This is what happens when you get to the limits of what any normal person would want and a phone and then just blow right past it.
Hey, what’s up, This is the Rog phone 5 Ultimate Edition Review. So there’s no ROG phone 4, because for the some reason 4 is an unlucky number in some parts of Asia. So we’ve skipped right to ROG Phone 5 and this phone is every bit as ridiculous as it looks it’s kind of funny.
They’ve actually sort of been toning down the gamer phone aesthetic over the years, but they have not been toning down how ridiculous the actual Rog phone 5 is so gaming phones.
Starting out. We’re never supposed to be reasonable. You know, they’re huge phones with pretty striking designs RGB lights and the absolute bleeding-edge maximum specs available.
So the ROG phone has been at the Forefront of that for a while and this new one definitely takes even further.
ROG Phone 5 Specification Review
So first of all, it’s still got all the same big number fundamentals from before it is a massive phones. Got a gigantic 6.8 inch display, 144Hz AMOLED, a Snapdragon 888, which while it’s not a plus version like they typically launched the phone with it is absolutely the latest and greatest right now still has a massive six thousand milliamp/hour battery, half a terabyte UFS 3.1 Storage
And still has a huge pair of stereo front-facing speakers that get louder than any other phone I’ve tested in a long time. But now on top of all that there’s a lot of new.
There’s a surprising amount of upgrades. Actually. First of all, Rog Phone 5 back, It’s a matte white kind of a pearl like finish with blue accents. It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it does reject fingerprints really well and overall the looks not too crazy. It’s still unmistakably in ROG Phone 5 with those slanted lines, and they just love In Ting texts all over the phone.
So Republic of Gamers logo, the number five for ROG phone 5, The quad rear camera text at the top is says “for those who Dare” for some reason they love that text but I do think of the SIM card tray in blue is a super nice touch and while the huge white phone still does stand out I do feel like the whole gamer phone aesthetic is maturing a little bit from just like rainbow puke now right in the middle, you might have caught from some images, that there is still a little bit of a glossy piece at back side of the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate. You might be wondering what that is.
ROG Phone 5 Back Screen Features
That is another screen on the back of this phone. So it’s called Rog Vision. So there’s this little inch and a half black and white screen that can display different kinds of information and the settings for it is Here are in Asus’s Armory crate App instead of in the settings app. But once you dive in here, you can turn the screen on and off and then choose what the screen lights up for, so you can see it lights up when the phone’s screen is on, it lights up when the phone is charging, even lights up when you receive a phone call.
And then for each of these scenarios, you can actually go in and customize the exact animations that play in each scenario. To the point where you can actually create new animations and import images that you want to use and make new animations for yourself.
It’s crazy. Now, this is how I got the TECHENTH text animation here playing on the back of my phone any time. My screen is on, its even orientation sensitive. I know it’s extra. There’s no other phone that does this and that’s probably for reasons.
But hey, if you’re going to go Niche you might as well go all the way down the customization rabbit hole and Asus has like really committed to something unique here. So okay, there’s no doubt. They have leveled up the Aesthetics.
Asus Rog Phone 5 Pro & Ultimate Edition Battery Review
It’s definitely still looks like a camera phone but Asus didn’t just stop at the Aesthetics. So that’s six thousand milliamp hour battery. I mentioned the one that wanted the smartphone award for battery last year.
Parallel Charging On Rog Phone 5
It’s upgraded that to a fast charging system inside thanks to two things this really beefy heavy 65 watt charging brick that comes In the box and the new dual battery system inside.
So it’s actually now a pair of 3000 milliamp hour batteries that charge in parallel. So this is the same concept that Oneplus was using smaller batteries in parallel charge faster than one huge one. So now it’s a massive best-in-class battery that also charges really fast roughly 0 to 75 percent in around half an hour, which is plenty now. That’s already great. That’s already I get a day and a half of completely Carefree.
Use out of this phone at a 144Hz, which is crazy and if you want to take it easy. Set it to auto mode those numbers start to get kind of ridiculous at 60 hertz. It’s easily two days. But the other thing to think about with a fast charging system like this is, you still want to think about battery health in long term and that’s also something Asus is thinking about so that built in a bunch of different battery charging adjustments to address that.
So there’s now steady charging which charges slower for better battery health. There is scheduled charging so you can reduce the time that the battery is full and not in use. So basically it’s slow charges overnight and then Finishes up to a hundred percent when it’s time to get up and you can set that to finish charging depending on when your scheduled alarm is.
That is dope and you can also manually set a charging upper limit to just straight-up limit your max charge to 80 or 90 percent.
Asus Rog Phone 5 Pro Charging Bypass Feature
And then on top of that there’s something called bypass mode which is such a gamer specific thing. But when you’re in this mode you plug in the phone, let’s say your gaming, it bypasses charging the battery and just puts the power straight into the system so that you’re not heating up the battery as Charging because you’re not charging and you’re not cycling the battery.
So it’s just going straight into the actual system who would have thought it’s great idea. So I’m clearly very impressed with the battery as you can probably tell but there’s more first of all they brought the headphone jack back.
Is this the first phone that I’ve seen that’s ditch the headphone jack with one year’s upgrade and then brought it back the next year. I think so They moved it from the phone and the Rog phone 3 to the fan accessory through USB last year now. It’s back in the Rog Phone 5 and not only is the headphone jack back, but there is a deck behind it.
Rog Phone 5 Audio Wizard
And there’s a whole Audio Wizard built into the software that lets you drag 10 different frequency response sliders and change the audio in a crazy way.
Like that’s just that’s approaching too much customization at this point. It’s awesome.
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Rog Phone 5 Specs Checks
They’ve also technically leveled up the performance and aspects of the phone here to so imagine all the highest end specs possible that can fit in the Rog Phone 5 Snapdragon 888 Chip (check), half a terabyte of the fastest you Statement one storage (check) 18gb RAM on this highest end version (check), 144 Hz maximum refresh rate on the display with a 300 Hertz touch sample rate (check).
Rog Phone 5 Technicality
This is about as consistently smooth of a phone as you’ll get to see like 18 gigs of ram in a phone. Is this some kind of joke like a clearly. I’m not the biggest gamer. I don’t really play games on my phone like that. So I’m playing games to test this and it’s obviously very responsive but the performance difference between This and something like Galaxy S21 something with maybe 12 gigs of RAM to be fair is pretty small.
So this is like I mentioned beginning the Rog phone 5 Ultimate Edition, which is the highest end in a new lineup of phones, which I’ll get to in a minute, but this has 18 gigs and in the rest of the lineup gets up to 16 gigs. So I feel like they added the extra two gigs around for this phone just for I mean, it’s gaming it’s bragging rights. Yes. It’s technically better.
I feel like they just want to be able to say they have the most Ram in any phone which they can say now, which is kind of sad because you can’t actually pin apps into RAM like you can on like Samsung and OnePlus phones would be nice to add on a phone like this right now.
Rog Phone 5 Camera Specs & Review
One thing you probably didn’t expect to be so good about a gaming phone is the cameras, because are usually pretty bad. So this is an area where I was actually pleasantly surprised by Rog phone five. It has some decent cameras. It’s a triple camera said back here as 64 megapixel primary.
13 megapixel Ultra wide and a 5-megapixel macro camera and I wasn’t expecting much. Like I said, but the more photos I took with this primary camera the more impressed I was.
This thing makes some nice detailed pretty confident and contrasty photos. It’s the style that reminds me of the pixel. It’s not quite pixel level, but it reminds me a lot of the Zenfone also by Asus which did win the blind smartphone camera test we did last year.
So this phone did a really good job. Maybe just a tiny bit aggressive with the HDR sometimes, and I’ve noticed it’s a little bit slow to focus on closer up objects that you can miss focus a bit but it’s better than I expected from a gaming phone.
The ultra-wide is definitely weaker and softer per usual and a macro it works. But the minimum Focus distance isn’t as close as I’d expected from a macro and the selfie camera is wildly inconsistent with exposure. So it’s fine. But, you know, even in the same room with back-to-back selfies, I could get like totally different shots. Look.
I know you’re probably not getting this Rog phone 5 just for the cameras, but it’s nice that it’s not super. Meaning so that’s I’ll give it like a B- and the grand world of smartphone cameras. It’s a b-, it’s not that the reason you would buy a phone like this is because of the power you get in the palm of your hands and the ridiculous level of customization possible.
You saw the audio customization behind the headphone jack you already saw the display on the back of this phone acting like a notification LED on steroids, even though this phone already has a notification LED, but then there’s also
These performance profiles here into a gaming mode or an everyday use mode or a battery saver mode and then all the custom settings that go with it and there’s even the custom buttons.
Did you even remember the custom buttons on the phone? It’s kind of a big deal. There’s a pair of the shoulder triggers called are triggers that are mappable and in addition. There’s a second set of back buttons and from my experience, They’re not a sensitive, but they do work by just kind of sliding your finger over them.
Honestly. I don’t even know what games I would play that are. Serious enough to take advantage of these but if you do that’s two more extra buttons on the back of this phone. So you don’t have to cover that precious screen really state with your fingers.
It’s crazy stuff. And on top of all of that. Like I said, it feels like like like a sports car that you can also drive on the daily and I say that because then you I feels pretty close to stock Android like they’ve built a lot of the features directly into the settings without turning it into some blinged-out over-the-top gamer Look, I mean it can be that when you wanted to
You but if you’re not, it’s a very usable daily phone now. I’ve said a lot of good things in the past. However, many minutes has it been so far. Now if you’re thinking, well, what’s the catch?
What are the bad parts of this phone? There’s got to be stuff. That’s not perfect. And there is definitely I would say a bunch of it adds up to feeling a little bit less premium than the highest end phones in this price bracket and maybe that’s because I’ve just used some of the other ones recently, but there’s some stuff to know what the vibration mode. Odor and the haptics aren’t great at all and in a gaming Zone.
Actually, I would expect this to be a pretty heavy Focus like having great haptics into gaming phone for immersion sake would feel really cool. This is maybe one notch better than the classic old vibration mode of the past.
It’s nowhere near the best, doesn’t feel very precise or tight at all. The fingerprint reader is slow. Like there’s no way around it. I guess if I’m sticking with my car analogy, that would be like taking a long time to turn on. I don’t know it just gets annoying.
After a while when it is slow to unlock a lot and then the display while it is super responsive. We know the hundred forty-four Hertz is great. It’s still slightly below a one quality. Like there’s a bit of The Tell-Tale rainbow angling your off-axis. And while the max brightness did improve it can still get washed out in harsh Sun.
There’s no wireless charging, call Quality is definitely not that great and the rubber plug on the side USB ports falls out really easily and they definitely know this, because they included two extra ones in the box, but I’m convinced I’m gonna lose them all and also fun fact we did manage to kill this phone to zero percent battery.
And when we did, it wouldn’t charge back up until we plugged it in the side USB port which asus tells us is the primary USB port. Asus also tells us that this will be fixed with an upcoming software update. So it’s not perfect. Like there’s there’s definitely stuff that’s quirky about it. But the thing is I think the easy complaint about a phone like this is that is it
Giant clunky form factor with like kind of thick bezel is why wouldn’t go closer to the edge and do a whole bunch but on a gaming phone. If the idea is to be here all the time and not interrupt your view with a hole punch then having a little extra on the side to hold it and having huge front-facing stereo speakers, because it trade-off that I think makes a lot of sense.
So overall this is a really fun ridiculous phone. So now that you’ve made it all the way to the end of this Asus Rog Phone 5 Review. I’m assuming you have like at least a Tiny little bit of interest in buying this right?
So this phone this Asus Rog Phone 5 Ultimate Edition highest-end spec is 1299 Euros. There’s a little bit of conversion map depending on where you are in the world, but that’s expensive.
Now this Rog Phone 5 Ultimate Edition includes the phone and also this incredibly extra and our unboxing experience is that the phone boots into the first time you set it up. It’s pretty cool and there’s a fan accessory and there’s some kind Is gamer Swag Like a hat there is like I mentioned though a lineup.
So this is the Rog Phone 5 ultimate Edition is the highest end version 1299 Euro. Then there’s a Rog phone 5 Pro for 1199 Euros. And there’s this guy which is just a standard ROG phone 5, which starts at 799 big difference.
It skips the screen on the back and it doesn’t have the to touch sensitive back buttons and it starts at 8Gb of RAM and 128 gigs of storage.
And so if you’re thinking about getting one, The base version I feel like is the most reasonable and then I think You upgrade for an extra hundred Euro that first upgrade is pretty nice.
Double the storage bump up your RAM, but then this spec right here, I think as a little crazy a hundred extra dollars for just four more gigs of RAM, which I don’t know if I feel like that’s not the move, but then the price only goes up from here as you upgrade further in the lineup, but hey, you know what? They say, you gotta pay to play.
But do they actually say that I don’t know. I’m just look I only play Among Us on my phone. I feel like at this point. There are people who are more squarely in the Target demographic who are thinking about shooter games first person, whatever other games you play that require multiple custom buttons.
This is a phone that’s going to be really fun for that. But let me know what you think. Are you the type to go all out on a crazy customized gaming phone like this with a screen on the back deal going on the comment section below also the wallpaper. I’ll link below as I always do.
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