Getting started
Unboxing
ASUS has taken the unboxingexperience of the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition one stepfurther . It’s like being in a cyberpunk James Bond movie, with Q guiding you through the features. In short, we don’t want to spoil the experience for those who buy the phone. For the rest of you, you’ll find unboxing videos on YouTube. Well worth a look.
Design
ASUS now presents the ROG Phone not only as a gaming phone, but also as a premium phone.
The ROG Phone has been slimmed down, while retaining the same screen size. The edges are thinner, and the front camera is positioned behind the screen. However, ASUS has opted for a better front image thanks to an eyelet, rather than having the sensor covered by the screen. For us, this is a big plus compared with the Redmagic, which surely has the worst front-facing camera.
In terms of thickness, ASUS has also fine-tuned its baby, reducing it from 10.49mm to 8.9mm… Well, that’s if you forget to measure the area where the photo sensors are located, which is measured at 13.45mm. The contours are rounded, making it very pleasant to hold.
Despite the 5500 mAh battery, the device is lightweight. ASUS has also chosen to place the chip in the center and the battery on either side, and this has its advantages. Firstly, the phone is perfectly balanced when held horizontally, and therefore in a gaming position. Secondly, the heat generated by the chip is concentrated in the center of the device, perfect for long gaming sessions. Finally, this component arrangement enables ASUS to offer us a fan module for heat dissipation that will be perfectly centered.
Screen
The screen is an OLED slab, more precisely a flexible E6 AMOLED. This explains the slimming treatment, but also the excellent colors. The screen can also run at up to 165 Hz, although you’ll have to find a game that supports 165 Hz and, above all, where it makes a difference. After all, the FPS we tested were often below 100ips.
Cooling
The ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition comes with AeroActive Cooler X. This module is installed on the back of the phone mainly for heat dissipation, but also has a 3.5 jack, RGB and 2 configurable trigger keys.
Battery and charging
At 5500mAh, it’s 500mAh less than the ROG Phone 7, but will last for 24 hours in normal use. But as soon as you activate “X” mode for gaming, you’ll be eating up battery percentages like hotcakes.
The ROG Phone 8 Pro comes with a fast charger, which ASUS calls HyperCharge adapter, which allows charging at 65 watts. We’re told it takes 39 minutes to charge, but in reality our tests went well beyond this, with a 53-minute charge on a hot phone following a gaming session, and 45 minutes when cold. You can also recharge the phone in 15W wireless mode using the Qi 1.3 standard.
Audio
The phone is equipped with stereo speakers, perfect for playing games, watching videos or movies. However, the speaker on the bottom of the ROG Phone 8 has considerably more treble than the other. And in gaming, this results in a less-than-balanced spatialization without headphones.
Finally, a 3.5 mm headphone jack is perfect for gamers who don’t want the latency of Bluetooth headphones .
Other
The ROG Phone 8 is a premium phone, and as a result it has finally been awarded an IP68 water resistance rating. As far as we know, it’s the only gaming phone that can claim this. The AniMe Vision mini-LED screen can display a camera icon when you take a photo, a music viewer when you listen to music, or customized animations that you can configure in the settings. You can, of course, configure the screen in the settings and even unlock animations. This screen can also be deactivated if you don’t want it all to flash.
Games require a fast response, which is why the screen has a multi-touch sampling rate of 730 Hz. This figure corresponds to the number of times the screen’s sensors update to register touch data per second. By comparison, gaming mice generally have a sampling rate of 1,000 Hz (1 ms).
