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The Asus ROG 3 phone. This phone is for elite gamers only, so expect a lot of nerve laser beams in these photos. Asus even brought a fog machine.
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The front of the ROG 3 phone. Occasionally, it will open the pod bay doors for you.
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Some of these source images are quite tall, so here’s a close-up of the top bezel.
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The back, which is not a joke, has RGB LEDs. You can choose a color for the ROG logo and some highlights.
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There is a side USB port for a range of accessories. If your USB cable shoots lightning like this, you probably need to replace it.
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The side.
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The other side.
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Asus’ Android look is about what you’d expect: laser beams and chrome highlights.
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An explosive photo! I love these.
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Let’s talk about extras. Here a man with what looks like a sunburn terminal box uses the dual-screen accessory.
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Here is a controller clip.
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Clip-on controller pads.
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Everyone salutes the Asus ROG Phone 3, the new spec sheet champion. Asus announced its new gaming phone today, and this thing has bigger numbers than anything else on the market or really anything scheduled for the rest of the year.
The ROG Phone 3 is one of the first devices with the new Snapdragon 865 Plus, Qualcomm’s new chip that offers a modest frequency boost over the standard Snapdragon 865 found in most 2020 flagships. Plus “gets clocks 10 percent higher than the standard, which means a CPU up to 3.1 GHz and a GPU running at 660MHz. Qualcomm’s new chip will continue to be smoked by Apple’s A13 Bionic SoC, but this is at least the fastest Android phone on the block, now.
The 6.59-inch 2340 × 1080 display runs at 144Hz, making it one of the fastest displays ever installed on a smartphone (although the first 144Hz display was the Nubia Red Magic 5G). The benchmark RAM and storage are 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, with options for 12 and 16GB of RAM, both with 512GB of storage. There is also a strong 6000 mAh battery. Samsung was previously the maker of Android “more is more,” but Asus is outperforming Samsung with the ROG phone. This is a faster SoC, a faster screen, and a bigger battery than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, and it even exceeds the rumored specs for the upcoming Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.
Asus Marketing focuses on the spec details of the display and lists the display multiple times as “144Hz / 1ms AMOLED”. A millisecond sounds great to those who remember the improvements in the response time of the LCD, but honest 1ms is quite normal for an OLED panel. Response times were a concern with LCDs, where liquid crystals had to be rotated and unscrewed to control light from a single large light source behind the panel. This process took a few milliseconds, and if it were too slow, it would cause a “ghost effect” or a blurred image. OLED panels are much simpler designs in which applying a voltage to a material produces light, and since nothing has to move and each pixel is its own light source, panel response times are no longer really a concern.
Touch latency
A rare but significant display specification is “an industry-leading 25 millisecond touch latency” promoted by the press release thanks to 270Hz touch sampling. Touch latency is how quickly the screen responds and keeps up with finger movements. (The best touch latency intensive course you can get is this three-minute video from Microsoft Research.) I don’t know if “industry leader” is the right term when Apple Pencil on an iPad is famous for 9ms, but for an Android phone, 25ms is pretty good.
The phone has a 64-megapixel main camera on the back, along with a 13-megapixel wide-angle and 5-megapixel macro camera. There’s also a 24MP front-facing camera, NFC, stereo speakers, an on-screen fingerprint reader, Android 10, and a rare headphone jack. Like the previous ROG phone, there are two USB-C ports, with the extra living aside for various gaming accessories like a fan and controller. There are also side shoulder touch buttons, which are great for games that support them.
One disappointment is that the phone does not support the new “Wi-Fi 6E” standard. 6E adds a 6GHz band to existing 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands, which will greatly increase the amount of simultaneous traffic that Wi-Fi can handle. For crowded areas like apartment buildings, it is possible to fully saturate the 2.4 and 5GHz spectrum, resulting in reduced performance. If you have a 6 GHz access point and 6 GHz devices, you will have access to a large amount of additional spectrum.
The Snapdragon 865 Plus is the first Qualcomm chip to support Wi-Fi 6E, and the ROG Phone 3 has the 865 Plus, but apparently Asus didn’t do the job to enable Wi-Fi 6E on the ROG 3. Bummer. The phone also does not support wireless charging and is not waterproof.
What is the point?
The phone will ship to the US in September, but for now, we’ll settle for prices in Europe. The 8GB / 256GB version costs € 799 ($ 925), the 12GB / 512GB version is € 999 ($ 1,156), and the 16GB 512GB version is € 1,099 ($ 1,272).
With any of these “gamer phones,” we have to ask ourselves: do people like gamer phones? Anyone in the “ROG” demographic of a normal PC gamer probably doesn’t care much about mobile gaming, and if they really do, an iPhone is a much better gaming phone, thanks to the larger game library already standardization of hardware similar to the console. To further confuse the “gamer phone” idea, the phone comes with a three-month trial of Google Stadia. Since this is a cloud-based gaming platform, it doesn’t require high-end hardware like this and it won’t work at 144Hz.
Asus listing image
