Asus is launching its new ROG Phone 8 series at CES 2024. Per usual, there is more than one flagship phone to satisfy even the most discerning gamers. These are the ROG Phone 8, ROG Phone 8 Pro, and ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition. But also, this year’s ROG phones are a bit different.
If their design wasn’t a dead giveaway, Asus has added a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to these new phones from a proper IP68 rating to wireless charging, and so, it seems buyers are finally getting their money’s worth out of them. Because let’s face it, these phones don’t come cheap.
Asus ROG Phone 8 series prices
The ROG Phone 8 with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage will set you back by USD 1,099.99 (roughly Rs 91,500). The ROG Phone 8 Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage by USD 1,199.99 (roughly 1 lakh). While the top-of-the-line ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition with 24GB RAM and 1TB storage can go up to USD 1,499.99 (1.25 lakh). In India, the ROG Phone 8 Pro will sell for Rs 94,999 and the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition for Rs 1,19,999 (no ROG Phone 8 for India at the time of writing).
Asus ROG Phone 8 series hot take
Aside from more RAM and storage, the higher-end ROG Phone 8 Pro and Pro Edition, get you Asus’ signature LED dot-matrix displays on their backs while the regular Phone 8 makes do with an RGB logo. The overall design is a big departure from everything that has come before. While in the past, you’d expect these phones to be big and bulky, Asus has slimmed them down in this generation by a big and noticeable margin. They measure “only” 8.9mm versus the ROG Phone 7 which was nearly 11mm. Wow. They still weigh quite a bit, but not as much as their predecessors— 225g versus 239g.
Each year, Asus modifies the internal cooling mechanism in these phones and the ROG Phone 8 is no exception. If anything, with IP68 and a sleeker design coming to these phones, presumably it was harder to get it all right. But even with all the technical challenges, the company is promising up to 20 percent better thermal management thanks to a new conduction cooling system that uses boron nitride and copper to extract heat directly from the underlying Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and dissipate it via the back cover, passively of course. An active cooling system is also available if you can pitch in for Asus’ AeroActive Cooler accessory —which is also getting an upgrade in this generation— lowering surface temperature by up to a claimed 26 degrees Celsius.
The rest of the package is as follows— 6.78-inch 165Hz OLED display with up to 2,500 nits of peak brightness, 5,500mAh battery with 65W fast wired and 15W wireless charging, triple rear cameras headlined by a 50-megapixel wide, 32-megapixel front-facing camera, and Android 14 sprinkled with AI quirks such as AI grabber and AI wallpaper (the former lets you extract text from games and search the Internet for things like a walkthrough, while the latter uses stable diffusion to build custom wallpapers and is “coming soon”.)
As impressive as these new ROG Phones are, their pricing could be a big deterrent making them out of reach for most buyers. ROG’s name and brand value (compared to a Samsung or iPhone) outside the gamer community and the fact that Asus has been criminally slow with availability especially in markets like India, don’t help their case either. But one thing is clear. With these new devices, serious gamers (who can afford them) don’t need to look elsewhere, any more. It’s game on.
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