Asus refreshes gaming-centric smartphone lineup, unveils ROG Phone 5 series

The ROG Phone 5, ROG Phone 5 Pro and ROG Phone 5 Ultimate are built on the same blueprints but with different design theme on the back covers and RAM & storage configurations

Taiwanese electronics maker Asus on Wednesday refreshed its gaming-centric ROG Phone line-up with the launch of the ROG Phone 5 series. Named the ROG Phone 5, ROG Phone 5 Pro and ROG Phone 5 Ultimate, the smartphones in the series are built on the same blueprints but with different design theme on the back covers and RAM & storage configurations. Besides, the Pro and Ultimate variants get two additional touch sensors on the back cover over the vanilla ROG Phone 5. Let’s look at what is new in the ROG Phone 5 series:

ROG Phone 5 series: Price in India

The ROG Phone 5 series goes on sale in India from April 15 at 12 pm, exclusively on Flipkart. The ROG Phone 5 is priced at Rs 49,999 and Rs 57,999 for the 8GB RAM + 128GB storage and 12GB RAM + 256GB storage variants, respectively. The ROG Phone 5 Pro is priced at Rs 69,999, and the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate is priced at Rs 79,999.

ROG Phone 5 series: Design

The ROG Phone line-up has been through several design changes, and the latest iterations take the design quotient a notch above. Though the smartphones in ROG Phone 5 series are built on the same blueprints, each of them have different design language.

The ROG Phone 5 comes in storm white and phantom black colours with a glossy clean dot-matrix design on the back cover similar to the popular ROG products like the ROG Zephyrus G14 (review).  The vanilla model has an illuminated ROG logo, which supports 8 different lighting schemes 

The ROG Phone 5 Pro comes in black space colour theme. The luminated ROG Logo of the ROG Phone 5 is replaced here to the matrix PMOLED display called by the company as the ROG Vision. This tiny display shows customisable graphics for scenarios like incoming calls, loading a game, charging, entering X-mode, etc.

The Ultimate variant in the series is similar to the Pro model but with different colour theme and PMOLED display on the rear cover. It comes in matte white colour and sports a monochrome PMOLED display, instead of colour PMOLED one on the Pro variant.

Both the Pro and Ultimate variants also has two additional AirTrigger touch sensors on the back of the phone.

The three variants in the series sports Gorilla Glass 3 on the back, and Corning Gorilla Glass Victus on the front.

ROG Phone 5 series: Display

The ROG Phone 5, ROG Phone 5 Pro and ROG Phone 5 Ultimate sport 6.78-inch custom-made Samsung AMOLED screen of 144Hz refresh rate. The screen is HDR10+ ready and supports up to 1200 nits peak and 5 nits minimum brightness levels. This screen is touted to be colour accurate – each panel is factory calibrated across different color gamut in a single process for an average Delta-E of less than 1 accuracy and a 111 per cent DCI-P3 gamut coverage. With regard to gaming-centric features, the screen is touted to have a touch sampling rate of 300Hz. Besides, it is touted to have a touch latency of 24.3ms and a slide latency of 18ms.

ROG Phone 5 series: Performance

All three smartphones in the series are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 system-on-chip. However, each smartphone comes in different RAM and on-board storage configurations. The ROG Phone 5 comes in 8GB RAM + 128GB on-board storage and 12GB RAM + 256GB on-board storage variants. The ROG Phone 5 Pro comes with 16GB RAM + 512GB on-board storage. The ROG Phone 5 Ultimate comes with 18GB RAM + 512GB on-board storage. All three models boasts LPDDR5 RAMs and UFS3.1 storages. There is no storage expansion slot here but the phones support external storage drives (NTFS file format only). All the three models support 5G and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity.

The smartphones ship with Android 11 operating system-based ZenUI and ROGUI built-in. Speaking of software, the series brings several value-added features for improved gaming-experience. For example, the X-Mode now allows the user to set a wider variety of performance parameters -- from CPU/GPU performance to touch sensitivity settings and display refresh rate. Similarly, the Armoury Crate has been improve to allow customisation options with regard to performance, touch, display and network related settings on a game-by-game basis.

As for the hardware, the ROG Phone 5 series gets updated AirTrigger 5 technology with better sensitivity, better positioning (closer to edge for smaller hands) and new motion control gestures. Now, there are up to 18 specific touch points on the screen that can be mapped (with the AeroActive Cooler 5 and ROG Phone 5 Pro or Ultimate). The AirTrigger 5 utility goes beyond games, it can be used to activate useful actions or to launch apps with a simple squeeze gesture while holding the phone in portrait mode.

Powering the smartphone are two 3,000mAh batteries, supported by up to 65W fast wired charging.

ROG Phone 5 series: Audio

The ROG Phone 5 sports two symmetrical 7-magnet ‘Super Linear Speakers’, each powered by a dedicated Cirrus Logic CS35L45 mono amplifier. In addition, the speakers are tuned by Swedish Dirac Research AB for wide, clear and deep sound. Complementing the speakers is the 3.5mm audio output jack with Hi-Fi support. The audio out through the 3.5mm jack is supported by the ESS Sabre ES9280AC Pro with HyperStream II QUAD DAC technology and a built-in Class G ESS Sabre Headphone amplifier with up to 2Vrms output for headphones with higher impedance.

ROG Phone 5 series: Camera

The smartphones in the series carry triple-camera array on the back, featuring a 64-megapixel primary sensor (Sony IMX686), a 13MP ultra-wide-angle sensor of 125-degree field-of-view (FoV), and a 5MP macro sensor. On the front, the phones have a 24MP sensor that works on pixel-binning technology.