ASUS ROG Phone 7 Ultimate Hands-On

Launched globally a couple of weeks back, the ASUS ROG Phone 7 series is set to be released in the Philippines by around mid-June this year.

We managed to score an early review unit of the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate and we’re going to share with you our initial hands-on impressions of this 7th-gen gaming phone from ASUS.

Compared to the ROG Phone 6 series from last year, not much has changed in the design and construction of the ROG Phone 7 series, except of course the patterns and finish you see here at the back panel.

As for our review unit, the ASUS ROG Phone 7 Ultimate is the successor to the ROG 6D Ultimate, which was released with a Mediatek Dimensity 9000+ chipset last year. It has the same RAM (16GB) and storage (512GB) configurations too. The 6.78-inch AMOLED display from Samsung is almost the same with the same 165Hz refresh rate, 720Hz touch sampling rate, and resolution.

Remember that, last year, ASUS made a lot of variants – the ROG 6, ROG 6 Pro and ROG 6D Ultimate; then they had the Batman Edition and Diablo Immortal Edition. This time around, ASUS only made two variants – the ROG Phone 7 and the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate.

Both the ROG Phone 7 and the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate have, more or less, the same hardware specs and camera configuration. What makes the 7 Ultimate different is that it has a small 2-inch display screen on the back side called the ROG Vision. It has display options like showcasing the ROG logo, game mode, and charging status, incoming calls. We’ve seen this in the ROG Phone 6D Ultimate as well last year.

The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate’s thermal cooling accessory is the AeroActive Portal instead of the AeroActive Cooler 7. The AeroActive Portal has an improved fan with more blades and activates automatically once attached to the phone. And you can see all the RGB light features in there.

The new AeroActive Cooler 7 is also improved with four additional physical buttons for game input, a kickstand, a fan and a thermal electric cooling chip that draws its power directly from the phone. This time, they also include a 5-magnet super linear subwoofer, improving gaming and listening experience.

Powering the ROG 7 Ultimate is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 which has an octa-core processor, peaking at 3.2GHz and paired with an Adreno 740 GPU. If you want a gaming beast, this chipset is the one to beat. As mentioned earlier, it also comes with 16GB of LPPDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 – both of these are also currently the fastest in the industry.

And, as you can see, our benchmark results are thru the roof – over 1.31 million points in Antutu, close to 18k in PCMark and 5,477 in GeekBench. It also has the fastest internal storage we’ve ever tested on a smartphone with read speeds of 3,498MB/s and write speeds of 2,989MB/s.

When we compared these scores to other flagship smartphones we’ve tested and reviewed this year, the numbers give a much better picture.

So, it is safe to say the ROG 7 Ultimate is a beast in terms of raw performance. But of course, we have to try how it feels in real-world scenarios like gaming. So far, everything is spot on.

We also liked the dual-WiFi feature. It basically allows you to connect to 2 different WiFi access points at the same time so if one connection drops, the phone automatically switches to the other AP with almost negligible impact to the game you’re playing.

This is great if you’re playing games like Mobile Legends where milliseconds in lag time really matter.

Or, if you are playing Genshin Impact at the best settings and highest frame rates. So far, the gameplay experience is smooth and lag-free.

What makes the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate more attractive is the cooling system – that AeroActive Portal that helps cool the device by improving heat dissipation and lower core temperature. This, in turn, allows the phone to operate at peak performance.

Next up is the battery. The ROG Phone 7 packs a dual 3,000mAh battery – giving it a total of 6,000mAh. As with the previous ROG phones, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate also comes with a 65W fast charging capability with support for Quick Charge 5.0 and PD Charging. There’s also reverse charging at 10W.

We initially tested the battery and were totally surprised to get a score of 24 hours and 24 minutes with PCMark Work 3.0 Battery Test on a single full charge (50% brightness, zero volume and in airplane mode).

ASUS claims it can also recharge from zero to 100% in under 42 minutes. We’ll share the results in our full review.

Let’s look at the camera setup for a bit as well. You get a triple camera setup here, headlined by a 50MP Sony IMX766 with f/1.9 aperture. This is paired with a 13MP ultrawide camera and a 5MP macro camera. The main camera can shoot up to 8K @ 24fps or 4K @ 60fps.

We will be taking more sample photos and videos as we explore the camera capabilities of this phone so watch out for that in our full review.

This phone has a lot of other features we don’t normally see in other flagship phones – like 3 microphones. Here, here and here. Two USB Type-C charging ports. One here and another one here. The dual SIM card slot looks really nice too. See, look here.

Overall, it’s the same ROG phone we’ve known and loved for years, plus the usual hardware upgrades, engineering refinements and a bit of design refresh.

ROG Phone 7 Ultimate specs:
6.78-inch AMOLED @ 2448 x 1080 pixels
165Hz refresh rate
Corning Gorilla Glass Victus
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
Qualcomm Adreno 740 GPU
16GB LPDDR5X RAM
512GB UFS 4.0
50MP Sony IMX766 f/1.9
13MP ultrawide f/2.2
5MP macro f/2.0
32MP front camera
8K UHD@24FPS / 4K UHD@60FPS
5G, Dual-SIM
WiFi-7
Bluetooth 5.3
NFC supported
GPS, Glonass, Galileo, BeiDou, QZSS, NavIC
Android 13
6000mAh, 65W charger
3.5mm earphone jack
173mm x 77mm x 10.3mm (dimensions)
239 grams (weight)
Storm White