[CES 2024] ASUS ROG Phone 8 Series Tones Down Its Gamer Looks, Brings AI Features Onboard

ASUS ROG Phone 8 Series Tones Down Its Gamer Looks, Brings AI Features Onboard

Meet the eighth iteration of ASUS’s gaming smartphone – the ROG Phone 8 series. The company called it “the biggest redesign in its history,” by shedding away its heavily cyberpunk-like design of old to a more minimalist “lifestyle phone for gamers.”

In the effort to shift the smartphone into the mainstream crowd, the phone’s design has undergone a few changes – both inside and outside. Firstly, the chassis is now 15% thinner at 8.9mm thick and slashed its original 239g weight from its predecessor down to 225g. However, there is an unfortunate side effect for those who liked the phone’s large battery: it has now been shrunk down to 5,500mAh from the 6,000mAh capacity, which was maintained in every single generation except the very first ROG Phone model in 2018.

For the hardware, the ROG Phone 8 series all comes equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC coupled with up to 24GB of LPDDR5X-8533 RAM and UFS 4.0 storage up to 1TB. This is coupled with the new Rapid-Cooling Conductor, as part of the GameCool 8 thermal design, which directly conducts the heat from the SoC to the rear cover of the phone. To combat the heat, the new AeroActive Cooler X, now 29% smaller than previous variants, offers temperature reduction as much as 26°C on the back cover, ASUS claims. The ingress protection rating is now IP68 – a first in gaming smartphones, and on par with virtually all the flagship smartphones on the market.

Display-wise, the new 6.78-inch Samsung E6 OLED panel can deliver a range of 1-120Hz with the use of LTPO technology, though it’s capable of running at 165Hz in gaming scenarios; like its predecessor, it’ll come with a 720Hz touch sampling rate to minimize input lag. The panel’s peak brightness is now boosted to 2,500 nits, and colors are tuned courtesy of Pixelworks to maintain peak color accuracy. And yes – it loses the slim bezel in exchange of a small hole-punch layout, making it one less smartphone to remain free of cutouts to this day.

Cameras haven’t been one of the main points of gaming smartphones, and that’s understandable for the most part. However, ASUS is bringing the big guns (and big bumps) for the ROG Phone 8 series, with a trio of sensors – starting with the main 50MP, 1/1.56″ f/1.9 Sony sensor (24mm equivalent), a 32MP 3x telephoto lens (a first in ROG Phone), and a 13MP ultrawide lens. On the front, you get a 32MP ultrawide sensor with FOV increased to 90°, and works better in low-light conditions thanks to a new RGBW sensor array.

And finally, we’re in 2024 – so here are the obligatory mentions of AI features. For starters, there’s the “AI Grabber” that works as an in-game text capture tool (think Google Lens but for games), “Semantic Search” helps sift through images in the gallery, and the self-explanatory AI Wallpaper feature that uses Stable Diffusion to generate wallpapers. Of course, the long-standing AI Noise Cancellation feature is also available for communications.

While the phone’s design has been toned down, you still have the RGB logo on the back of the phone (ROG Phone 8) or the 341-dot AniMe Matrix display (ROG Phone 8 Pro / Pro Edition) to customize and play around with. As a bonus, ASUS says you can unlock a secret animation if you tap your ROG Phone 8 Pro back-to-back with someone else’s. Only two colors will be offered – Rebel Grey and Phantom Black, and the former is exclusive to the standard model.

As for availability, ASUS Malaysia says the ROG Phone 8 series will “tentatively” be launched in Malaysia on January 30th, 2024. No pricing has been announced at this writing, however.

Pokdepinion: I guess gaming phones eventually “grow up” – just a small shame the battery is shrunk slightly as a result.