
pretty good ones out there but this is too real speakers facing you six
thousand milliamp hour battery that's a lot of battery 30 watt charging no
wireless charging and when pressed a soos basically said well you know
everything is trade-offs that's something that I would to be a basic flagship feature these
days but they didn't include it because they just wanted to make as much space
for battery as possible that was a lot of the justification behind removing the
headphone jack as well the cold hard truth is you know if you want my take on
why brands are removing headphone jacks it's because if you can afford to buy
our product you probably have Bluetooth headphones anyway so like honestly
though almost everyone here in the office has switched to bluetooth headphones at this point they don't
sound as good but boy are they convenient I love that I'm screen
recording downloading games in the background and running this game at 120fps and this thing is just going like
it's going yep we're running at 117 120
FPS like I said I really you know I don't feel it as much as I do on a large
display but it's definitely better smooth turns out I didn't know how to
steer but do my shoulder buttons do in this game do they do anything I'm in
ninth oh I suck maybe this is why I'm hating on all the mobile gamers cuz I'm
just not good enough to be them the chassis is starting to heat up a little
bit though now that my GPUs at like 70 plus percent usage CPU at 40 this is a
pretty demanding game especially these frame rates oh and now it needs another
600 Meg's that was just that was just the intro oh
lordy that's fine all I wanted to see was high refresh rate and it was
definitely high I'm not even gonna deploy a parachute that's for wimps
on epic quality we're actually still
only seeing about 22 to 25 FPS oh yeah
what's up now what's up now what's up
now I don't even know what's up now whoa whoa gotcha how do I pick things up I
don't I don't know I don't know how to pick things up I don't play this game hey what's up what's up now no way these
can't be real people he's got to be BOTS this is terrible it's getting a little
toasty that 80% CPU usage definitely
running a little hotter now that's fine because all I really wanted to know is
how the game ran between 25 26 FPS
at epic quality oh I get it they call it
epic quality because epic games I get it
but what a jokester you are mr. Sweeney
oh that's while recording though how is it without recording oh now my from on
now my CPU usage be much lower and my
FPS is like pins no I'm not quiet okay
we dip to like 28 there for a second oh okay that's pretty cool we were still
getting very playable frame rates while recording though from my first
impressions the bottom line here is pretty simple the RG phone 3 is exactly
as advertised it's got a gigantic high
refresh rate high brightness OLED display it's got a massive battery it's
got gamer optimized features like being able to quickly screen record turn your
seat view up to the maximum speed you know configure your air triggers and all
that good stuff they've got a bunch of accessories I love that they gave thought to intergenerational accessory
compatibility and really the bottom line for this one is do you need a gaming
phone like does anyone need a gaming phone there's people out there I mean do
you need a gaming phone and if you do this is looking like a pretty swell
option oh yeah subscribe to a ShortCircuit so you don't miss any of our unboxings and
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