Gadgets
Asus ROG Phone 5 First Impressions: Gamers’ Delight?
The ROG Phone 5 is a big smartphone and houses a 6.78-inch display with a 20.4:9 aspect ratio. It is an HDR 10+ certified AMOLED panel made by Samsung and offers a full-HD+ resolution. It has a 144Hz refresh rate but is set to 120Hz by default. Asus claims 1200nits of peak brightness. There is Corning Gorilla Glass Victus at the front, and Gorilla Glass 3 at the back. The display has thin bezels on the sides but has slightly thicker ones on the top and bottom, which house stereo speakers. The top bezel also has the 24-megapixel selfie camera and a notification LED.
The ROG Phone 5 has a big 6.78-inch display
Lift the phone up and you will notice that it is quite heavy at 236g. The frame is made out of metal, but it is rounded which makes it comfortable to hold. The power and volume buttons are on the right side of the frame towards the center which makes them very easy to hit. They also offer good feedback. You also get Ultrasonic AirTriggers on the right side (the top when held horizontally) for gaming. On the left side of the frame, the ROG Phone 5 has a second USB Type-C port for charging, and a proprietary connector for accessories including the Aeroactive Cooler 5. The SIM tray on the left has two Nano-SIM slots but no microSD card slot.
At the back, the ROG Phone 5 has a triple camera setup consisting of a 64-megapixel primary camera which uses pixel binning to deliver 16-megapixel shots, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera with a 125-degree field of view, and a 5-megapixel macro camera. All of them sit in a thin oddly shaped camera module that protrudes slightly. The ROG Phone 5 has an Asus ROG logo on the back with customisable RGB lighting. The ROG Phone 5 Pro and ROG Phone 5 Ultimate have small secondary PMOLED displays in that spot which can show status information.
The ROG Phone 5 has RGB lighting under the ROG logo at the back
The Asus ROG Phone 5 packs in a 6,000mAh battery which is split into two cells of 3000mAh each to help with fast charging and prevent the phone from heating up under load. The two cells are towards the top and the bottom of the smartphone while the mainboard housing the SoC is in the center. Another benefit of this setup is that the Aeroactive Cooler 5 accessory sits right on top of the SoC when attached, for effective cooling. Asus claims that the ROG Phone 5 is capable of 65W fast charging but only ships a 30W charger in the box. If you want to use faster charging, you will need to buy a compatible charger separately.
The Asus ROG Phone 5 is the first smartphone I have used with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC. The processor is clocked at 2.84GHz and should be able to deliver some impressive benchmark numbers. I couldn’t test the ROG 5 phone at this time but I will put it through all our usual benchmark and gaming tests at the time of the full review.
The Aeroactive Cooler 5 has physical trigger buttons and a fold-out kickstand
Asus ships the ROG Phone 5 with Android 11 and ROG UI on top. The UI is clean and offers a lot of customisations which I’ll cover in the review. The demo unit of the ROG Phone 5 had the January Android security patch which is fairly recent. I did see some preinstalled apps on the phone such as Instagram and Facebook but these can be uninstalled right away, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I did not notice any spammy notifications during my time with the ROG Phone 5.
Asus also sent me the Aeroactive Cooler 5, but it will only be bundled with the ROG Phone 5 Pro and Ultimate models. Buyers of the ROG Phone 5 will need to buy this separately. The Aeroactive Cooler 5 clamps on to the phone and needs to be aligned with the pins on the left. It draws power from the phone’s battery. In addition to the fan, there are two physical trigger buttons on the Aeroactive Cooler 5 which takes the trigger count to four on this device.
The Asus ROG Phone 5 is equipped with some of the best hardware available these days and claims to offer the best gaming experience. How well will it deliver on these promises? Stay tuned to Gadgets360 to find out.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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