Asus ROG Phone 5 video teardown shows why it snaps in half

A few days ago the Asus ROG Phone 5 shocked the world by essentially snapping in half when subjected to a traditional bend test. Considering none of its predecessors had such issues, this was intriguing, to say the least.

We were eager to find out what might explain the situation, and luckily Zack from JerryRigEverything has now done a video teardown of the ROG Phone 5, which you can see embedded below.

He tries to get to the bottom of the snapping incident, and taking off the back of the device instantly reveals an inside that's unlike anything else we've ever seen, with two separate batteries sitting above and below a middle board. There's simply no internal structural reinforcement ridge, the phone has only the frame to depend on.

And the snapping in half occurred exactly at the points where the frame is most vulnerable because of cutouts. So that probably explains everything. The ROG Phone 5 also has a pretty big cooling vapor chamber, but it's no match for the one employed by Sony's Xperia Pro.