Oh, did I mention the headphone jack? This makes it one of the very few high-end smartphones with a port if you prefer to jack. Asus also goes against the grain of the competition and throws in a 65-watt charging brick, which doesn’t include a power supply these days. In the box
Much of it is the same as previous ROG phones. The latest lineup includes the Asus ROG Phone 9 ($1,000), ROG Phone 9 Pro ($1,200), and ROG Phone 9 Pro Edition ($1,500). The latter maximizes some of the Pro’s specs (like 24GB of RAM instead of 16GB) and 1TB of storage, and includes the Aeroactive Cooler X Pro in the box. Cooler X Pro brings back the subwoofer that used to be on the older model, boosting the bass of music played from the phone.
The 6.78-inch Phone 9 only has 85 mini-LEDs on the back, so it doesn’t have the full range of features. You can play some animations on it, but upgrade to the ROG Phone 9 Pro and you can use the haptic shoulder triggers to play arcade games at the same time. You’ll probably find a lot of shapes on the back of your phone in public.
It is powered by the newly announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which is currently the fastest processor in the Android world. Asus claims the CPU is 45 percent faster than the ROG Phone 8, along with a 40 percent faster GPU. The phone’s natural cooling capabilities have improved, such as the inclusion of a 57 percent larger graphite sheet, which dissipates heat to produce lower temperatures. Asus claims the most demanding mobile games, eg Ganesh Impact or Zenless Zone Zeroshould consistently hit 60 frames per second for smooth gameplay, even more if you pair it with cool attachments.
Other notable upgrades on the ROG Phone 8 are a bump in battery size from 5,500 mAh to 5,800 mAh, and the primary 50-megapixel camera now sports Asus’ fourth-generation stabilization technology. The company claims it provides 66 percent better motion compensation, hence the six-axis gimbal should Produce ultra-smooth footage when you record videos. Stability has generally been strong in my testing on previous ROG phones, but overall camera quality has generally been weak, so I’m interested to see how it fares now.
