I have used the ROG phone 2 as my daily driver for a month now and it is about time I give what I feel like would be a minimum usage period to understand what you just bought. As I said in my earlier post on the unboxing and early impressions, there should be a follow-up, and here it is. The first impression was a bit neutral and perspective ridden. More so it is after a month of use.
In the first week I was into a lot of buyer’s remorse. So much felt like selling it someone interested. The main reason for that was its bigness. It doesnt fit into medium size pockets and since the protection isnt much, you have to be very careful when carrying it. There were no cases or screen guards available at that time and it was a bit hard handling the device.
Game play was hard too, fitting the hand to cover all trigger actions ideally, calibrating the sensitivity, changing the controls in pubg, whew, it is hard work. But now that I had spent the cash to buy it, I decided to learn to use it.
By the second week I was kinda used to the phone’s size and hardships involved, so much so that I had then started liking the size. Believe me, this isn’t where the liking started cause there are some discoveries which made me question my choice in buying the phone. At the end of the second week I found out about the red tint problem with the amoled screen and with a lot of experimenting and online discussions it was clear that this is with all devices and at low brightness over a grey colour background. Based on some local nerdy conversations it felt that the calibration of the screen on how it should output grays at low brightness settings needs to be tweaked at the kernel. But hey, “local” “nerdy”. And I am no expert in screen calibrations.
Another let down was the option of app scaling, which believe me is a mixed bag. Some games understand this by filling it with content, others just scale the output, the latter being ugly. Try playing NFS NL, with and without app scaling and you will understand what I am talking about. OK, so the app may be to blame there. But, and with a seriously capital ‘B’, the app doesn’t centre itself when app scaling is “off”. The application shifts to the left leaving a black patch on the right giving it a feel of a development board. The game does work, but hey. Gaming phone. Display is kinda very important, ain’t it?
Enter third week. Now having been used to these discoveries and revelations, I quickly had to search for something to go back to liking this device. And that I did. So much so that I now I don’t want to part with it.
I tried to share the phone screen using a type-c to HDMI adapter and it didn’t work. Kind of a let down until I tried the same using the side port. Voila, insane goodness. The side port is way more feature rich than the one at the bottom, and it includes video output to my 22 inch monitor. The setup was like this:
1. 22 inch monitor
2. The Rog 2 phone
3. Type C to multi-port adapter (ideally with power-in)
4. My offbeat ripjaw gaming mouse (reviewed in an early post)
5. Angry birds 2
I hope you see what I saw on my monitor. You can control the game with a mouse, pulling over the catapult and thanks to the front speakers, a couple of hours of gaming goodness. This works on other games too, but you need to fix a USB joystick/mouse/keyboard based on the game support.
In the third week I managed to order a tempered glass and a TPU case with bumper extensions on the corners.
The 4th week began with installing the screen guard and the case. Let me tell you, after 2nd weeks agony, it has only been a joyride with this phone. Barring the app scaling and red tint, which you eventually get used to, the phone is mighty fun. You don’t need to charge it everyday and you can use it to your heart’s content before even needing to look at the battery bar.
Though I still do not feel that this was my best decision, I certainly am not sad that I made it. Looking forward to more testing and posts on the software side of things as I still haven’t tested it to the extent I did to the hardware.