The Asus ROG Phone 5 is one of the most powerful phones you can buy today, but all that performance doesn’t come cheap. You will have to shell out more than $ 1,000 to get one, which makes durability that much more important. Asus did not hesitate to make its design as large and robust as necessary to fit a Snapdragon 888, 16 GB of RAM and dual 3,000 mAh batteries at each end of the phone. Unfortunately, if you thought that a phone as bulky as the ROG Phone 5 would behave decently in a durability torture test, get ready.
Zack’s video on JerryRigEverything starts off well, with ROG Phone 5’s Gorilla Glass Victus picking up the expected scratches at a Mohs hardness level of 6. The metal edges of the phone can pick up some additional scratches from Zack’s pocket knife, but, overall, it looks like the phone is surviving the usual challenges as well as you would expect.
It is not until the curvature test that everything will go sour. At the first turn, the phone is able to crack along the antenna line embedded in the chassis. Although things are still functional at this point, the haptic module inside the ROG Phone 5 is damaged, omitting a hissing noise instead of the normal vibration. A second front curve breaks the screen forever, although the Victus glass that covers it can stay strong. A final curve finds another weak point along the side USB-C port, breaking the rear window and killing the device forever.
In short, it’s not what you want to see from any phone, let alone a $ 1,200 gaming monster like this. Check out the video through the embed above to see the full details.
