You’d expect a smartphone with top of the line silicon designed to get the most out of both gaming and everyday use will come with a significant price tag. The Asus ROG Phone 9 starts at $999, and climbs up to $1499 for the Pro edition reviewed here..
You wouldn’t expect it to come with just two years of Android updates and an additional two years of security updates. The ROG Phone 9 faces this huge issue straight out of the gate. For many, that minimal support window is going to be a dealbreaker.
I’ll put that aside for the rest of the review and look at the hardware, but I’m already thinking that Asus should up this to five years of Android for the ROG Phone 9 to feel viable.
Asus’ previous gaming phone, the Asus ROG Phone 8 started the ROG Phone series down a new path; rather than go all out and focus purely on gamers, the ROG Phone 8 opened up to a more mainstream user base, which in turn diluted some of the gaming aspects of the phone. The handset’s design was more conservative, offered less thermal management hardware than previous handsets, and the garish bright colors and cyber-glow had been moved out of the phone and into a clip-on gaming peripheral.
I wondered at the time if Asus’ gamble to move away from focusing on gamers to welcome a wider audience would be the right decision. The comparison now would be with the likes of the Samsung Galaxies and Honor Magics of the world, as opposed to the more niche gaming phones from the likes of Nubia.
The Mainstream Ambitions Of The ROG Phone 9
With the ROG Phone 9 building on that mainstream direction, I’d have to presume that the feedback from the Phone 8 pointed to a continuation of the ethos within the Phone 9. This means that the two sides of the ROG Phone is still present. Is this a gaming phone that wants to join in with the mainstream, or is it a mainstream phone looking to get some street cred with the gamers?
I think it’s the former. In part, that’s because the ROG Phone 8 feels more like an “S” update to the phone 8 rather than a new phone. It’s more than just a change of the chipset, although the inclusion of the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite processor means this is one of the fastest Android smartphones on the market today.
That comes with another advantage… the ROG Phone 9 benefits from the power management of the 8 Elite. Coupled with Asus adding a 5800 mAh battery in the case, you are going to get some excellent battery life. In regular use, the phone will go for two days and partly into a third day before needing to be charged—which can use the bundled 65W fast charger o 15W wireless charging.
This is, of course, is going to get cut down when you switch to gaming, but you have proportionately more endurance than the previous ROG Phone 8.
What’s Been Bumped Up In The ROG Phone 9 Spec Sheet?
Two key areas that have been improved are an increase in RAM, which helps performance in gaming but also allows for smoother task switching and app usage when the phone is just a phone.
Perhaps most important is the increased passive cooling capacity. Top performance on any device, especially a smartphone, generates a lot of heat. If that heat is not drawn away from the chipset fast enough, the handset will have to throttle back, so this is a much-needed design decision.
Asus has added “a little bit more” to many areas of the phone. You have more battery (up to 5800 mAh from 5500 mAh on the ROG Phone 8), the screen refresh upper limit is now 185 MHz (although not many titles will support this, put it down as future proofing), the rear camera picks up improvements to the gimballed stabilisation… again this all feels like a point upgrade to the ROG Phone 8 rather than a brand new handset.
The more subtle design language of the Phone 8 continues here. It’s an angular design with a decent chamfer on the edges, which makes it blocky but not harsh. The camera island touches on a 45-degree language with a sliced-off corner—emphasised by the diagonal slash on the rear of the handset.
You’ll also find the AniMe display on the back of the phone. It’s not a traditional display. Instead, there are 648 LED lights embedded in the surface, which only appear when in use. It brings a bit of life to notifications; you can leave the phone face down but still get nudged when something’s up. Asus has also included some straightforward games you could play on the screen, such as the classic Pong bat’n’ball but these feel more proof of concept than something to sell someone on the device.
Especially since you can turn the phone over and get some games with slightly higher definitions.
The Gaming Side Of The ROG Phone 9
So, how does it perform as a gaming handset?
It’s probably worth picking out the impact that some of the compromises have made to the experience. The bezels around the screen have been reduced in size to feel more in line with consumer expectations of a premium phone, which has a knock-on effect that reduces the audio and visual impact of the experience.
The first is the lack of forward-firing speakers. Without the extra space afforded by bezels, the speakers point out of the handset but to the sides. That’s wildly different to two stereo speakers astride a landscape screen, putting you into the gaming world. The ROG Phone 9 does have a headphone jack, that gives that stereo experience as well as no-lag audio, but the vanilla option is focused less on the gaming mode of the phone than general use.
Then you have the selfie camera. It’s one of those features every phone needs, but manufacturers can decide how to implement it. Asus chose to have a punch-out camera and obscure part of the screen rather than mount it in a larger bezel, which shows how form has come ahead of function.
To finish this triple, I want to call out the USB port. Like previous ROG Phones, the ROG Phone 9 has two USB-C ports. You have a secondary port on the long left-hand side, which might sound unusual until you shift the phone into landscape mode for gaming and realise that your hand covers the standard port and this secondary port is not at the base of the screen. You can have a charging cable here without interfering with your play.
Yet the main USB port feels awkward in another way. It’s not centred in the way that many smartphones are. Critically, the vast majority of third-party controllers expect the USB port to be in the middle of the phone. The off-centre port on the ROG Phone 9 forces it to sit awkwardly high on some controlers and is incompatible with others that wrap around the base.
ROG’s own Tessen controller doesn’t have any side walls that stop the higher mounting of the ROG Phone 9, and certainly, the marketing suggests that this is the look that the Tessen/Phono combo was looking for, but the off-centre USB means that ROG is taking a lot of the choice away from users.
There’s one element to the ROG Phone 9 that boosts the gaming nature of the smartphone: the AeroActive Cooler X Pro. This is available as a separate purchase as an accessory for the hardened gamer. Clipping around the back of the ROG Phone 9, it includes a hefty cooling fan to draw hot air away from the rear to keep the operating temperature way down. It also offers two additional physical trigger buttons that complements the air-trgger based shoulder buttons to give a more console-controller experience.
The weight distribution does feel top-heavy when the AeroActive is attached. Reaching for the air-trigger shoulder buttons and the rear triggers and placing your thumbs on the screen for an FPS control system does not feel super-secure in my hands. It’s fine if developers allow you to place your thumbs high up on the screen for the virtual joysticks, but that’s not always the case.
Given where the cooling fan needs to be, and the physical connection that the Tensor controller requires, there is unfortnatly no way that you can use both accessories at the same time which feels like the ultimate combination to get the full experience. Alas, not to be. Which is a shame because switching to a bluetooth controller with the AeroActive attached is a nice compact gaming solution.
The final piece of the gaming puzzle is the software. Asus continues to use Armoury Crate to tailor the gaming experience. It allows you to tweak the performance settings for each app or game individually. You can turn up the graphical power on some games, cut it back, lean into procesing power on another, and mix and match on a per-title basis.
In here you can also define your controls, so if a game does not support the air-trigger shoulder buttons or the AeroActive triggers natively (which, let’s face it, is likely), you can map these to keypresses or actions in Armoury Crate, again on a per-title basis. A quick sweep down from the corner of the screen brings it up; a tap sends it away.
Armoury Crate has been present in the ROG Phone family for many years and is mature now. There’s an online database of controller and configuration files for the vast majority of gaming titles that can act as a starting point for your setups.
Taking all of these pros and cons together, how does it perform as a gaming handset?
Some of the most demanding games on Android, think the likes of Genshin Impact, which have pushed the limits of gaming smartphones sit comfortably at the 60fps mark with the graphics turned all the way up. The power of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite comes into play here, but so do Asus’ engineering decisions that focus on gaming; cooling both from the internal design and the AeroActive allow not only peak performance but enables you to keep playing for significantly longer sessions without the need to throttle everything back.
Going thirty minutes is not a problem with the ROG Phone 9, especially with the AeroAcive offering the extra heat dissipation.
Control-wise, the touchscreen’s responsiveness helps with your ‘twitchy’ games, so you can do a quick sweep of a crosshair, jump to a distant platform, or just snapping a quick look behind you.
There are also some subtle advantages when you play less intensive games. Balatro has recently arrived on Android, and the rouge-like card game is tearing up the charts. It doesn’t need all the graphical horsepower and high frame rates… which means that Armoury Crate software can be set up to turn everything down when Balatro is started, offering you more battery life and endurance when titles requiring less power are run.
I still feel that the ROG Phone 7 was Asus’ peak design for a gaming phone because the compromises were all in favour of the gaming experience. Gaming phones remain a niche product line but one that has many players. As the baseline of performance and graphical power of a ‘standard’ smartphone (albeit at flagship levels) continues to rise, the pure gaming phone is losing part of its identity.
There remains a market for the ultra-focused device, but I don’t think this is the Asus ROG Phone 9. The ROG Phone 8 has taken the line down a different direction, and the ROG Phone 9 has tweaked that.
Asus has put together a “Gaming Smartphone… For Everyone Else.” The graphics have enough power, and the computing needs to deliver a great experience. There’s also a feeling that this can be used as your regular smartphone without too many complications. I can’t decide if this is a niche on a niche (coming from the gaming side) or a niche on a widely popular site (coming from the premium everyday regular handsets).
Given this is the second handset going in the latter direction, it’s probably a safe assumption that Asus has been able to find a market in this space, a market that isn’t an identikit phone although the ROG Phone 9 does try to hide the gaming prowess in something a little more subtle than the average gaming smartphone.
The package works… but I can’t get past it coming with only two years of software updates. Given the high price of the ROG Phone 9, that one fact makes it incredibly difficult to recommend.
Disclaimer: Asus supplied an Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro and accessories for review purposes…
