The ROG Phone Can Play TWO GAMES at Once!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
3,648 words · ~18 min read
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accessory dependent phones have existed for many years in multiple forms and it
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seems like they always follow the same script the experience at launch with no
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accessories or just a couple of weird ones is meh at best which leads to
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poor sales which leads to very little incentive to keep creating accessories
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for the tiny user base which ultimately leads
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to failure so i guess that's why ASUS went full ham
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preparing not just a couple but an entire suite
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of gaming related gaming related accessories for their rod
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phone some of which like oh yeah this one
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right here give you such a big competitive edge that they should
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probably be considered cheating anywho we've got all of them so we're
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just gonna like get these puppies opened up and go through a uh oh
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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
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i alluded to before was that the features that they offered this was
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particularly true in the case of the moto z and its modules
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didn't have a clear benefit over existing device agnostic options
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and or they were unreasonably expensive so challenge number one for ASUS is at a
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reasonable price giving me functionality that is as good or greater than someone
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else's one size fits all option so we've
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got their desktop dock here that's going to cost you about 230 bucks we've got
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their professional dock so we'll figure out what the difference is there that's
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going to cost you 120. we've got the
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these ones are the y gig dock is going to be 330 and
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then the twin view dock is going to be 400 with
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in my opinion the most interesting one for most people the game vice coming in
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at 90 bucks so that's looking
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okay kind of mixed bag i guess but even
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the good things here are gonna be worthless if they can't address
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challenge number two building a good enough phone that you'd actually want to
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use it when it's not docked to an accessory so the rog phone though it's
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decidedly futuristic looking with near 360 degree gorilla glass ASUS's
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ubiquitously edgy line design and fancy
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orange accents the screen is a six inch HDR OLED panel rocking at 2160 by 1080
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resolution with in my opinion far more importantly this buttery smooth 90 hertz
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refresh rate like honestly other manufacturers out there
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take notice because this needs to be way more common on mobile
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devices and while we're at it this does too yes my friends it has a headphone
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jack though to be clear other manufacturers i'm not saying you should
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all be more like jesus in every way because the ui design of the default
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theme on this phone is terra bad the
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only good thing i can say about it is that they give you the option to change
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it so we made a custom theme that looks
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as close to stock Android as possible and then we pretended like the other
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thing just never happened the volume and lock buttons are pretty clicky which is
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nice but given that they're on the same side and close together i wish they had
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kind of different textures so that they're easier to feel in your pocket
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and then on the opposite side you've got
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no buttons but rather something that you've probably
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never seen before this double usb type c
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port thing so ASUS is touting this as a way to
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charge your phone without obstructing your hands while you're gaming and i'm
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with them there but whether this was an unintended side effect or not it's also
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finally the solution to the long time issue of charging your phone while
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watching netflix in bed and it gets better it also serves as a
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connection hub for most of the accessories that we're going to get into
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in a little bit here i got to turn that down oh yeah the speakers are really
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loud almost all of the accessories connect
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directly to this special port which by the way has a huge warning on it out of
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the box not to plug power into the wrong one
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because half of it is wired up more normally like for charging while the
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other half is presumably set up for the rest of the HDMI output gigabit lan
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second headphone jack and presumably laser vision functionality that's
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included with this phone now actually ASUS couldn't confirm that last one
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another thing that sets this device apart is the CPU so yes it's a
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snapdragon 845 like all the other flagship phones from this year but ASUS
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is actually binning the socs specifically for this phone allowing
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them to reach 2.96 gigahertz as opposed to the stock 2.8 gigahertz it doesn't
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sound like a lot probably because it isn't but it's enough to call it the
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fastest 845 equipped phone and this does show in our synthetic tests
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too bad the snapdragon 855 is already upon us anyway
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because of that extra clock speed boost it's bound to run hotter and to combat
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this ASUS implemented a massive vapor chamber like this is a pretty heavy
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phone and copper plate that does seem to mostly work with the warmth evenly
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spread out throughout most of the device under load instead of it just kind of
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singing your fingers on one hand instead of both of them battery life is also a
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plus thanks to the thick four thousand milliamp hour battery inside which
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brings us then to the accessories now i could give you some fancy b-roll of them
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while i read out the spec list but instead Jake and i are just going to try
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them all out and give you guys some candid live impressions what are we
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going to do first oh man oh you almost ran over my phone
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okay so this is the one accessory you get for free this is the rog phone
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cooling fan uh basically it's just got a little sliding
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slider so that it can clamp onto the phone it's got a little tiny like what
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would that even be like a 30 mil fan something stupid like that little tiny
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fan that's got kind of like a ventilation thing above it here and then
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it's got their proprietary dual c connector and then a charging port and a
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headphone jack now did you like try to benchmark this or
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what see i tried but phones the way that the
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like temperatures and stuff it's kind of inconsistent like i'd load up a game the
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same scene and the phone would be at 35 and then i'd do it again and it would be
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at 32 like regardless of putting the fan on so i don't know but like subjectively
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when you have it on it definitely feels cooler in the hand right it's just a
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matter of how much that change in surface temperature is actually
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affecting the internals based on how the cooling layout is inside there yeah so
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this is interesting the way that it works is that you actually aren't
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expecting a lot of the cooling to happen here like there's no thermal
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compound or anything like that so it just vents the air out either side so
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you know i could kind of see it cooling your hands
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as much as cooling the phone being a benefit here it goes pretty loud actually
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oh and it's got a little RGB light on the back so if you turn ara on
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it you don't lose your RGB light anymore
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for gaming yeah got that dinosaur yeah oh my god
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oh actually he's unconscious i didn't kill him i think so does it feel hot on
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your hand or what no actually i think for me the biggest
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benefit is not even like cooling the phone necessarily but because you know
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how your hands can get sweaty when you're holding a warm phone well the phone doesn't even feel warm you can see
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your GPU 70 oh yeah it's got that cool little
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overlay 31 degrees on the phone that's like that's the low 30. that's the
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lowest i've ever seen it like oh it's cool out here in the warehouse this is true yeah yeah that's
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probably a factor okay hit me with the game vice so basically the way this guy
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works is you've got both halves of a controller
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you've got your r1 r2 l1 l2 and then
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you've got kind of this flexible bit here that
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stretches a little bit so it's kind of spring-loaded on the inside there oh
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and this guy only uses the side type-c
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or the phone actually comes with two games uh this one's kind of like a pub g
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clone are they even trying to make it not look like a pub g clone this looks
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like a dating game like sims or something like that you know like grand
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theft auto dating like thugdating.com
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man these controls are so much better
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than trying to use on screen okay so i'm not a huge fan of how the positioning of
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like the a button compared to the positioning
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of the stick here
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pubg mobile okay so this game doesn't
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at least from what i understand doesn't natively support these controls but ASUS
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has this really really sick feature which i should probably show it once
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we're actually in a game but you can set custom key mapping right and so this is
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so there that's just your analog stick so you just kind of plunk that down wherever the analog stick is in the game
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and then the game has no idea so even if they try and block this
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for like competitive reasons how are they going to do that there's no
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way yeah so that then this is just look there's now you can put it wherever you
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want and change your sense wow that's pretty cool of individual sticks
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even like i can't even tell the difference between the one that's uh
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mapped natively and the one that we just set up yeah
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if you don't have this controller actually you can also configure something called air triggers and so
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these little like i think they're 20 gram actuation point little like
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ultrasonic buttons here so your triggers can be actually on top of the phone so
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you don't have to have that on the screen so that can be cool too
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no i got him no way what what the heck
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okay come on what oh you got him oh my
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gosh what the heck all right so clearly more configuration
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required yeah does it support like multiple profiles
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like driving profile and stuff i think so i don't know
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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
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the twin view this is heavy yeah i mean there's a lot
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inside like there's a fan at the top i think it it's probably a beefier one
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than the little fan attachment you have the full same screen is on the
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phone so that's the same six inch OLED super nice panel and a 6 000 milliamp
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hour battery okay so that's basically
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1.5 the phone on top of the and a full-size sd card reader yeah hell yeah
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what i don't even know what you would use that but then like it's so weird because
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they only put one shoulder button on each side yeah i think the point is you
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still use like the firing on the screen
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yeah and then you can have your triggers oh yeah baby dude this phone is fast
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okay i'm chugging a little bit now though yeah but like i can feel it
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that's crazy like this is a weird use case but i think
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there is one game that actually makes use of both screens okay one of the ones
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they included it's the pub g clone i think you can have your map up top here
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yeah i still don't have a ton of hope for
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i'm not a hundred percent with a really nice on this one i mean i'd love to hear
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your comments below guys like what would you use
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the dual screens for here so next up we've got the mobile desktop
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dock which gives you microphone headphone HDMI and display
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port gigabit Ethernet 4 usb threes and
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manufacturers okay everyone stop doing
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this if it's not thunder pool don't put like a little lightning thing near it i
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know that's not technically the same one but just stop they mean power but it
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looks like Thunderbolt don't do that another DisplayPort one of those
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horrible usb micro b3 ones and then an sd card why does this say sync
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do they mean s y and c like these are both one output you know what let's not
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worry too much about that so what's the point of this so this is
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a way to be able to use your phone
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with your regular computer's accessories when you
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don't want to use the phone it just acts as a pass through for your regular
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desktop but the really really dumb thing
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is that cable you were talking about earlier you have to use that to pass through the
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usb functionality to the pc
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and it doesn't come with that cable does this have its own cooling fan that's
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like ripping it up in there
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oh that is loud uh
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oh whoa yeah i think you can't do that in the
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game mobile to desktop docking is one of
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those like who's asking for these things there we go Jake let's watch sabrina the
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teenager it's not even like fourth grade oh wait no you do the full screen events
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like it works yeah but that's still a bad experience oh wait oh okay hey you
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can so that's kind of working it's just the games i bet you they specifically
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lock it out of those like pub g type games
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so if you're like really into tower defense games i guess this is kind of
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cool
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i've never been sold on like uh an Android desktop experience before and i
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don't think i'm sold today do you think it passes through g-sync
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come on it might it's worth a shot at least 4k g-sync can
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this dock do it oh wow yeah it did pass through g-sync
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and it's 4k so i guess if you don't want to spend 330 on that i don't there is
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this okay so this is the non-rog version
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wait whoa okay you actually need this what so you still get the scent the
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stand like functionality out of the cardboard
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are you kidding no i'm not joking this
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is an this is advertised functionality right here
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okay i guess they weren't expecting such a heavy phone
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anyway
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i mean this still looks all right though you've got your Ethernet you've got your
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usb 3 you've got your um your power and
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HDMI i mean this overall this looks like it
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makes more sense to me other than the how to build ASUS professional doc stand
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yeah i've never seen anything more professional in my life this this this
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is fine this is pro the other thing not pro let's try this so you have to
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enable Ethernet in the Ethernet menu so i've got that
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turned on did we get an ip oh yeah yeah yeah so it
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seems to be working off uh i haven't
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maybe do that okay
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what do you think i'm going 300. oh
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damn so yeah it's like not even used to this so just
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look how fast it just doesn't even understand
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okay so yeah that definitely works nice all right so one more accessory then
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this is the big kahuna uh the kids say kahuna yeah so
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this is the y gig dock it's got usb and
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HDMI so it's like got way less functionality than the other ones except
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it does usb and HDMI
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wirelessly using y gig so all we got to do theoretically is enable y gig we've
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already got this thing paired and theoretically
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a thing will happen here hey okay
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you could use that too you're playing games yeah latency good
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really good uh compression not as good like look at the way
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it's weird some things are really sharp yeah no it takes a second
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yeah so that's what's that's what's uh going going down here see like watch
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these logos as i scroll through them so you see that like when they're in motion
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they look like absolute garbage and it like takes a sec
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so in fairness to this most people probably wouldn't be sitting four feet
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from a 77 inch screen but
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to say that there is a clear image quality difference here
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like even when we account for it being blown up would be an understatement
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like if you come and have a look at like
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yeah there's quite a bit of compression yeah there's a lot of compression like
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that the image is quite fine here and it's quite less fine
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uh here like this text would be sharp if we
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weren't wireless right now latency though like you said is really
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good like that's that's probably better than a wireless xbox controller on this tv
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you know what i'm actually less impressed now that i'm looking at it side by side again in fairness this is a
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90 hertz display and that's super not and it's super wireless but like i'd
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probably have to come up with some other use cases for it other than gaming to
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justify it for myself anyway oh he's got buddies oh
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no way what are you gonna do you can't hit
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nothing i can dance all day boom boom boom yeah you like that yeah
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you like that oh yeah
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so the conclusions are pretty mixed here the desktop dock i guess is pretty cool
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if you have a use case for it i personally don't really and i think the
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same can be said for the y gig dock with price being a serious concern for both
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of those the professional dock though i quite like other than the cardboard box
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stupid stand thing that they're doing but i think the real star of the show
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has got to be the game vice here because this plus a portable battery pack
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to me makes more sense than this one in
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terms of how much better it legitimately makes
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you at real games like how much more competitive it makes you so i'm pretty
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happy with my experience overall but i think ASUS still has a lot of
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fine-tuning to do for what will undoubtedly be an rog phone too let me
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know in the comments what you guys think which ones were your favorites which
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