Asus ROG Phone ZS600KL

Asus introduces one of India’s first smartphones dedicated just for gaming purposes. Priced at Rs. 69,999, this phone remains a high performer and creates a monopoly market for its favor.

Introducing a powerful processor along with an adequate battery and stylistic design, the ROG Phone is set to put your gaming genes on fire. While it does have a passable camera for its price, the phone is certainly not a camera model. The ROG Phone delivers what it promises and is a phone suitable for gaming.

Since the ROG Phone has been designed for gamers, it comes with a different design signature. The back panel is asymmetric for good grip, and comes with a dual camera setup and fingerprint scanner fitted in unique polygonal shapes. The fingerprint scanner is reachable but a bit wide and off-centre.

The ROG logo is present in the centre of the rear panel which features RGB lighting. At the back, the Corning Gorilla Glass 5 has been used to keep it away from scratches. The metal frame gives the handset a rigid feel. Plus, the phone comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack at the bottom and a USB Type-C port which is positioned off-centre.

It also has ultrasonic sensors called AirTriggers on the phone which are touch sensitive when you are gaming in the landscape mode. The design makes it stand out among the competition. However, quite naturally it is a bit heavy (200g) due to its large battery.

The ROG Phone arrives with a 6-inch display and an 18:9 aspect ratio. It is a FullHD AMOLED screen which gives you amazing viewing angles as well as special sensors to adjust different color temperatures. It can support HDR, has a beautiful 90Hz refresh rate and can produce DCI-P3 color gamut of about 108 per cent.

You can also lower the refresh rate to 60Hz. The color is quite punchy and bright and aids in gaming purpose. You can also enable the always-on display.

Since it is a gaming phone, the ROG does not hold back on performance. It comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 with the chips getting clocked at 2.96 GHz. The clock speed of the processor is about 2.8 GHz. Thus, to keep this processor from throttling, there are carbon pads, a significant cooling chamber, as well as a copper heat spreader to dissipate the heat.

On top of the processor you get a wonderful 8GB RAM that helps you to process multiple apps without entering slow-down mode. The phone gets a multi-core score of about 9,119 in Geekbench. In X Mode, the unique mode on this phone, the count gets up to 9221 points.

Heavy games can run on this phone at Ultra setting without the slightest bit of lag. The phone gets a bit warm, but the cooling vapors work wonderfully to keep it at a consistent temperature.

The Asus ROG Phone comes with a 12MP primary camera with phase detection autofocus and an f/1.7 aperture and an 8MP secondary camera with f/2.2 aperture and 120-degree wide angle field of vide. It is also integrated with AI to detect objects. In bright situations, the phone enables HDR scenes to provide detailed pictures, although the autofocus does not work well. The Macro shots are however still accurate.

In low light, the shutter remains open for a long time to invite more light in. Even then, you get to see some grain when you zoom in.

The 8MP front camera, with an f/2.0 aperture clicks good shots with excellent edge detection. Portrait mode is commendable too.

A maximum of 4K video can be shot with this phone. Electronic stabilization is also available, but the videos tend to have a yellowish or greenish tinge.

The phone comes with a 4,000 mAh battery which is lovely and stays alive for quite a long time. With HDR mode on, an HD video loop saw that it could stay alive for 10 hours 58 minutes and without HDR, it can run for a whopping 15 hours 5 minutes. All in all, the phone can run an entire day with moderate use. The phone can also get juiced up quite quickly getting from 0% to 85% within an hour.

As a dedicated gaming smartphone, the ROG Phone is a brilliant model. It has a unique design for gaming advantage along with software customizations, suitable for gaming. The performance is excellent enough to run all games, and it is powered by a sizable battery so that you don’t get too much of a battery drain. AirTriggers and Game Center will be a delight for the gaming audience.

Asus, however, could have worked by delivering better cameras though that was not their motto. All in all, the phone is an accomplished gaming phone and has all the specifications to please the gaming audience.