The Rock Phone 2: A Gaming First Phone with Refinement and Flaws

As I began to explore the features of the Rock Phone 2, it was clear that this device is a game-changer in the world of smartphones. With its record-breaking 120Hz AMOLED display, one millisecond response time, and powerful hardware, this phone is designed specifically with gamers in mind. The display itself is a standout feature, offering crisp visuals, good brightness, and decent contrast, although it falls short compared to Samsung's best displays.

The bezels around the display are noticeable, but some people may actually prefer them for their grip on the phone or improved front-firing speakers. Speaking of which, this phone features dual front-firing speakers, providing some of the best audio quality you can get on a smartphone. The phone also boasts an impressive gaming portal that lets users launch favorite games and fine-tune LED behavior with ease. The setup screen is polished, with options to block certain areas of the screen from responding to touches and control CPU speeds. This software, known as Zen UI 6, is bloatware-free and offers a range of features, including an Ex Mode that boosts CPU frequency and blocks RAM-eating applications.

The phone's design has been refined, with landscape use in mind, featuring a second side-mounted USB-C port for charging while playing games. The capacitive air triggers are also noteworthy, supporting not only tap functionality but also slide actions. Furthermore, the haptics on this device provide an amazing tactile experience, which aids gaming and typing. These features make the Rock Phone 2 a compelling choice for those in the market for a new smartphone.

However, there are some potential drawbacks to consider. For one, the phone's display maxes out at 1080p, although it's still crisp and better than a quad-HD panel when it comes to battery life and frame rates. Additionally, the camera setup is solid but not exceptional, with comparable performance to mid-range cameras. The HDR+ Enhanced Mode improves dynamic range, but still falls short of top-tier smartphone cameras.

The Rock Phone 2's battery life is another aspect worth mentioning. With a 6000 milliamp hour capacity, it has plenty of juice for daily use and gaming sessions. Overall, the phone's hardware is a major selling point, especially with its powerful performance and fluid display.

A Closer Look at the Camera

One feature that sets the Rock Phone 2 apart from other smartphones is its camera setup. While it won't win any awards for the best camera in the world, it's certainly capable of producing high-quality images. The main wide-angle lens, ultra-wide angle lens, and software-based time zoom all contribute to a solid mid-range camera experience.

The phone even features a decent night mode, which can shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second and slow motion footage. This is particularly impressive considering the phone's size and intended use case as a gaming device. In contrast to other flagship smartphones, the Rock Phone 2 prioritizes performance over high-end camera capabilities.

A Glimpse into X Mode

One of the most interesting features of the Rock Phone 2 is its X Mode. This feature allows users to configure a single squeeze to perform one action and long squeezes to open up different modes. The phone also responds to being squeezed, allowing users to customize their experience.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of X Mode, it's essentially a way for the phone to recognize and respond to user input in a more intuitive manner. This can be particularly useful for gamers or anyone who wants to streamline their workflow. With its versatility and customizability, X Mode sets the Rock Phone 2 apart from other smartphones.

A Personal Experience with the Rock Phone 2

In my time with the Rock Phone 2, I found myself drawn to its power and fluidity. The display is truly remarkable, offering an experience that's hard to put into words. While it may not be perfect – such as in terms of brightness or contrast – it's still one of the best displays you can find on a smartphone.

The phone's camera setup also impressed me, particularly in its ability to capture high-quality images without breaking a sweat. The battery life is ample for daily use and gaming sessions, making this an excellent choice for those who want a reliable device.

However, there was one area where I couldn't quite justify the Rock Phone 2 as my main daily device: photography. While it's certainly capable, the phone's camera capabilities just didn't compete with other smartphones on the market.

Overall, though, I can see why the Rock Phone 2 is an attractive option for those in the market for a new smartphone. Its powerful hardware, fluid display, and innovative features make it a compelling choice for gamers and anyone looking for a high-performance device.

The Verdict

In conclusion, the Rock Phone 2 is a remarkable smartphone that excels in several areas, particularly gaming performance. With its 120Hz AMOLED display, powerful hardware, and innovative features like X Mode, this phone is designed to provide an exceptional user experience.

While it may have some minor flaws – such as its camera capabilities or bezel design – these don't detract from the overall package. The Rock Phone 2 is a solid choice for those who prioritize performance, fluidity, and gaming capabilities above all else.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to a small film that is about to smash a whole load of records this is the successor to the ASIS rock phone which when it came out last year was labeled as ridiculous and crazy and yet they have just completely topped it all right sue it actually took me a good minute to figure out which way this thing opens up and once we're inside it is equally elaborate you get the company's second gen arrow active cooler which calls not just the phone but also your fingers while playing and get this it gives you a second headphone jack there's a pretty different looking plastic case here and also a 30 watt adapter with the USB c2 USBC cable what is nice is they've also given replacement covers for your USB C port as well as a little add-on that turns your cooler into a phone at stand as well okay so the phone itself has five pillars five key areas and which is really doing something completely new but just before we get to that you might be thinking that phone looks chunky it seems like pretty much the entire strategy of this device could be embodied with the word extreme and that also applies to the dimensions we're talking nine point seven eight millimeters thick with a mass of 240 grams I don't think I've ever tested a phone that's heavier aside from those crazy devices with 10,000 milliamp hour batteries inside I would say this the weight itself is not a complete deal-breaker for me and I did find that the phone is still grip of all thanks to a curved side trim but also that the center of gravity here is just a little high up so you've always just got to make sure you hold it properly the design is just as nuts as last year it pretty much looks like the company started with the original rock phone and thought how can we make this more so this phone is not just much larger but adds a second LED a better ultra wide camera and the rear finger in scan has now been replaced for an in display one on the front is what I think about it the rock phone to looks spectacular when light hits the back it forms streaks that run down the device and creates a rainbow effect when it hits any of these accents but it does lose a lot of their magic when you're not in favorable lighting and the finish does absolutely nothing to mask fingerprints massive shout out to the case though the finish contrasts well with the smooth glass and although it does look a little bit like your phone is wearing a helmet it does manage to reduce the fingerprint problem without obstructing the view of the design now you might have guessed the first pillar here is performance this is pretty much the fastest phone in the world we've got the brand new Snapdragon 855 plus chip which compared to the already powerful 855 adds a pretty negligible 4% CPU overclock but more importantly a large 15 percent GPU overclock it then pairs that with 12 gigs of ram and 500 gigs of superfast UF s3 storage I said it before and I'll say it again if a company is going to pitch a phone as a high-end gaming device and they're gonna charge a premium for it then the top priority needs to be that actually performs better for gaming and so thankfully that is not an issue here I won't show any benchmark scores yet as this thing's on beta software but you can probably imagine what they'd be has also got an upgraded heat dissipation system which you kind of need when you're using an overclocked chip like this okay so the second pillar is battery and this actually goes quite a way towards explaining how this thing ended up being of this much of a unit the rock phone 2-packs a 6000 milliamp hour battery which is completely unheard of and if you're conservative with it we're talking the kind of battery that can get you into your third day of usage but also bear in mind that this phone in particular has the ability to drain battery quickly you've got a 120 Hertz display an overclocked chip and potentially this extra caller as well all of which need to be powered you also get pretty fast 25 watt charging it's actually a 30 watt charger in the box but five of those wallets are reserved for charging the phone's peripherals which are coming soon so do subscribe if you want to see some of that action there's one thing I've got to say I agree with Asus on when it comes to this phone and that is prioritizing a higher capacity battery as opposed to one with a higher charging wattage you might know that when you charge your phone at the rate of charging Falls as the battery starts to get full and so if you have a higher capacity battery let's say the six thousand milliamp hour one in this phone then even though it might take longer to fully charge the phone you can still get to four thousand milliamp hours faster than an equivalent device that had a four thousand milliamp hour battery because that would slow down towards the end the third pillar is display it is very good but I should start by mentioning to these caveats it still got some noticeable bezel around it and it maxes out at 1080p but these things are kind of subjective some people actually like larger bezels it gives you something to grip on and can result in better front firing speakers which by the way is definitely something you can see happening here you've actually got a dual front firing speakers system and this is some of the best audio you can get on a smartphone no doubt and then as for it being a 1080p panel I'm all for it it's still crisp and compared to a quad HD panel it's still going to preserve battery when gaming and keep frame rates higher but if you are intent on finding the sharpest display out there then this isn't going to be it with that out the way though Wow you're looking at world's first 120 Hertz AMOLED HD our smart phone display it's got a record-breaking one millisecond response time and while that's pretty hard to test in practice I can say that this is easily one of the most fluid tactile and instantaneous experiences albear it's not quite as bright and contrast not as high as Samsung's best but color accuracy is bang-on number four is software straight out of the box you can feel the refinement in fact this might just be the only time ever where I felt the need to show you guys the phone's setup screen you get this super polished gaming portal that lets you see your phone status at a glance you can launch your favorite games and fine-tune LED behavior it's all really impressive stuff it even lets you block certain areas of your screen from responding to touches and gives you fine control of your CPU speeds the rock phone - also sees the return of something called ex mode which as a fun little touch makes your wallpaper and logo start to glow but is really about upping the frequency of your CPU and blocking ram eating applications okay so this software is Zen UI 6 and it is pretty bloatware free and while I'm still not a fan of the general gamer aesthetic Asus is also going to be giving you the option to use that cleaner skin that we saw on the zenfone 6 ok number 5 it's not a secret that the rock phone 2 is a gaming first phone and so it's nice to see some actually useful gaming features the phone has clearly been designed with landscape use in mind with this second side mounted USB C port for charging while playing and these completely you capacitive air triggers that now support not just the tap functionality but also the ability to slide and perform a completely different action oh yeah and the phone also responds to just being squeezed so you could configure a single squeeze to do one thing and then a long squeeze to open up X mode and to add to all of this the haptics on the phone are amazing which of course aids in gaming too AB tactility but also just generally in typing you get a really satisfying physical response to touches so those are my five pillars the five potential reasons why I think people might consider this phone but there's a couple more things I need to mention you've got those cameras and whilst I wouldn't class them as a selling point exactly this is a solid mid-range setup you pretty much getting the same cameras as you did on the super well received a zenfone 6 although just without that rotating module there's a main wide-angle there's an ultra wide and there's also a software based to time zoom which works well enough in broad daylight the hdr+ enhanced mode is an improvement but dynamic range still doesn't match up to the best phone cameras out there the shots are comparable in most conditions but you'll be able to tell the difference when you try something more demanding the phone even has a decent night mode it can shoot 4k video at 60 frames per second and it does slow motion this is a capable camera setup especially for a gaming phone so there you have it and let me tell you I came this close to switching from the galaxy s 10 5g to the rock phone 2 as my main daily device I love the idea of a six thousand milliamp hour battery of having the most powerful and fluid phone out there but for me a big part of it is cameras the rock phone 2 is an insane and gaming smartphone with pretty good cameras and so because photography is such a priority for me I couldn't quite justify it but the fact that it was such a close call is a testament to how compelling this firmly is if you enjoyed this video I'm gonna drop a link to a whole bunch of interesting smartphone and box things like this one and with that being said my name is Aaron this is mr. user boss and I'll catch you in the next one youwelcome to a small film that is about to smash a whole load of records this is the successor to the ASIS rock phone which when it came out last year was labeled as ridiculous and crazy and yet they have just completely topped it all right sue it actually took me a good minute to figure out which way this thing opens up and once we're inside it is equally elaborate you get the company's second gen arrow active cooler which calls not just the phone but also your fingers while playing and get this it gives you a second headphone jack there's a pretty different looking plastic case here and also a 30 watt adapter with the USB c2 USBC cable what is nice is they've also given replacement covers for your USB C port as well as a little add-on that turns your cooler into a phone at stand as well okay so the phone itself has five pillars five key areas and which is really doing something completely new but just before we get to that you might be thinking that phone looks chunky it seems like pretty much the entire strategy of this device could be embodied with the word extreme and that also applies to the dimensions we're talking nine point seven eight millimeters thick with a mass of 240 grams I don't think I've ever tested a phone that's heavier aside from those crazy devices with 10,000 milliamp hour batteries inside I would say this the weight itself is not a complete deal-breaker for me and I did find that the phone is still grip of all thanks to a curved side trim but also that the center of gravity here is just a little high up so you've always just got to make sure you hold it properly the design is just as nuts as last year it pretty much looks like the company started with the original rock phone and thought how can we make this more so this phone is not just much larger but adds a second LED a better ultra wide camera and the rear finger in scan has now been replaced for an in display one on the front is what I think about it the rock phone to looks spectacular when light hits the back it forms streaks that run down the device and creates a rainbow effect when it hits any of these accents but it does lose a lot of their magic when you're not in favorable lighting and the finish does absolutely nothing to mask fingerprints massive shout out to the case though the finish contrasts well with the smooth glass and although it does look a little bit like your phone is wearing a helmet it does manage to reduce the fingerprint problem without obstructing the view of the design now you might have guessed the first pillar here is performance this is pretty much the fastest phone in the world we've got the brand new Snapdragon 855 plus chip which compared to the already powerful 855 adds a pretty negligible 4% CPU overclock but more importantly a large 15 percent GPU overclock it then pairs that with 12 gigs of ram and 500 gigs of superfast UF s3 storage I said it before and I'll say it again if a company is going to pitch a phone as a high-end gaming device and they're gonna charge a premium for it then the top priority needs to be that actually performs better for gaming and so thankfully that is not an issue here I won't show any benchmark scores yet as this thing's on beta software but you can probably imagine what they'd be has also got an upgraded heat dissipation system which you kind of need when you're using an overclocked chip like this okay so the second pillar is battery and this actually goes quite a way towards explaining how this thing ended up being of this much of a unit the rock phone 2-packs a 6000 milliamp hour battery which is completely unheard of and if you're conservative with it we're talking the kind of battery that can get you into your third day of usage but also bear in mind that this phone in particular has the ability to drain battery quickly you've got a 120 Hertz display an overclocked chip and potentially this extra caller as well all of which need to be powered you also get pretty fast 25 watt charging it's actually a 30 watt charger in the box but five of those wallets are reserved for charging the phone's peripherals which are coming soon so do subscribe if you want to see some of that action there's one thing I've got to say I agree with Asus on when it comes to this phone and that is prioritizing a higher capacity battery as opposed to one with a higher charging wattage you might know that when you charge your phone at the rate of charging Falls as the battery starts to get full and so if you have a higher capacity battery let's say the six thousand milliamp hour one in this phone then even though it might take longer to fully charge the phone you can still get to four thousand milliamp hours faster than an equivalent device that had a four thousand milliamp hour battery because that would slow down towards the end the third pillar is display it is very good but I should start by mentioning to these caveats it still got some noticeable bezel around it and it maxes out at 1080p but these things are kind of subjective some people actually like larger bezels it gives you something to grip on and can result in better front firing speakers which by the way is definitely something you can see happening here you've actually got a dual front firing speakers system and this is some of the best audio you can get on a smartphone no doubt and then as for it being a 1080p panel I'm all for it it's still crisp and compared to a quad HD panel it's still going to preserve battery when gaming and keep frame rates higher but if you are intent on finding the sharpest display out there then this isn't going to be it with that out the way though Wow you're looking at world's first 120 Hertz AMOLED HD our smart phone display it's got a record-breaking one millisecond response time and while that's pretty hard to test in practice I can say that this is easily one of the most fluid tactile and instantaneous experiences albear it's not quite as bright and contrast not as high as Samsung's best but color accuracy is bang-on number four is software straight out of the box you can feel the refinement in fact this might just be the only time ever where I felt the need to show you guys the phone's setup screen you get this super polished gaming portal that lets you see your phone status at a glance you can launch your favorite games and fine-tune LED behavior it's all really impressive stuff it even lets you block certain areas of your screen from responding to touches and gives you fine control of your CPU speeds the rock phone - also sees the return of something called ex mode which as a fun little touch makes your wallpaper and logo start to glow but is really about upping the frequency of your CPU and blocking ram eating applications okay so this software is Zen UI 6 and it is pretty bloatware free and while I'm still not a fan of the general gamer aesthetic Asus is also going to be giving you the option to use that cleaner skin that we saw on the zenfone 6 ok number 5 it's not a secret that the rock phone 2 is a gaming first phone and so it's nice to see some actually useful gaming features the phone has clearly been designed with landscape use in mind with this second side mounted USB C port for charging while playing and these completely you capacitive air triggers that now support not just the tap functionality but also the ability to slide and perform a completely different action oh yeah and the phone also responds to just being squeezed so you could configure a single squeeze to do one thing and then a long squeeze to open up X mode and to add to all of this the haptics on the phone are amazing which of course aids in gaming too AB tactility but also just generally in typing you get a really satisfying physical response to touches so those are my five pillars the five potential reasons why I think people might consider this phone but there's a couple more things I need to mention you've got those cameras and whilst I wouldn't class them as a selling point exactly this is a solid mid-range setup you pretty much getting the same cameras as you did on the super well received a zenfone 6 although just without that rotating module there's a main wide-angle there's an ultra wide and there's also a software based to time zoom which works well enough in broad daylight the hdr+ enhanced mode is an improvement but dynamic range still doesn't match up to the best phone cameras out there the shots are comparable in most conditions but you'll be able to tell the difference when you try something more demanding the phone even has a decent night mode it can shoot 4k video at 60 frames per second and it does slow motion this is a capable camera setup especially for a gaming phone so there you have it and let me tell you I came this close to switching from the galaxy s 10 5g to the rock phone 2 as my main daily device I love the idea of a six thousand milliamp hour battery of having the most powerful and fluid phone out there but for me a big part of it is cameras the rock phone 2 is an insane and gaming smartphone with pretty good cameras and so because photography is such a priority for me I couldn't quite justify it but the fact that it was such a close call is a testament to how compelling this firmly is if you enjoyed this video I'm gonna drop a link to a whole bunch of interesting smartphone and box things like this one and with that being said my name is Aaron this is mr. user boss and I'll catch you in the next one you\n"