The ASUS ROG Phone III Review: A 144Hz 6000mAh Beast With Caveats

Video Recording

Video recording on the ROG Phone III is interesting because it’s one of the newer phones which promise 8K recording capabilities. As the phone lacks OIS, it’ll be also interesting to see how the EIS is able to stabilise the video recording and how it holds up against the competition.

Starting off with 4K30 recording, the stabilisation employed by the phone is actually significantly better than I had expected and is able to produce an excellent result even without OIS.

4K30 on the ultra-wide gives a much better field of view and giving the EIS a better frame to be able to stabilise the video in, however the quality of the video isn’t too great as it’s lacking dynamic range – with the processing flattening highlights quite a lot.

4K60 is reserved just for the main camera, and the footage is very good, although again it’s visible how the HDR isn’t the best as we’re seeing highlights clip in and out. Overall, however, it offers excellent amounts of detail and smoothness.

8K30 is also limited to the main camera. Again, dynamic range is a weakness, however it’s one of the modes that allows for almost no quality loss when digitally zooming in. Notice the video noise when zoomed in in the video sample. The biggest issue I have with this mode is that it’s still pretty much a gimmick and not viable for every-day usage as bitrates come in at 105Mb/s and result in about 800MB of storage consumption per minute, and the phone does not have expandable storage.

Audio Evaluation

I’ve moved offices so I don’t have the same audio measurement setup to be able to showcase apples to apples measurement data, so I’ll keep my evaluation of the speakers on the ROG3 brief.

The stereo speakers of the phone are augmented by a speaker calibration by Dirac, allowing the phone to achieve actually quite impressive sound quality. The phone has quite deep bass, and the stereo balance of the two speakers is perfect given that we’re seen two identical driver setups.

Virtualisation of sound isn’t quite as good as some other devices out there, however the ROG Phone III makes up with a flatter sounding frequency response curve. It has better audio playback than Apple and Samsung devices, and edges out the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro as well as the device with the phone with the best audio playback on the market right now.

It’s just a pity the company had dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack – it would have otherwise been a complete winner in the audio department.