The ASUS ROG Phone 5 Review: A Gaming Powerhouse with Unprecedented Control and Customization Options

As we put the ASUS ROG Phone 5 through its paces, one thing became clear: this is a phone designed for gamers. With an average battery life of 28 hours in four minutes, it beats out even other high-end gaming phones like the LG V60. But what really sets the ROG Phone 5 apart is its ability to control the battery in so many different ways. Users can set limits on how much charging they allow, choose slow charging speeds, and even schedule when their phone will charge. This level of customization is unparalleled in any other phone we've tested.

One of the coolest features of the ROG Phone 5 is its ability to use power from a cable while gaming, without affecting the phone's temperature or performance. This is a huge advantage for gamers who want to play for long periods without worrying about overheating their phone. The Sony Xperia 5 Mark II also offers this feature, but it's not something we've seen in many other phones.

The ROG Phone 5 also features advanced controls and interaction options that will appeal to serious gamers. Among these are Air Triggers, sensors located on the sides of the phone that allow for more precise control over games. These sensors span the entire edge of the phone, making it easier to find and hit buttons. The Pro and Ultimate versions of the phone also come with an additional sensor on the back side for input, giving gamers even more options for customizing their controls.

While the ROG Phone 5 is undoubtedly a gaming powerhouse, it's not without its drawbacks. For one thing, it weighs over 240 grams, making it the heaviest phone we've ever tested. This can be a problem, especially when combined with cases or other accessories that add to its weight. The phone also has some issues with camera quality, particularly in low-light situations. The main camera takes decent photos in bright light, but struggles when the scene gets dark.

The ROG Phone 5 is capable of taking stunning 8K video at 30 frames per second, but like other cameras in this class, it suffers from poor image quality in low light. Auto-focus also becomes sluggish and unreliable, making it difficult to get sharp shots. The phone's lack of water and dust resistance is another drawback, especially considering its premium price tag.

One final issue with the ROG Phone 5 is its price. The base model starts at €799, while the Pro and Ultimate versions will set you back €999 and €1,199, respectively. When converted to US dollars, these prices are equivalent to around $950 for the base model and $1,540 for the Pro version. While this may not be an egregious price point compared to other gaming phones on the market, it's still more than some users might want to pay for a phone that has some significant limitations.

Overall, the ASUS ROG Phone 5 is an excellent value for serious gamers who are willing to invest in a premium device with unparalleled control and customization options. But for others, its high price tag and lack of water resistance may be a deterrent.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfrom the front there's not much to see with this phone but from the back with its light up logo well this doesn't look like an ordinary phone and it's not it's the asus rog phone 5. rog stands for republic of gamers and this is the fourth generation of the asus gaming phone line and i gotta say they really knocked this one out of the park overall this isn't a major redo of its design but rather another round of tweaks making this phone yet another step closer to an ideal every improvement from the screen to the speakers is done with one goal in mind to make this the ultimate gaming phone to give you the absolute control over the most minute detail from the battery to its performance perhaps the biggest change this year is there's not just one there are three the first one is the regular rog phone five it comes in black with a graphic dot matrix pattern and hot pink 80's punk rock highlights seriously you just need to throw on some blondie or talking heads to complete the effect then there's the rmg phone 5 pro not pictured here because i didn't get sent one it comes with a detachable fan in the box aka the aero active cooler 5 but instead of the light up logo on the back of the phone there's a color display for showing off graphics and finally there's the rog phone 5 ultimate it has a matte white back black hair lines and neon blue accents all of which stole my heart as soon as i laid eyes on it it has a back display just like the pro but it's black and white and with these displays you can show off graphics and text for things like charging or battery incoming calls gaming and more in fact you can make your own custom graphics from text or photos to show on that back display i should note um here that during the filming of this review that the ultimate slid off a stand and then onto the desk and then onto the ground and gave it this wonderful spiderweb crack pattern that you see it was so beautiful and now it's ruined like the pro version the ultimate also comes with an aeroactive cooler five in the box but what really makes this phone ultimate is what's on the inside and that is 18 gigabytes of ram look my new work laptop only has 16. okay so what do you do if you have a gaming phone you game i play driving games off-roading games group games problem-solving games zombie games vertical games role-playing games gum slinger games foxy games and whatever game this is sometimes i played games with the fan attached other times i played games using the nifty gamepad accessory that you could buy and other times i played games oh natural now sometimes i played games indoors and other times i played outside and here are some takeaways the screen is amazing you can set its refresh rate up to as high as 144 hertz but i found the auto refresh rate worked best as it didn't kill the battery as quickly also i realized at the time i'm recording this video that in china the red magic 6 just launched with a 165 hertz screen the battery oh the battery is absolutely incredible it has a six thousand milliamp hour capacity and is actually made up of two 3000 milliamp hour batteries this design means you can fast charge it or what asus calls hyper charge it with a 65 watt charger after a day of normal use i had about 40 of the battery left i was even able to make it to the end of two days barely i had to plug it in around dinner time but really the battery life depends on how heavily you use it especially for gaming battery tests for the rpg phone 5 for continuous video playback on airplane mode clocked in an average of 20 hours and 15 minutes and that's with the screen locked at 120 hertz with the screen refresh rate set to auto it averaged a time of 28 hours in four minutes that's the longest time of any phone we've tested this year and that's the second longest time for any phone in the past few years just after the lg v60 but what's brilliant about the rog phone is you can control the battery so many different ways you can set limits for how much it charges you can choose slow charging speeds you can even schedule when it charges one of the coolest features is that while you're gaming you can have the phone plugged into power and it will use power from the cable instead of charging the battery and that means the phone won't get as hot which won't affect the gaming performance this is something we saw on last year's sony xperia 5 mark ii speaking of control there are so many different ways to control and interact with the games you play among these is a thing called air triggers which are these sensors located on the sides of the phone now this is nothing new but what's new this year is the sensors span from edge to edge of the phone so it makes it so much easier to find those buttons and i find myself missing less when i hit them and if you're using the not pictured here pro version or the ultimate version of the phone there's an extra sensor located on the back side for input add the aeroactive cooler 5 aka the fan and you get 2 more inputs for games that said a lot of mobile games have a very simplistic control scheme but i imagine having so many different options to map game controls will really appeal to people who are big until esports for example but it isn't all fun and games there are some drawbacks the rg phone 5 weighs more than the iphone 12 pro max samsung galaxy s21 ultra and last year's rog phone 3. all of those phones are heavy but the rmg phone 5 is the heaviest phone i have ever tested and after a long bout of gaming you really start to feel that weight and even more so if you have a case on it or a fan or a gamepad accessory i know this is a gaming phone but i do wish the cameras were better you get three of them on the back a main 64 megapixel camera they use a pixel binning to improve image brightness and reduce noise there's also a 13 megapixel ultra wide camera and a 5 megapixel macro camera the main camera takes some decent photos in bright light but when you get into dimmer situations like indoors the image quality really suffers if it's dark the phone has to go into its night mode just to take a picture which works okay i really wish asus would just remove the macro camera and use the money they save from that to improve the ultra wide camera also with so much processor power ram power and gpu power i just wish the rog phone could take advantage of that to make better photos the rg is capable of shooting 8k video at 30 frames per second and the story here is the same as photos in good light you can get some decent video but as soon as the light gets darker video image quality suffers and auto focus hunts like crazy and there's not a night mode like there is for photos to help the video out instead you end up with something that looks like a bad photoshop filter was applied to your video another downside is there isn't any water or dust resistance and for the price of this phone i think there should be and that brings me to my last gripe price well it might be my last gripe to be honest i don't know and the reason is i don't know what the us pricing is for these phones the rvg phone 5 starts out at 799 euros and you can get different amounts of ram and storage going up to 999 euros then if you want to jump up to that rog phone 5 pro the one that we don't have that's gonna cost you 1199 euros and then there's this bad boy with the 18 gigabytes of ram this is gonna be 1299 euros when you convert all this to us dollars it means that the rog phone 5 could cost 950 for the baseline model and this phone would cost 1540. but those probably aren't the actual us prices and that's where it's hard to put a value on these phones yeah if the baseline rog phone was 700 or even 800 it would be an excellent value but i don't know if it is and if the ultimate was 1200 i could say without hesitation that that is an excellent value but who knows and that's all i got and now i want to hear from you guys what do you think of the new rog 5 series are you considering getting one if so which one would you get throw your thoughts in the commentsfrom the front there's not much to see with this phone but from the back with its light up logo well this doesn't look like an ordinary phone and it's not it's the asus rog phone 5. rog stands for republic of gamers and this is the fourth generation of the asus gaming phone line and i gotta say they really knocked this one out of the park overall this isn't a major redo of its design but rather another round of tweaks making this phone yet another step closer to an ideal every improvement from the screen to the speakers is done with one goal in mind to make this the ultimate gaming phone to give you the absolute control over the most minute detail from the battery to its performance perhaps the biggest change this year is there's not just one there are three the first one is the regular rog phone five it comes in black with a graphic dot matrix pattern and hot pink 80's punk rock highlights seriously you just need to throw on some blondie or talking heads to complete the effect then there's the rmg phone 5 pro not pictured here because i didn't get sent one it comes with a detachable fan in the box aka the aero active cooler 5 but instead of the light up logo on the back of the phone there's a color display for showing off graphics and finally there's the rog phone 5 ultimate it has a matte white back black hair lines and neon blue accents all of which stole my heart as soon as i laid eyes on it it has a back display just like the pro but it's black and white and with these displays you can show off graphics and text for things like charging or battery incoming calls gaming and more in fact you can make your own custom graphics from text or photos to show on that back display i should note um here that during the filming of this review that the ultimate slid off a stand and then onto the desk and then onto the ground and gave it this wonderful spiderweb crack pattern that you see it was so beautiful and now it's ruined like the pro version the ultimate also comes with an aeroactive cooler five in the box but what really makes this phone ultimate is what's on the inside and that is 18 gigabytes of ram look my new work laptop only has 16. okay so what do you do if you have a gaming phone you game i play driving games off-roading games group games problem-solving games zombie games vertical games role-playing games gum slinger games foxy games and whatever game this is sometimes i played games with the fan attached other times i played games using the nifty gamepad accessory that you could buy and other times i played games oh natural now sometimes i played games indoors and other times i played outside and here are some takeaways the screen is amazing you can set its refresh rate up to as high as 144 hertz but i found the auto refresh rate worked best as it didn't kill the battery as quickly also i realized at the time i'm recording this video that in china the red magic 6 just launched with a 165 hertz screen the battery oh the battery is absolutely incredible it has a six thousand milliamp hour capacity and is actually made up of two 3000 milliamp hour batteries this design means you can fast charge it or what asus calls hyper charge it with a 65 watt charger after a day of normal use i had about 40 of the battery left i was even able to make it to the end of two days barely i had to plug it in around dinner time but really the battery life depends on how heavily you use it especially for gaming battery tests for the rpg phone 5 for continuous video playback on airplane mode clocked in an average of 20 hours and 15 minutes and that's with the screen locked at 120 hertz with the screen refresh rate set to auto it averaged a time of 28 hours in four minutes that's the longest time of any phone we've tested this year and that's the second longest time for any phone in the past few years just after the lg v60 but what's brilliant about the rog phone is you can control the battery so many different ways you can set limits for how much it charges you can choose slow charging speeds you can even schedule when it charges one of the coolest features is that while you're gaming you can have the phone plugged into power and it will use power from the cable instead of charging the battery and that means the phone won't get as hot which won't affect the gaming performance this is something we saw on last year's sony xperia 5 mark ii speaking of control there are so many different ways to control and interact with the games you play among these is a thing called air triggers which are these sensors located on the sides of the phone now this is nothing new but what's new this year is the sensors span from edge to edge of the phone so it makes it so much easier to find those buttons and i find myself missing less when i hit them and if you're using the not pictured here pro version or the ultimate version of the phone there's an extra sensor located on the back side for input add the aeroactive cooler 5 aka the fan and you get 2 more inputs for games that said a lot of mobile games have a very simplistic control scheme but i imagine having so many different options to map game controls will really appeal to people who are big until esports for example but it isn't all fun and games there are some drawbacks the rg phone 5 weighs more than the iphone 12 pro max samsung galaxy s21 ultra and last year's rog phone 3. all of those phones are heavy but the rmg phone 5 is the heaviest phone i have ever tested and after a long bout of gaming you really start to feel that weight and even more so if you have a case on it or a fan or a gamepad accessory i know this is a gaming phone but i do wish the cameras were better you get three of them on the back a main 64 megapixel camera they use a pixel binning to improve image brightness and reduce noise there's also a 13 megapixel ultra wide camera and a 5 megapixel macro camera the main camera takes some decent photos in bright light but when you get into dimmer situations like indoors the image quality really suffers if it's dark the phone has to go into its night mode just to take a picture which works okay i really wish asus would just remove the macro camera and use the money they save from that to improve the ultra wide camera also with so much processor power ram power and gpu power i just wish the rog phone could take advantage of that to make better photos the rg is capable of shooting 8k video at 30 frames per second and the story here is the same as photos in good light you can get some decent video but as soon as the light gets darker video image quality suffers and auto focus hunts like crazy and there's not a night mode like there is for photos to help the video out instead you end up with something that looks like a bad photoshop filter was applied to your video another downside is there isn't any water or dust resistance and for the price of this phone i think there should be and that brings me to my last gripe price well it might be my last gripe to be honest i don't know and the reason is i don't know what the us pricing is for these phones the rvg phone 5 starts out at 799 euros and you can get different amounts of ram and storage going up to 999 euros then if you want to jump up to that rog phone 5 pro the one that we don't have that's gonna cost you 1199 euros and then there's this bad boy with the 18 gigabytes of ram this is gonna be 1299 euros when you convert all this to us dollars it means that the rog phone 5 could cost 950 for the baseline model and this phone would cost 1540. but those probably aren't the actual us prices and that's where it's hard to put a value on these phones yeah if the baseline rog phone was 700 or even 800 it would be an excellent value but i don't know if it is and if the ultimate was 1200 i could say without hesitation that that is an excellent value but who knows and that's all i got and now i want to hear from you guys what do you think of the new rog 5 series are you considering getting one if so which one would you get throw your thoughts in the comments\n"