The flagship gaming phone from Asus, ROG has arrived in India and it is great! The two models, ROG 5s and ROG 5s Pro will be available starting from Feb 18.
The ROG 5s starts at ₹49999 for the base 8GB/128GB variant and the ₹57999 for the 12GB/256Gb variant.
The ROG 5s Pro is priced at ₹79999 for the 18GB/512GB and comes with the AeroActiv Cooler in the box.
Both the 5s and 5s Pro are powered by Snapdragon 888+ and the phone looks like what it is meant for. Gaming! It has the signature gaming look with ROG’s dot matrix design.
Its front panel uses the Corning Glass Victus while the back panel uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3. Unlike other phones in the market, it has thicker bezels on the top and bottom to avoid accidental touches while gaming.
Display
Both the ROG 5s and ROG 5s Pro come with an FHD+, 6.78-inch sAMOLED display with a refresh rate of 144Hz. Both the phones have one of the brightest screens with 1200 nits of peak brightness.
With a low 24ms touch latency and support for HDR10+, your gaming experience is bound to be rich.
Performance, Cooling and Battery
Compared to the earlier ROG 5 which came with Snapdragon 888, the new ROG 5s and ROG 5s Pro come with Snapdragon 888+.
Although Snapdragon 888+ isn’t much faster than the Snapdragon 888, it is better in terms of battery efficiency and doesn’t have the heating issues that 888 had.
And since the ROG phone is a ‘gaming’ phone it needs to address the cooling more aggressively.
For cooling, the phone comes with an internal Copper 3D vapour chamber, a split battery and a large graphite cooling pad.
The ROG 5s and ROG 5s Pro does quite well handling the heat and doesn’t thermal throttle on prolonged use but does get a little hot after long hours of use.
It also comes with an optional AeroActive Cooler 5 which is basically a small fan to provide extra cooling.
Both the ROG 5s and ROG 5s Pro come with a beefy 6000 mAh battery which comes in spilt design; 2 batteries of 3000 mAh each making a total of 6000 mAh.
Software and ‘Gaming features’
Both of them run on ROG UI based on Android 11. The ROG UI is specifically made for gaming which has features specifically made for gaming. You can switch to Zen UI for more simplistic use but why would you?
You get Asus’ proprietary Armoury Crate software which includes the X mode helping you improve performance in titles like Genshin Impact.
The phone also features Air Triggers which turns the bumper into touch-sensitive triggers, just like on the controllers, which can be useful in titles like PUBG or CODM.
The presence of a charging point on the side is a good quality-of-life feature. Playing on the landscape mode, the wire won’t come in your way with the charging on the side of the phone.
RAM and Storage
The ROG 5s comes with a base variant of 8GB RAM / 128GB storage and the second variant with 12GB RAM/ 256 GB storage.
The ROG 5s Pro comes with 18GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. All the variants are plenty for running any mobile games and storing those games.
Camera
The camera isn’t a priority for the buyers of this phone but the phone does cost a premium and you would expect a good camera.
The phone features a triple camera setup with a 64 MP Sony IMX 686 camera, 13 MP ultra-wide camera and a 5 MP macro shooter.
The front camera has a single 24 MP lens.
It is not on par with the other flagship phones out there but it gets the job done. Again, the camera is not a priority for gaming phones so, it’s not exactly a bad thing.
Asus ROG Phone has been the undisputed champion in the niche of gaming mobiles and it still is. While the phone is a bit heavy and huge, it might get a little uncomfortable for normal usage.
The phone itself is blazingly fast and will handle anything that you throw its way but the camera performance could have been better.
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