Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate review

Gaming phones are not new to the market – in fact, there are more of them than ever, with Asus ROG, Redmagic, and Black Shark all brands devoted to gaming-centric devices.

Asus ROG may be feeling the heat from the best gaming phones, but it remains the market leader and hasn’t slowed down its bi-annual release cycle for its ROG phones.

I’ve been testing the top-of-the-line ROG Phone 7 Ultimate, and I am very impressed. It’s a monster of a phone with bleeding-edge screen tech, cooling features, and software add-ons to please the most discerning gamer.

If you want a phone that will turn heads for its looks and power as well as play all your favourite Android games flawlessly, then all you need is an eye-watering £1,199/€1,399.

The high price may well be this phone’s undoing.

Design & build

• Bulky and heavy
• Slick matt white design
• Cooling ‘AeroActive’ back flap

You’ll either love or hate the look of the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate. I thought I’d hate it, snooty as I thought I was about modern gamer aesthetics. To my great surprise, after a few weeks with the phone in my pocket I am fond of it.

Though the regular ROG Phone 7 (which I have not tested) comes in black or white, the Ultimate edition I reviewed only comes in matt white. It feels great, showing absolutely no fingerprints and is far preferable to the glossy finish of so many other smartphones.

Far from plain, the back is interrupted by a symmetrical design punctuated with trtiple cameras as well as the two alien additions of a small LED strip of screen and a black flap. This is called the AeroActive Portal, a cooling hole that automatically opens when the included AeroActive Cooler 7 fan is attached to the phone.

On paper this sounds laughably over-engineered, and it is! But I took a nerdy glee in seeing it all work. It’s garish, but it’s well thought out and feels complete.

The build quality is excellent, with a two-tone white on the back with ROG branding and a few blue accents on the power button, a camera lens, and the SIM tray. The sides are rounded and there are two USB-C ports – one to the left on the bottom so it’s less in the way when landscape gaming and another on the left edge to attach and power the AeroActive fan.

With all these ports and holes, the phone is only IP54 water and dust resistant, so won’t survive a submerged dunk. It’ll sink fast too at 239g.

Screen & speakers

• 165Hz 6.78in AMOLED
• Extra mini rear display
• Excellent speakers

The screen is flat, as you would hope for a gaming phone. There’s a thick bezel at the top and bottom meaning there’s no notch or cut out in the display, plus it’s something to hold onto while you’re gaming in landscape.

The 6.78in screen is a superbly sharp AMOLED with a variable 165Hz refresh rate. It’s HDR10+ certified, has up to 1,000 nits of brightness, and has a high 720Hz touch sampling rate.

It’s not the brightest display out there, which I noticed when using it as a phone, but when gaming in most lights I had no complaints. It’s a good size, and the phone feels immersive to play games on for long periods.

I also noticed the coating Asus has put on the surface of the screen “for reducing friction when hand sweating”. Ew. It works, though, my thumbs gliding around the Gorilla Glass Victus display despite the clamminess of a half-hour Call of Duty session.

A PMOLED colour strip screen on the back of the phone is there for aesthetics and can be switched off, though it does display notification badges in colour if you leave the phone face down. You can toggle to off to save power.

The dual fron- facing speakers are hands down the best I’ve ever heard on a phone. The have full, booming sound that helps to further immerse you in gameplay. I was genuinely stunned at how good they were on first use.

Specs & performance

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
• 16GB RAM and 512GB storage
• Included cooler accessory

The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, the most powerful of Qualcomm’s arsenal at the time of the phone’s launch in April 2023.

Phones such as the Galaxy S23 Ultra and OnePlus 11 also use this chipset but the combination of additional, somewhat OTT specs on the ROG Phone push it above those phones in terms of raw gaming performance and capability.

Despite the upgrade in chip, the specs are otherwise incredibly similar to the ROG Phone 6 Pro and ROG Phone 6D Ultimate, so the generational step up is very minimal.

The phone has 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of fast UFS 4.0 storage, both top of the range. With the Qualcomm Adreno 740 GPU, the thing flies.

I played several demanding game titles on the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate and encountered flawless performance. The graphically intense Call of Duty Mobile, Asphalt 9, Genshin Impact, and FIFA Mobile can sometimes bring capable phone hardware to a standstill, but not this phone.

This means it’s a dobble to smash out a few rounds of Mario Run or Might Doom on the bus, too. Asus also includes its overwhelming but overall excellent Game Genie software that lets you turn off notifications while you’re playing, adjust the screen refresh rate, and a ton of other customisations to make the gaming experience your own.

Bundled in the box is a clip on shell case and the AeroActive Cooler 7, a fan accessory powered by the phone’s side mounted USB-C port. It’s huge overkill, but I loved using it. The design is clever, adding four physical shoulder buttons that you can program to specific moves in games, coupled with the touch sensitive shoulder trigger buttons on the right edge of the device.

After a bit of a learning curve to adjust how you hold the bulky creation, it did improve my shooting accuracy on Call of Duty, but for simpler games it’s unnecessary to have more buttons. But you might want to clip it on to cool the phone down, as it does run hot given the loads the system is put under by lengthy gaming sessions.

Asus says it has improved the surface area of the vapour chamber within the phone, and I found the software clever enough to pick which of four levels to set the fan to. You have to have the bundled charger connected to the Cooler to get to the top ‘Frosted’ level as it needs more power than the phone can deliver.

Check out the phone’s top performance compared to the last-gen of ROG Phone, plus some recent popular smartphones:

Software & updates

• Dedicated gaming & performance software
• Android 13
• Only two guaranteed Android updates

As well as Game Genie, Asus’s Armory Crate app is an excellent way to access games and monitor system performance. You can get a read out of the CPU and GPU temperatures, see storage and memory usage, change performance modes, AeroActive Cooler modes, and shoulder trigger settings.

The level of control is amazing, letting you select which performance mode you want certain games to launch in to make sure they run well.

It even knows to run AAA games in ‘X-Mode’ to boost performance, while simpler arcade games are preset at more balanced settings. The attention to detail is astounding, and you will get lost in the options.

The phone ships with Android 13 and Asus promises two OS updates to Android 14 and 15 but four years of security updates, which means it’ll be updated till 2027.

You can run the phone with either ROG UI or Zen UI – the former is a decidedly gamer aesthetic theme with RGB-like flashes, fark colours, and stylised icons, the latter is Asus’s regular smartphone software you’d find on the Zenfone 9. You can mix and match certain styles from both, true to the phone’s customisation ideals.

Camera & video

• 50Mp main rear camera
• Basic ultrawide and macro

This is a gaming phone, so cameras are not its forte. The 50Mp main sensor is the Sony IMX766, the same found in the Oppo Find X3 Pro from 2021. It’s by no means a bad sensor, but the fact it has been around for two years shows Asus skimped a bit here.

It takes great clear shots with good detail in daylight, and has an acceptable night mode that helps keep low light photos in focus and better lit. You can get lossless 2x images with zoo but there’s no optical zoom lens here.

Less impressive is the 13Mp ultra-wide, which still capture good detail in the centre of frame but stretches the image at the edges. The 8Mp macro camera helped me find out how dirty my MacBook keyboard was but distorts if closer than 4cm away.

On the front is a capable 32Mp selfie camera that is first and foremost for gaming and video streaming purposes, but bins photos to 8Mp to take not-great selfie or group photos.

Battery & charging

• Expansive 6000mAh battery
• 65W wired charging
• No wireless charging

Asus crams in 6000mAh of battery to the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate by having two separate 3000mAh cells.

This total is 1000mAh more than what’s in the Galaxy S23 Ultra, but it’s needed given Asus expects people who buy it to be running power-hungry games most of the time.

If you don’t play any games then you’ll comfortably get two days on a single charge. With games fired up and the phone powering the fan accessory, you’ll run down fast and need to recharge midway through the day or certainly in time for the next day.

Charging is fairly fast, thankfully. The included charger tops the phone up at 65W, in my test returning 72% of the battery in half an hour. There’s no option for wireless charging however.

Price & availability

The Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate costs £1,199/€1,399. You can buy it direct from Asus.

US pricing and availability is yet to be announced.

This makes it the most expensive gaming phone you can buy alongside last year’s ROG Phone 6D Ultimate. Asus also launched a regular ROG Phone 7 in April 2023 for £999/€1,199, which I have not tested.

The iPhone 14 Pro Max costs the same but at that price only has 128GB storage, while the Galaxy S23 Ultra costs £50 more and gets you 256GB.

If you want similar performance you could opt for the £899 ROG Phone 6 and not miss out on much, or check out our list of the best gaming phones for options at a range of prices.

Verdict

The Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate is just that: the ultimate gaming phone.

It has top of the range specs, a superb display, a battery big enough to cope with the games it churns through, and the most customisable software settings I’ve ever seen in a phone.

You also pay big for all these features, with a price akin to the most expensive smartphones from Apple and Samsung. But this phone comes with 512GB storage and a charger and cooling fan accessory in the box, so if you are a hardcore mobile gamer at least Asus won’t skimp on the extras.

It’s a big, heavy phone though and the design is garish, and you have to ask yourself if you really do need all its power. Asus’s four years of security updates is good enough for me to happily recommend this phone, but there are cheaper options if you don’t need something quite so overkill.

Specs

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
• Android 13 (ROG UI & Zen UI)
• 6.78in 165Hz AMOLED display
• Qualcomm Adreno 740
• 16GB LPDDR5X RAM
• 512GB UFS 4.0 storage
• Cameras:
  • 50Mp main sensor
  • 13Mp ultrawide
  • 8Mp macro
  • 32Mp front facing
• Wi-Fi 6E (Wi-Fi 7 ready)
• Dual SIM dual standby
• Bluetooth 5.3
• 6000mAh battery
• 65W wired charging
• 173 x 77 x 10.3 mm
• 239g