The Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro is still very expensive, and its still a superb gaming phone.
Even so, this remains a brilliantly balanced gaming phone.
At $1,099 / 949 (roughly AU$1,600), it costs less, too.
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For clarity, we’ll be making distinctions between all three models throughout this review.
Choose the Pro model and you wont even get RGB lighting.
These are turned off by default, and in this state, you wouldnt even know they were there.
Finally, we have a gaming phone that wont quit if you drop it in a body of water.
Theres a 2.6x larger cooling area and a slightly faster fan speed to compensate.
You now only get two, rather than four.
Personally, Id rather that than the Red Magic 9 Pros woeful in-display selfie cam solution.
That would also facilitate proper front-firing speakers, which are missing here.
Two vital gaming design elements have been retained, however.
They can even be split into two for a total of four physical controls.
This makes it much more pleasant to plug and play while youre playing landscape games.
And yes, there is still a 3.5mm headphone jack for that vital low-latency personal audio.
With auto-brightness switched off, I measured a maximum brightness of around 775 nits, which is excellent.
The Red Magic 9 Pro, by way of comparison, could only hit 445 nits.
Head into gaming mode, however, and it can ramp up even further to 165Hz.
Thankfully, Asus has done just that.
It starts with a vastly improved main camera, fitted with the same 1/1.56-inchSonyIMX890 sensor as theOnePlus 11.
Its not just night shots that the gimbal helps with either, with video footage also kept super-steady.
The photographic improvements continue with the provision of a 32MP 3x telephoto camera.
Previous ROG Phone models havent bothered, supplying a pointless macro camera instead.
Still, Asus has supplied a freeform lens, which reduces distortion towards the edges.
Asuss AI image processing didnt always call the scene right in my experience.
Which, given its pricing, you might well expect it to do.
However, given the calamitous history of gaming phone cameras, this represents a huge step forwards into respectability.
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Thankfully, its an absolute barnstormer, with only the barest of wrinkles to speak off.
Lets start with the specs, because theyre all cutting edge.
You get QualcommsSnapdragon 8 Gen 3chipset, which is going to be the go-to chip for 2024.
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In a pricey gaming phone such as this, though, it seems far more reasonable.
With such components at its disposal, Asus has turned the performance tap on full.
However, it falls short of the Red Magic 9 Pro, which scored a nigh-on perfect 99.7%.
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The reason for this is almost certainly the ROG Phones lack of an integrated fan cooling system.
stock) home screen layout.
I dearly wish more (read: all) Android manufacturers did this.
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Essentially, ROG UI is the same as Zen UI on the Zenfone 10.
There are also a couple of third-party apps pre-installed in Instagram and Facebook, but its nothing egregious.
This is most useful when you want to map those Air Trigger controls.
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While the ROG Phone 7 had a 6,000mAh battery, the new model only has a 5,500mAh cell.
Charging from empty got me to 100% in around 40 minutes.
Its another feature that makes this the most easy gaming phone to live with.
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Should you buy the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro?
The Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro is the first one that doesnt.
These phones can tick some of the same boxes, and a few others besides.
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Nubia Red Magic 9 ProThe Red Magic 9 Pro is the ROG Phone 8 Pros major gaming phone rival.
However, its more gaming-focused, and should now be cheaper too.
For at least a week of that time, the 8 Pro was my everyday phone.
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Im a freelance journalist who got his start writing about mobile games in the pre-smartphone era.
I now write about consumer tech, games, and culture for a number of top websites.
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