Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and this is the ROG phone so in a Sue's invited us out to their event here at Computex I had a few big questions so after seeing the razor phone last year there's some interesting stuff there's some stuff that it does well but at the end of the day it has a great display it has an interesting build but it's not a great phone now I don't want to be too hard on the razor phone as there are some things that does well but at the end of the day I don't care how gaming focused of a device you're making it has to be a good phone and the ROG phone at least on paper and sort of based on first impressions looks like it is that good balance so what is the ROG phone what you're getting here is on the surface a very unique looking device and when I say that I mean it not only do you have an LED that is going to be full RGB on the back but you've got a vent you've got vapor chamber cooling and you've got what looks to be one of the best-looking displays I've ever seen on a smartphone the LG phone is rocking a six-inch 2160 by 1080p AMOLED display now that might not sound impressive but what you're getting here is two things first of all it's a solid panel it's got good viewing angles really impressive brightness it's going to support HDR but almost more importantly than that it's going to be running at a full 90 Hertz no yes on paper the razor phone has it beat but now you're getting a much much nicer looking OLED panel but as far as I'm concerned bringing it in 90 frames per second versus 120 frames per second it's very hard to tell on any display especially when it comes to a phone so what you're getting here is actually a decent I'm gonna stop pressing stings accidentally no if you take a look at the back of the phone you'll definitely see it's got some gamer style but I actually don't think it's that bad it's going to be fairly subtle especially when you considering that this is going to be glass sort of blends in a little bit and while you do have a glowing LED logo it's going to be completely customizable and importantly you can also turn it off if you don't want to you know if you're seeing in a meeting looking like this the rest of the specs are literally as high-end as you can imagine this guy is rocking the snapdragon 845 but not just any snapdragon 845 it's actually a custom version which is running it just under three gigahertz they don't have the exact SKUs just yet but you should expect a gigs of ram and up to supposedly 512 gigabytes of storage camera wise you're getting a set up that is very similar to the zenfone 5 and 5z a wide-angle 8 megapixel camera as well as a 12 megapixel standard shooter now the main difference here is that these are going to be supported by Google's AR core which should be helpful for some AR games in the future but expect decent performance maybe not anything spectacular but definitely better than the razor phone might be tuning to the razor phone all this is being backed up by a four thousand milliamp hour battery a pretty decent size especially considering that you have to have so much power to run phone like this now there's some other things that are definitely appreciated first of all we do have USB C as well as a headphone jack and two more USB ports which I'll talk about in a second but you're also going to be getting some really impressive sounding front firing speakers those are incredibly loud speakers something cool that shared with the pixel two is that you can actually squeeze on the edges of the phone to be able to enable gaming mode so on the pixel that'll turn on Google assistant but here you can see it turns whole red and looks cool and this will turn off things like notifications when you're in the game enable a higher level of performance and just look really cool if you take a look at the top of the phone what you're going to find are there two little sort of ridged edges here now this actually can be mapped inside the software to be an actual button so as opposed to needing to carry around a controller for some games you might just be able to use these as triggers because it's all going to be pressure-sensitive it's actually kind of cool and one of my favorite parts even though it's not really all that important is if I actually open up the camera here you can see it if I just press on top it takes a shot which is cool right it feels like a real camera you don't have to think about it like I think I naturally sort of press down on this part of the phone when taking a shot but it actually works as a shutter button here what really pushes the ROG phone into crazy talent are going to be the accessories so in addition to your standard USB C port and a headphone jack that you're going to find on the bottom of the phone the side of the phone also has two more USB ports the first accessory is the arrow active cooler now this moves your USB C port as well as your headphone jack to the side of the phone so when you're playing in landscape it doesn't sort of get in your way when you're trying to hold it on either end but on top of that it has RGB because of course it does it's a phone in 2018 that has the ROG brand on it and on top of that it's also going to function as an actual cooler for your phone and importantly this is included in the box unlike some other slightly more exciting accessories but I would say one thing because the fan is going to be cooling the entire back of the foam because of the vapor chamber which runs most of the way here you're actually getting a little bit of cool air on your fingers when you're holding it like this which is nice play any kind of smartphone game for an extended period of time you know that it can get very hot very quickly there's also the mobile desktop dock so this is actually a pretty hardcore accessory which when you dock your phone inside of it will give you a wide range of ports including Ethernet HDMI DisplayPort a ton of USB ports and importantly it's also going to allow you to use a mouse and keyboard in the game now this paired with some clever software will allow you to use a mouse and keyboard on literally any Android game out there the way it works is is that it will remap various different parts of your display to go along with your keyboard or Mouse so for example if you hit the e key on your keyboard it can press a specific part of the display that might you know reload or pick something up now to be fair the very early ROG phones that I got to try was not super smooth as far as this went so we'll kind of have to wait and see but I feel like it's a very simple piece of tech that I'm sure they'll be able to sort out by the time the phone comes out the real issue is going to be I think this is kind of cheating because most people are playing on their actual phones and someone else could just drop their phone on the dock and play with a full mouse and keyboard so we'll see about that but super clever and I think actually could be implemented pretty well something just as crazy is the twin View dock now this sort of turns your og phone into something that kind of looks like a Nintendo DS so essentially when you drop your phone in it's going to give you a secondary display which you can use for a lot of different purposes for example if you want to say stream from your phone you could have the actual chat and the twitch window up on one screen and your actual game on the other but there's a lot of really cool advantages that you could have with this especially considering that it does have not only a full sized SD card slot and USB see out but it even does have a full six thousand milliamp hour battery there is a lot to like with the ROG phone now the idea of having a phone that's dedicated to gaming it first was very skeptical to me right so yes it's going to be a nice function to be able to have something that can do well at gaming but I mean at the end of the day it's a phone and it has to be able to function well as a phone so based on what I've seen with the ROG phone it does perform well but importantly it still doesn't really give up a lot of functionality or features right you can still fit it in your pocket it's not going to be giant it's not going to be bulky as nice display good performance all the things that you would expect now the main issue and I think the main thing that really sort of worries me with the ROG phone is going to be price this is not going to be cheap especially considering that it does come with the actual fan attachment inside the box so of course it's too early to know about the actual specific pricing or any kind of availability although it should be out later this year but the thing that really worries me is that this is going to be $1,000 plus foam no I get it if it's going to be in the $800 to $1,000 range I think it's actually going to be justified right I mean you compare it to something like a Galaxy Note 8 or something it's not going to be far off but if it's going to be thousand eleven $1,200 that's going to be a lot of money for essentially a Tsar oh geez first phone some very curious what do you guys think about the ROG phone let me know in the comments below and I will catch you guys in the next one