DIGILIFE: Asus ROG Phone 3-Gaming Champ

This brings me to the Asus ROG series of phones. Last year, the ROG Phone 2 pushed the envelope in several ways and made a gaming phone greatly desirable. The next iteration, the ROG Phone 3 has taken things up by several notches and we got our hands on it for a comprehensive review.

Straight off the bat, the first thing you notice is that the in-your-face design of the ROG Phone has been toned down in this iteration – possibly to entice non-gaming centric audiences. But that doesn’t mean, that the ROG Phone isn’t a looker anymore. It stands out with its outlandish design and the illuminated RGB logo. The sheer size and heft(240g) of the device is noticeable too along with the large top and bottom bezels (by design, to give players a place to grip the phone without inadvertently touching the screenand also to incorporate the really good front facing speakers).

The massive real estate upfront is put to great use with a 6.59-inch OLED panel with a resolution of 2,340 x 1,080and a 144Hz refresh rate to boot. It might not be the most colour accurate screen out there, but it more than makes up for it with a 10-bit colour display tuned for gaming. For those of us not keen on gaming, there are a number of display modes to choose from.

With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus overclocked to 3.1GHz and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, performance is snappy and the ROG Phone 3 is among the fastest phones around. Even with such beefy specs and a gigantic screen, the phone also manages to have great battery life, courtesy the 6000mAh unit. In our tests, it easily lasted more than a day and a half even under heavy use.

The cameras proved to be the surprise package here and performed admirably well. For a gaming phone I wasn’t expecting much, but both the 64MP Sony IMX686 main sensor as well as the wide-angle sensor were truly impressive, and images consistently had great colour and good dynamic range while reproducing ample detail. The macro too produced sharp images with good levels of colour and contrast. The 24MP selfie camera does very well even in low light conditions.

The gaming-centric Air Triggers have improved considerably with support for upto eight programmable controls built in. Software improvements have got even better and Asus offers a ton of control for the enthusiast with X Mode.

Overall the Asus ROG Phone 3 offers great value no matter how serious a gamer you are and even if you aren’t. No wonder then, they are quite literally flying off the shelves right now.