The "Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders" vs ROG5 Preview: Branded vs Original

Display Measurement

The display of the SSI is generally no different from the ROG Phone 5 – which in turn wasn’t much of a change form the ROG Phone III. At 2448 x 1080 on a 6.78” it’s not quite the sharpest and naturally doesn’t compete with newer QHD 120Hz devices on the market, however it’s still enough for most people.

The phone really lacks any kind of modern panel technologies, such as VRR, and it’s also notable that it has worse viewing angles, which I suspect is due to the glass substrate OLED panel.

Colour calibrations is identical to the ASUS ROG Phone 5 – and comes with the same software options for customisation. We’re measuring the “Standard” preset which targets sRGB colour space for general content.

We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using Portrait Display's CalMAN software.

In terms of brightness, manual maximum brightness goes to 450 nits, which when in automatic brightness mode and under brightly lit environmental conditions, the device goes up to 734 nits full screen white. It’s a generally very competitive screen, though not quite up to par with cutting-edge devices.

Portrait Displays CalMAN

In terms of greyscale colour accuracy, the phone has one of the most perfect D65 white points I’ve ever seen in a device at 6524K, so a big applause for ASUS there. Unfortunately, the gamma isn’t great, and is consistently higher than the 2.2 target one uses for consumer content.

What this means is that tones, particularly at lower intensities, will look darker than they’re supposed to.

Portrait Displays CalMAN

The phone does adequately in the saturations accuracy, however we see that reds are off-hue, and in general mid-point levels on all colours are undersaturated.

Portrait Displays CalMAN

The GMB patches of common tones and skin tones actually fares well for the SSI when it comes to colours themselves, with a dEITP of 2.17 when luminance compensated, but because of the higher gamma target, we’re seeing the aggregate score be quite bad, and we see the differences in the colour comparator strip.

In general, the screen of the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders is essentially identical to that of the ROG Phone 5. The problem is that that panel wasn’t very competitive in the 2021 device landscape. Rather low resolution for the device size, non-competitive viewing angles due to a cheaper glass substrate OLED panel, and the lack of any power saving features make this a strictly 2019 era flagship screen. That’s just not really a fitting combination for a $1500 phone.