Thanks for the tip, unfortunately I really dislike the idea of the screen being the externally facing portion of the phone.

Seems to me like presenting the most fragile part of the phone to the outside is less than ideal.

Typing this from a ZenFone 9.

I like the physical parts of it, camera's good, but OS leaves a bit to desire. The largest gripe which I experience daily is it's horrendous pocket detection, or rather lack thereof. Until I figured out what tap-to-wake and other combos to disable, it went off in my pocket and pocket dialed my emergency contact at least five times daily. Now I've only had issues once a month or so.

I put up with it, since there's no other brand making a similarly sized phone, with good camera and 3.5mm jack.

Personally I've just had issues with pocket mode not registering and combining that with liking tap-to-wake, lift-to-wake I ended up calling my emergency contact way too many times. Still not fixed.

Also, I thought it was standard to allow for forward/backward by long pressing the volume buttons, but that option isn't available apparently either.

It's battery optimization is also a bit shite to be honest, however I don't know of any manufacturer that doesn't run afoul when it comes to that aspect.

Minor gripes really, but it feels like it could be more polished and while the UI isn't modified too atrociously, given the above issues I'm wary of what else they've modified under the hood.

Again not natively unfortunately, but Guild Wars 2 runs pretty well, even on the steam deck!

The base game is free to play, so no problem in testing it.