accessory dependent phones have existed for many years in multiple forms and it
seems like they always follow the same script the experience at launch with no
accessories or just a couple of weird ones is meh at best which leads to
poor sales which leads to very little incentive to keep creating accessories
for the tiny user base which ultimately leads
to failure so i guess that's why ASUS went full ham
preparing not just a couple but an entire suite
of gaming related gaming related accessories for their rod
phone some of which like oh yeah this one
right here give you such a big competitive edge that they should
probably be considered cheating anywho we've got all of them so we're
just gonna like get these puppies opened up and go through a uh oh
oh hold on a second oh right
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the biggest issue to me with the accessories on some of the devices that
i alluded to before was that the features that they offered this was
particularly true in the case of the moto z and its modules
didn't have a clear benefit over existing device agnostic options
and or they were unreasonably expensive so challenge number one for ASUS is at a
reasonable price giving me functionality that is as good or greater than someone
else's one size fits all option so we've
got their desktop dock here that's going to cost you about 230 bucks we've got
their professional dock so we'll figure out what the difference is there that's
going to cost you 120. we've got the
these ones are the y gig dock is going to be 330 and
then the twin view dock is going to be 400 with
in my opinion the most interesting one for most people the game vice coming in
at 90 bucks so that's looking
okay kind of mixed bag i guess but even
the good things here are gonna be worthless if they can't address
challenge number two building a good enough phone that you'd actually want to
use it when it's not docked to an accessory so the rog phone though it's
decidedly futuristic looking with near 360 degree gorilla glass ASUS's
ubiquitously edgy line design and fancy
orange accents the screen is a six inch HDR OLED panel rocking at 2160 by 1080
resolution with in my opinion far more importantly this buttery smooth 90 hertz
refresh rate like honestly other manufacturers out there
take notice because this needs to be way more common on mobile
devices and while we're at it this does too yes my friends it has a headphone
jack though to be clear other manufacturers i'm not saying you should
all be more like jesus in every way because the ui design of the default
theme on this phone is terra bad the
only good thing i can say about it is that they give you the option to change
it so we made a custom theme that looks
as close to stock Android as possible and then we pretended like the other
thing just never happened the volume and lock buttons are pretty clicky which is
nice but given that they're on the same side and close together i wish they had
kind of different textures so that they're easier to feel in your pocket
and then on the opposite side you've got
no buttons but rather something that you've probably
never seen before this double usb type c
port thing so ASUS is touting this as a way to
charge your phone without obstructing your hands while you're gaming and i'm
with them there but whether this was an unintended side effect or not it's also
finally the solution to the long time issue of charging your phone while
watching netflix in bed and it gets better it also serves as a
connection hub for most of the accessories that we're going to get into
in a little bit here i got to turn that down oh yeah the speakers are really
loud almost all of the accessories connect
directly to this special port which by the way has a huge warning on it out of
the box not to plug power into the wrong one
because half of it is wired up more normally like for charging while the
other half is presumably set up for the rest of the HDMI output gigabit lan
second headphone jack and presumably laser vision functionality that's
included with this phone now actually ASUS couldn't confirm that last one
another thing that sets this device apart is the CPU so yes it's a
snapdragon 845 like all the other flagship phones from this year but ASUS
is actually binning the socs specifically for this phone allowing
them to reach 2.96 gigahertz as opposed to the stock 2.8 gigahertz it doesn't
sound like a lot probably because it isn't but it's enough to call it the
fastest 845 equipped phone and this does show in our synthetic tests
too bad the snapdragon 855 is already upon us anyway
because of that extra clock speed boost it's bound to run hotter and to combat
this ASUS implemented a massive vapor chamber like this is a pretty heavy
phone and copper plate that does seem to mostly work with the warmth evenly
spread out throughout most of the device under load instead of it just kind of
singing your fingers on one hand instead of both of them battery life is also a
plus thanks to the thick four thousand milliamp hour battery inside which
brings us then to the accessories now i could give you some fancy b-roll of them
while i read out the spec list but instead Jake and i are just going to try
them all out and give you guys some candid live impressions what are we
going to do first oh man oh you almost ran over my phone
okay so this is the one accessory you get for free this is the rog phone
cooling fan uh basically it's just got a little sliding
slider so that it can clamp onto the phone it's got a little tiny like what
would that even be like a 30 mil fan something stupid like that little tiny
fan that's got kind of like a ventilation thing above it here and then
it's got their proprietary dual c connector and then a charging port and a
headphone jack now did you like try to benchmark this or
what see i tried but phones the way that the
like temperatures and stuff it's kind of inconsistent like i'd load up a game the
same scene and the phone would be at 35 and then i'd do it again and it would be
at 32 like regardless of putting the fan on so i don't know but like subjectively
when you have it on it definitely feels cooler in the hand right it's just a
matter of how much that change in surface temperature is actually
affecting the internals based on how the cooling layout is inside there yeah so
this is interesting the way that it works is that you actually aren't
expecting a lot of the cooling to happen here like there's no thermal
compound or anything like that so it just vents the air out either side so
you know i could kind of see it cooling your hands
as much as cooling the phone being a benefit here it goes pretty loud actually
oh and it's got a little RGB light on the back so if you turn ara on
it you don't lose your RGB light anymore
for gaming yeah got that dinosaur yeah oh my god
oh actually he's unconscious i didn't kill him i think so does it feel hot on
your hand or what no actually i think for me the biggest
benefit is not even like cooling the phone necessarily but because you know
how your hands can get sweaty when you're holding a warm phone well the phone doesn't even feel warm you can see
your GPU 70 oh yeah it's got that cool little
overlay 31 degrees on the phone that's like that's the low 30. that's the
lowest i've ever seen it like oh it's cool out here in the warehouse this is true yeah yeah that's
probably a factor okay hit me with the game vice so basically the way this guy
works is you've got both halves of a controller
you've got your r1 r2 l1 l2 and then
you've got kind of this flexible bit here that
stretches a little bit so it's kind of spring-loaded on the inside there oh
and this guy only uses the side type-c
or the phone actually comes with two games uh this one's kind of like a pub g
clone are they even trying to make it not look like a pub g clone this looks
like a dating game like sims or something like that you know like grand
theft auto dating like thugdating.com
man these controls are so much better
than trying to use on screen okay so i'm not a huge fan of how the positioning of
like the a button compared to the positioning
of the stick here
pubg mobile okay so this game doesn't
at least from what i understand doesn't natively support these controls but ASUS
has this really really sick feature which i should probably show it once
we're actually in a game but you can set custom key mapping right and so this is
so there that's just your analog stick so you just kind of plunk that down wherever the analog stick is in the game
and then the game has no idea so even if they try and block this
for like competitive reasons how are they going to do that there's no
way yeah so that then this is just look there's now you can put it wherever you
want and change your sense wow that's pretty cool of individual sticks
even like i can't even tell the difference between the one that's uh
mapped natively and the one that we just set up yeah
if you don't have this controller actually you can also configure something called air triggers and so
these little like i think they're 20 gram actuation point little like
ultrasonic buttons here so your triggers can be actually on top of the phone so
you don't have to have that on the screen so that can be cool too
no i got him no way what what the heck
okay come on what oh you got him oh my
gosh what the heck all right so clearly more configuration
required yeah does it support like multiple profiles
like driving profile and stuff i think so i don't know
i think you could just make a new one or something right okay so they've got some work to do yeah and this is
the twin view this is heavy yeah i mean there's a lot
inside like there's a fan at the top i think it it's probably a beefier one
than the little fan attachment you have the full same screen is on the
phone so that's the same six inch OLED super nice panel and a 6 000 milliamp
hour battery okay so that's basically
1.5 the phone on top of the and a full-size sd card reader yeah hell yeah
what i don't even know what you would use that but then like it's so weird because
they only put one shoulder button on each side yeah i think the point is you
still use like the firing on the screen
yeah and then you can have your triggers oh yeah baby dude this phone is fast
okay i'm chugging a little bit now though yeah but like i can feel it
that's crazy like this is a weird use case but i think
there is one game that actually makes use of both screens okay one of the ones
they included it's the pub g clone i think you can have your map up top here
yeah i still don't have a ton of hope for
i'm not a hundred percent with a really nice on this one i mean i'd love to hear
your comments below guys like what would you use
the dual screens for here so next up we've got the mobile desktop
dock which gives you microphone headphone HDMI and display
port gigabit Ethernet 4 usb threes and
manufacturers okay everyone stop doing
this if it's not thunder pool don't put like a little lightning thing near it i
know that's not technically the same one but just stop they mean power but it
looks like Thunderbolt don't do that another DisplayPort one of those
horrible usb micro b3 ones and then an sd card why does this say sync
do they mean s y and c like these are both one output you know what let's not
worry too much about that so what's the point of this so this is
a way to be able to use your phone
with your regular computer's accessories when you
don't want to use the phone it just acts as a pass through for your regular
desktop but the really really dumb thing
is that cable you were talking about earlier you have to use that to pass through the
usb functionality to the pc
and it doesn't come with that cable does this have its own cooling fan that's
like ripping it up in there
oh that is loud uh
oh whoa yeah i think you can't do that in the
game mobile to desktop docking is one of
those like who's asking for these things there we go Jake let's watch sabrina the
teenager it's not even like fourth grade oh wait no you do the full screen events
like it works yeah but that's still a bad experience oh wait oh okay hey you
can so that's kind of working it's just the games i bet you they specifically
lock it out of those like pub g type games
so if you're like really into tower defense games i guess this is kind of
cool
i've never been sold on like uh an Android desktop experience before and i
don't think i'm sold today do you think it passes through g-sync
come on it might it's worth a shot at least 4k g-sync can
this dock do it oh wow yeah it did pass through g-sync
and it's 4k so i guess if you don't want to spend 330 on that i don't there is
this okay so this is the non-rog version
wait whoa okay you actually need this what so you still get the scent the
stand like functionality out of the cardboard
are you kidding no i'm not joking this
is an this is advertised functionality right here
okay i guess they weren't expecting such a heavy phone
anyway
i mean this still looks all right though you've got your Ethernet you've got your
usb 3 you've got your um your power and
HDMI i mean this overall this looks like it
makes more sense to me other than the how to build ASUS professional doc stand
yeah i've never seen anything more professional in my life this this this
is fine this is pro the other thing not pro let's try this so you have to
enable Ethernet in the Ethernet menu so i've got that
turned on did we get an ip oh yeah yeah yeah so it
seems to be working off uh i haven't
maybe do that okay
what do you think i'm going 300. oh
damn so yeah it's like not even used to this so just
look how fast it just doesn't even understand
okay so yeah that definitely works nice all right so one more accessory then
this is the big kahuna uh the kids say kahuna yeah so
this is the y gig dock it's got usb and
HDMI so it's like got way less functionality than the other ones except
it does usb and HDMI
wirelessly using y gig so all we got to do theoretically is enable y gig we've
already got this thing paired and theoretically
a thing will happen here hey okay
you could use that too you're playing games yeah latency good
really good uh compression not as good like look at the way
it's weird some things are really sharp yeah no it takes a second
yeah so that's what's that's what's uh going going down here see like watch
these logos as i scroll through them so you see that like when they're in motion
they look like absolute garbage and it like takes a sec
so in fairness to this most people probably wouldn't be sitting four feet
from a 77 inch screen but
to say that there is a clear image quality difference here
like even when we account for it being blown up would be an understatement
like if you come and have a look at like
yeah there's quite a bit of compression yeah there's a lot of compression like
that the image is quite fine here and it's quite less fine
uh here like this text would be sharp if we
weren't wireless right now latency though like you said is really
good like that's that's probably better than a wireless xbox controller on this tv
you know what i'm actually less impressed now that i'm looking at it side by side again in fairness this is a
90 hertz display and that's super not and it's super wireless but like i'd
probably have to come up with some other use cases for it other than gaming to
justify it for myself anyway oh he's got buddies oh
no way what are you gonna do you can't hit
nothing i can dance all day boom boom boom yeah you like that yeah
you like that oh yeah
so the conclusions are pretty mixed here the desktop dock i guess is pretty cool
if you have a use case for it i personally don't really and i think the
same can be said for the y gig dock with price being a serious concern for both
of those the professional dock though i quite like other than the cardboard box
stupid stand thing that they're doing but i think the real star of the show
has got to be the game vice here because this plus a portable battery pack
to me makes more sense than this one in
terms of how much better it legitimately makes
you at real games like how much more competitive it makes you so i'm pretty
happy with my experience overall but i think ASUS still has a lot of
fine-tuning to do for what will undoubtedly be an rog phone too let me
know in the comments what you guys think which ones were your favorites which
ones did you think were the worst oh i'm being shot at it again
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