Friends+Design
- Sharp gaming look - Asus has opted for an extremely transparent cooling chamber with fewer sharp lines and it's clearly a design targeting the gamers
- Well-thought-out control layout, plenty of I/O including some unique input offers like the Air Triggers - it's also a very functional gaming-focussed design, including wider areas (bezels) around the display for bigger speakers and easier gripping
- There are two USB-C ports, one on the bottom and another on the left side - the latter is to allow gamers to charge the phone while playing games in landscape orientation (Asus has thought of everything here)
- The in-display fingerprint sensor is seamless and fast
- Heavy at 240 grams, the weight in your wrists and even the voice calls can get fatiguing after some time
- As there's a vent at the back, there's no water protection
- Incredibly slippery body - a case is a must
Air Triggers
- The “Air Triggers” on the ROG Phone 2 are touch sensitive panels located on the right side of the device’s body that double as shoulder/trigger buttons when the phone is held sideways - this allows gamers to play certain games the way console players do, with a combination of thumb and index fingers, and it improves the experience of playing first-person shooters significantly
Display
- Sharp, crisp 6.59-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display - with excellent viewing angles, it is HDR10+ certified, and capable of reproducing over 1 billion colours as compared to the 16 million on regular displays
- Asus has gone a step beyond and added 144 Hz refresh rate to the ROG Phone 3, which makes the whole experience extremely fluid, they have also upped the touch sampling rate to 270 Hz, so it feels incredibly fast
Software
- Surprisingly clean Android ROM, with most additions working behind the scenes to improve gaming
- Well laid-out Armoury Crate gaming interface, which includes a lot of automated optimization options as well as unparalleled access to system-level values and thresholds for advanced tuning
Performance
- Monstrous performance from the Snapdragon 865 Plus - the ROG Phone 3 is all about sustained peak performance for gamers - and thanks to Asus design decisions it doesn't heat a lot - the combination of high refresh rate, powerful hardware and light software make the ROG Phone 3 feels swift
Camera
- Good triple cameras for a gaming phone - the Asus ROG Phone 3 has a 64MP primary camera, a 13MP ultra-wide and a 5MP macro camera
- Images from the main sensor has great color and good dynamic range, they show a decent amount of shadow detail without looking washed out - most images retain a great amount of highlight details
- The ultra-wide sensor has a similar color profile to the main sensor, which is nice to see - it also maintains a fair amount of both highlight and shadow detail (though, the quality is a bit lower than the main sensor)
- Images from the 5MP macro camera look pretty decent - colour and contrast are good and the pictures are plenty sharp
- Portrait shots come out looking clean with nice subject detection and separation - background blur also looks neat and convincing
- It does well it low-light, photos have decent amount of details and the noise is well controlled - the night mode is auto, so the phone auto detects when it has to switch on the night mode and sometimes it works surprisingly well
- The 24MP camera for selfies offer good results - colour and sharpness are especially good, even in dimmer situations - you can do Portrait mode shots on the selfie camera, as well
- Video recording is decent and you can record up to 8K videos
- For a gaming phone, the cameras are surprisingly good, and hold up on their own against the competition
Audio
- The stereo speakers are really impressive - they're quite loud and don't feel distorted even at higher volumes
Battery
- Very good battery life from the monstrous 6000 mAh battery - it can easily do about a day and a half in normal use, and sometimes two full days (though, it could be inconsistent sometimes)
- The 30W charger can juice up the phone fairly quickly considering how large the battery is - it takes about 1 and a half hour to charge the phone completely
Verdit
- If you’re a heavy gamer looking for the best performance, great cameras, a big battery, and a decent UI, the ROG Phone 3 will serve you fantastically
- The ROG Phone 3 is targeted at the gamers, so if you're a mainstream user who casually games, it is an overkill
