Asus has given its ROG gaming phone line a redesign that keeps its focus on games while also improving general phone function. Announced Monday at CES 2024, the Asus ROG Phone 8 and Phone 8 Pro are powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. They pack a 6.78-inch display with a refresh rate as high as 165Hz and — in the Pro edition — specs as high as 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage. And in a first for Asus’ gaming phone line, the Phone 8 series includes wireless charging and IP68 resistance for water and dust.
The phones now adopt a punch-hole front-facing camera style, which eliminates the large top bezel that hid the front-facing camera in prior ROG phones. While this does mean games played at fullscreen will now have a small interruption of space around the punch-hole, Asus also gives you the option to slightly shrink the display area to avoid the front-facing camera. This differs from rival RedMagic’s strategy of including its selfie camera underneath the display for an uninterrupted full screen, but that approach often comes at the cost of image quality on the screen.
The Asus ROG Phone 8 series includes a 50-megapixel main camera lens, a 32-megapixel telephoto lens and a 13-megapixel ultrawide lens.
Asus has also revamped its cameras, primarily a 50-megapixel main camera that’s supported by a stabilizer — Asus calls it the 6-Axis Hybrid Gimbal Stabilizer 3.0 — for smoothing out videos along with photos. That main camera is joined by a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 32-megapixel telephoto lens with a 3x optical zoom. Around front, a 32-megapixel selfie camera is what’s now included within the display of the device.
While the ROG Phone 8 series now includes IP68 water resistance, that also means that the phone itself has had to change up its cooling system for heat exhaust. Asus says the Phone 8 now uses conduction cooling in order to send heat from the internals to the phone’s back cover. Asus is also releasing a new AeroActive Cooler X attachment for enhancing cooling, but it will no longer open a door in the back of the phone for that purpose like last year’s ROG Phone 7 Ultimate did.
