Asus appears committed to continuing its gaming smartphone line with the new Asus ROG Phone 7 and 7 Ultimate. The updated lineup doesn’t change much from the previous generation, instead focusing on simply upping the specs to give gamers shopping for a phone the extra horsepower they’re after. However, chasing the performance crown and focusing on gaming features doesn’t always help make for the best smartphone. Given how many similarities the ROG Phone 7 has to the unfortunate ROG Phone 6 Pro, it has its work cut out for it, and it ultimately can’t escape the same fate as its predecessor.
Asus ROG Phone 7 – Design and Features
When I pulled the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate out of the box, I thought there’d been a mistake. It was so remarkably similar to the ROG Phone 6 Pro I reviewed last year that I thought it was that phone. There are some minor differences in the styling of the back cover, but it has far more alike than different from last year’s phone. If anything, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate got a tad more subtle, with accents like the “ROG” letters along the bottom edge which almost hide until light hits them in just the right way.
The back of the phone plays at being a robot with its geometric camera bump and lines of faux seams between panels. Similar lines crisscrossed the ROG Phone 6 Pro, but they’re more subdued here. The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate still includes a POLED display – a pixelated little screen – on the back to display call notifications and various device status indicators, like battery charging or games running. All of these details sit amid a pearly two-tone finish of Gorilla Glass 3 on the rear that’s simply gorgeous. The front of the phone is covered in the same Gorilla Glass Victus that was on the ROG Phone 6. However, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate gets a small ruggedness upgrade with an IP54 rating to better protect against dust ingress compared to the ROG Phone 6’s IPX4 rating. That said, it’s still a far cry from the IP68 rating found on many smartphones.
Though the IP54 rating is low, it’s rather impressive given the ROG Phoner 7 Ultimate specifically has a special slot on the back of the phone – the AeroActive Portal introduced with the ROG Phone 6D – that opens up to enhance cooling by exposing heatsink fins on the chipset. This feature works when the AeroActive Cooler 7 (a separate accessory) is attached to the phone and blowing cool air through that fin stack. It’s a more impressive solution than the venting of the Nubia Redmagic 6, though that phone didn’t require an extra accessory to enable air cooling. Though the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate continues to support the previous AeroActive Cooler 6, the Portal works exclusively with the newer cooler model.
The rear is only a part of the quirky design. The phone’s left edge has a USB-C port and a pair of pogo pin pads. The combination is made for use with the AeroActive Cooler, but the USB port also enables charging and accessory connections that don’t interfere with holding the phone comfortably to game. There’s also a USB-C port and headphone jack on the bottom of the phone. While most phones keep their charging port in the center of the design, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate actually puts it off to the side. If there’s a benefit to the user here, I don’t see it, and it means that third-party controller accessories like the original Razer Kishi may not work. The two USB-C ports aren’t quite equal, with the side-mounted port offering faster connectivity and DisplayPort 1.4 output.
An external controller may not be necessary, though. The right edge of the phone includes two touch-sensitive trigger zones that can be mapped to on-screen controls. It’s a handy feature I’ve used on other phones, but it’s much nicer when they’re physical buttons, like those found on phones from Black Shark. The AeroActive Cooler 7 accessory also has four buttons on it, but I found the hand grip required to use them (with or without the phone’s shoulder buttons) a little too contorted for comfort.
The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate squeezes in a 6.78-inch display and has rather thick bezels at the top and bottom, making for a phone that’s larger than my Pixel 7 Pro in a case. Asus uses that extra bezel space smartly at the top to separate out the selfie camera, meaning none of the display is interrupted by a hole-punch camera. The size of the phone comes with weight. It’s hefty at 239 grams, the same weight as its predecessor. Holding the phone up for an hour while watching a movie became rather uncomfortable for me.
The display is a strong point. Its size paired with a 2448 x 1080 resolution make it exceedingly sharp. It’s also a bright AMOLED panel that displays HDR content wonderfully. With a 165Hz refresh rate, it’s also ready for smooth gaming, and a pair of front-facing speakers pump out excellent audio for a phone. Asus tucked a fingerprint sensor underneath the display like many other Android makers, and it’s quick to unlock the phone.
Asus ROG Phone 7 – Software
You might think a gaming device is going to come loaded down with extraneous gaming apps and a gaudy UI, but Asus has avoided that pitfall. The phone comes running Android 13 and has little extra software packed in beyond the Armoury Crate app, which is a key ingredient of getting extra performance and gaming features out of this phone. There’s little reason to buy this phone if not for those features, so Armoury Crate feels perfectly allowable here. And while Asus offers a Dark Matter Flow theme for the UI, which has all the edgy, gamer aesthetics on full display, it also has a classic theme that’s styled more like any standard Android phone. Asus even provides the Stock Android option during the initial setup of the phone. Asus promises two OS updates and four years of security updates as well – not bad, though Samsung and Google offer better.
Asus ROG Phone 7 – Gaming and Performance
The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate has plenty of performance muscle to spare in most current games and will likely really come into its own for future games. The system comes running on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, effectively the best you can get for Android phones at the moment. Asus pairs that chipset with 16GB of LPDDR5x memory in the Ultimate model. That’s a boatload of memory for the sort of tasks a phone is usually handling. In day to day use, the phone is supremely quick. Switching back and forth between apps is a breeze, including the camera. The phone doesn’t lack space for apps, games, or video either, with the Ultimate model packing 512GB of fast UFS 4.0 storage.
With that Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and advanced cooling, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate was able to run Genshin Impact and Apex Legends with maxed out settings at a smooth 60fps while hardly taxing the CPU and GPU in the latter game. Running around in the Apex Legends, both sit at well under 50% utilization most of the time. With the AeroActive Cooler 7 installed, the system sticks to a tidy 33 degrees Celsius. The heat is localized near the power button of the phone, which is far from the hands in the intended orientation for gaming. This keeps the phone comfortable to the touch. Genshin Impact ran smoothly most of the time with only an occasional hitch. As great as this might sound, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra runs these games just as smoothly.
Without the cooler, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate gets toastier. The phone actually got hottest while I was sustaining a 10MB/s+ download of Genshin Impact’s game files over a 5G connection. That saw it jump up to 42 degrees Celsius after about 10GB of download. At that point, it was uncomfortable to hold, especially as the metal edges of the phone soaked up the heat. That said, this is an intense scenario that most phones would lose their cool in. Playing Genshin Impact without the cooler attached, the phone held around 35 degrees Celsius.
Performance was also a strong point on the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate’s predecessor, but connectivity wasn’t. Fortunately, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate doesn’t seem to struggle from the same troubles I ran into with the ROG Phone 6 Pro. I’ve had reliable 5G around Chicago during my testing. And when I’m not on 5G, the phone can connect to Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 networks, though I only had Wi-Fi 6 to test on.
The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate’s big, bright, high-refresh-rate display can really suck down the battery, especially during gameplay. But the phone can recharge incredibly fast at 65 watts. It uses two 3,000mAh batteries that both charge at the same time to attain that fast recharge. It’s also not proprietary, as PD3.0 is supported. If the battery is already topped up, the phone supports a bypass mode that lets a wired connection power the phone directly, skipping the battery, to reduce heat.
Asus ROG Phone 7 – Camera
Like a good many top-tier smartphones these days, the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate comes kitted out with three rear cameras and selfie cam around front. While the internals of the ROG Phone 7 lineup vary slightly, most of the hardware on these phones is shared between models, and that goes for the cameras, too. So you can expect identical performance in the cameras whether you pick up the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate or standard ROG Phone 7.
Here are the cameras the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate packs:
- 50MP Wide
- 13MP Ultrawide
- 8MP Macro
- 32MP Selfie
The 50MP main sensor is not entirely disappointing. Photos come out lifelike and clear with modest performance in low-light scenarios. However, as was the case with the ROG Phone 6 Pro before it, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate’s camera doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Viewing photos on the phone’s screen, I don’t see much issue, but zooming in just a bit reveals some softness in the images. Side-by-side with a Pixel 7 Pro, the quality difference is apparent.
The ultra-wide camera on the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate is only worse. While it can fit more into the screen, it takes far less scrutiny to notice the softness and noise creeping into the image.
While the macro camera is an upgrade over the prior year model’s 5MP sensor, it’s still not offering impressive results. They still don’t look notably better than using a digital 2X zoom from the main sensor to get the same image and they look considerably worse than the same shot taken with the even more capable zoom levels of something like the cheaper Pixel 7 Pro
Asus ROG Phone 7 – Selfie Camera
Like last year’s ROG Phone 6, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate has a surprisingly good selfie camera. It’s using a different sensor this time with an increased resolution, though using a quad-bayer binning algorithm to drop that 32MP down to 8MP. It continues to be satisfyingly sharp, naturally colored, and capable even in moderate lighting.
Overall, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate again shows that cameras aren’t the strong point of a gaming phone.