There's something a little funny about someone who hasn't upgraded their phone in two years. Unboxing this. This is the ROG phone and it is just about the most excessive mobile device that I have ever encountered. It's equipped with a Snapdragon 865 Plus processor, anywhere from 12 to 16gigabytes of memory, 512 gigs of storage, a 144 hertz OLED display that actually touch samples at 270 hertz making for supposedly a nearly instantaneous feel to your touch inputs. It comes with, where's the phone? Power brick, apparently charges really fast. It's got a 6,000 milliamp-hour battery, comes with a type C, the headphone jack adapter.
Yeah, they took out the the headphone jack, it's got some. Well, that's really nice. It's got some extra rubber stoppers included for the port. Oh, the phone was in the outer shell. There it is ladies and gentlemen. Now, one of the design goals for ASUS, with the ROG Phone 3 was apparently to keep the form factor the same as the ROG Phone 2 in order to improve compatibility with their previous generation accessories. So you can expect to use the same like game pad adapter and like their grip and even there twin-view dock which we did a video about last year on the Linus Tech Tips channel. Although it should be noted that if you use your last generation dock you're gonna be limited to 120 hertz instead of 144 hertz which is what the new ROG Phones 3 runs at. In terms of the design, I'd actually say they did a pretty good job of maintaining the gamer look but without overdoing it.
Actually, previous ROG phones, I felt like they had kind of overplayed the gaminess of it. And the thing is, it's a phone. So most of the time, I would think you're probably using it as a phone as opposed to as a mobile gaming console. And even mobile gaming consoles, like, they generally don't look like way over the top. You can be sitting on the bus using them. So I think this is, I think they could dialit back a touch more, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. Let's go ahead and, actually, let's go ahead and have a look at allthe ports and everything. So on the right, you got your stacked up lock button and volume rocker right here. These are thepressure-sensitive air triggers. So these are for gamers. So you got your shoulder buttons right there. Up on the top, you got a whole lot of not much. Apparently, the phone has a four mic array for noise canceling. So that's pretty nice. You got a SIM tray here actually, oh, does it have micro SD expansion? And the answer is no.
Dual SIM, yes. Micro SD expansion, no. With that said, 512 gigs is a friggin lot of storage. As for why they didn't do a one terabyte option, apparently it was because the only one terabyte drive available was UFS 3.0, not UFS 3.1. And they were after just nothing but raw speed. Down here we've got two USB type Cs but it should be noted that one of them which is actually, there we go, handily marked on here is a USB type C and the other is; do not insert a USB type C cable to this port. Do not do that. So that's the, the red one. On the bottom, we've got another USB type C, it's offset again, just like the previous one, and as I alluded to before, there is no headphone jack right here, dual front-facing stereo speakers. I love the HTC One, and I'm expecting big things from them. Apparently, they have tuned the crap out of these speakers for like great bass response or something like that. We're in the middle of the setup process here. I'm gonna go with classic. Thank you ASUS, as of I believe last generation or might have been the first ROG phone offers the ability to set it up with a not horrendous gamer-looking skin, which I personally really appreciate.
Now, we're gonna get dropped onto the cringy startup video. I cheated on this video a little bit. I have already been through this, the startup process and it is hilarious. Scan the ROG totem. - [Man] Why? - Don't question it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Start it. - Playing a game is part of the setup? - Yeah. (upbeat music) Sounds pretty good. ASUS, I do. I love you guys very dearly. But what the hell did I just watch? Welcome to the republic of gamers, no, I'm good, thanks.(laughs) Oh, that's actually kind of a clever design for the stock case so it'll protect it from, getting dropped on a corner or whatever but it still leaves theair triggers exposed and it allows this to be mounted. Let's take a look at this puppy now. This is the Aero Active Cooler 3, there you go. It's labeled under there, and it's got a little kickstand. It's got a little cooling fan and it's got a pass-through for your USB type C as well as your headphone jack. So the idea is you can go ahead and pop this puppy open like that, pop your phone in there like that. Pop those dual USB-type season to the bottom there and there we go. You've got your phone propped up, and you're ready for some hardcore gaming. Bind X mode level threeperformance, uh, yes. So not only are they using a Snapdragon 865 Plus, but apparently, they allow you to manually specify if you want it to go into a higher performance tier and stay there because it's got active cooling on the back of the phone. How loud is it, though? Oh, it's audible. Here, I'll hold it up to my microphone here. Can you hear that? It's really heavy.
Wow, I actually hadn't really even thought about it up until now. But I guess that's kind of what happens when you have quite literally every feature built into the things so it has an in-screen fingerprint sensor. You can go ahead and set up a fingerprint here. So it's an optical ratherthan ultrasonic one. You can tell from the lights, how's the speed of the fingerprint? Unlock though. Well, not bad. That's acceptable. Not the fastest I've seen. Oh, we should get some games. We've got a game, let's say what's a game that all the kids play? 7.9 gigabytes. Yeah, no wonder you need a 512 gig freakin phone. Okay, let's have a look at our Game Genie stuff. That's actually pretty handy. So you can see your CPU times, what frame rate you're running at, clock speeds, whether X mode's enabled. You can lock down your brightness. Oh, cool. Check that out. So you got a little overlay that can show you some of those key specs if you want. You can turn off calls. Yes, there's just a one touch screen recording button. One thing to note though is that unlike the previous ROG phone, they have not integrated Twitch streaming. So apparently that was because they just had issues with it from the briefing call. That's really cool. Just being able to like quickly record like that, speed up button. Okay, so I'll probably just like closed background tasks and stuff like that. Still, free ASUS software. This is actually, surprisingly smooth and usable. It looks like YouTube live streaming is ready to rock though. Battery, more than two days remaining.
That's what happens to the 6,000 milliamp-hour battery. Refresh rate, you can set to auto. Interesting. Let's gostraight to 144 hertz. Oh, that's smooth. One thing I needed to change right away the first time I fired this thing up was to go to, I think Natural was the one that didn't look ridiculous in their splendid settings. That puts us in sRGB mode for using the operating system. Things aren't so over the top. The first couple of pictures I took on it, I was like, wow, this camera is horrible, but it was actually just the display that was horrible. I mean, the cameras still not gonna be competitive with something like the latest iPhone, but it's a lot better than what we've seen on previous ROG phones, that's for sure. I'm gonna take a beautiful selfie. Well, it's a selfie anyway. That's something. If I actually playeda lot of mobile games, sound is really good. Like almost nothing uses, proper dual amplified stereo speakers anymore like this. It's always just like an amplified earpiece speaker for the other one. And there are some prettygood ones out there but this is two real speakers facing you.
6000 milliamp-hour battery. - [Man] That's pretty awesome - That's a lot ofbattery, 30-watt charging, no wireless charging. And when pressed, ASUS basically said, well, everything is trade-offs. That's something that I would consider to be a basic flagship feature these days but they didn't include it because they just wanted to make as much space for battery as possible. That was a lot of the justification behind removing theheadphone jack as well. The cold hard truth is, if you want my take on why brands are removing headphone jacks, it's because if you can afford to buy our product, you probably have Bluetoothheadphones anyway. So like honestly though, almost everyone here in the office has switched Bluetoothheadphones at this point. They don't sound as good, but boy, are they convenient. I love that I'm screen recording, downloading games in the background and running this game at 120 FPS and this thing is just going, like it's going. Yep, we're running at 117, 120 FPS. Like i said i really, I don't feel it as much as I do on a large display but it's definitely butter smooth. (laughter) Take that loser.
Oh, no, turns out I didn't know how to steer. How do my shoulder buttons do in this game? Did they do anything? I'm in ninth. Oh, I suck maybe this is why I'm hating on all the mobile gamers cause I'm just not good enough to beat them. The chassis is starting to heat up a little bit though now that my GPUs at like 70% plus usage, CPU at 40. This is a pretty demanding game, especially at these frame rates. Oh, and now it needs another 600 Megs. That was just, that was just the intro. Oh Lordy. That's fine. All I wanted to see was high refresh rate and it was definitely high. I'm not even gonna deploy a parachute. That's for wimps. On epic quality, we're actually still only seeing about 22 to 25 FPS. Oh yeah. What's up now? What's up now? What's up now? I don't even know what's up now? Wow. Wow. Wow. Gotcha. How do I pick things up? I don't know. I don't know how to pick things up. I don't play this game. Hey, what's up? What's up now? No way. These can't be real people.
There's gotta be bots. This is terrible. It's gotten a little toasty. That 80% CPU usage, it's definitely running a little hotter now. That's fine because allI really wanted to know is how the game ran between 25-26 FPS at Epic quality. Oh, I get it. They call it Epic quality because Epic Games, I get it. What a jokester you are Mr. Sweeney. Oh, that's while recording though. How is it without recording? Oh, now my CPU usage be much lower and my FPS is like, no not quiet. Okay, we did till like28 there for a second. Okay, that's pretty cool. We were still gettingvery playable frame rates while recording though. From my first impressions, the bottom line here is pretty simple, the ROG Phone 3 is exactly as advertised. It's got a gigantic high refresh rate, high brightness OLED display. It's got a massive battery. It's got gamer-optimized features, like being able to quickly screen record, turn your CPU up to the maximum speed, configure your air triggers and all that good stuff. They've got a bunch of accessories. I love that they gave thought to intergenerationalaccessory compatibility. And really the bottomline for this one is; do you need a gaming phone? Like, not does anyone need a gaming phone? There's people out there, I mean, do you need a gaming phone? And if you do, this is looking likea pretty swell option. Oh yeah, subscribe to Short Circuit so you don't miss any of our unboxings and impressions and just trying stuff. It's a good, it's a good channel. It's good channel.
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