I can’t wait to review the Asus ROG Phone 9

At the Snapdragon Summit, Asus revealed the 8 Elite-powered ROG Phone 9, which will hit stores on November 19th. I played around with an engineering version of the handset at the summit, and while I couldn’t deep dive into the handset or play games on it, the phone’s hardware was still impressive.

What immediately caught my eye was the customizable LED lights. When you get your hands on the device, you can set up customizable lights, which, during my hands-on, said “Snapdragon.” These lights can also show the time, let you know if you have any notifications and support up to 24 characters.

The handset sports a large frame, but I think that’s stellar for gaming. I’ve been gaming on my smartphone lately, whether via streaming platforms like PS Remote Play, playing titles through the cloud via Game Pass, or downloading games to my handset with the Play Store.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t get to play games, but I’m looking forward to gaming on the upcoming handset. Since an 8 Elite chipset powers the handset, it supports hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing and Unreal Engine 5.2. The Adreno GPU will power high-quality scenes with a high frame rate and up to 8K upscaling. The 8 Elite also features ‘Variable Rate Shading,’ which allows games to run faster at higher resolutions and is supposed to offer lower power consumption. I played a little Naraka Bladepoint on a Snapdragon 8 Elite demo device, and it looked and felt great. However, the ROG Phone 9 will likely boast higher specs than this demo handset (regarding display quality, RAM, and more.)

The handset feels nice, offers a matte back, has a USB-C port on the side, and has pressure-sensitive AirTriggers with ROG branding. Asus has also teased some AI features related to games, but I’m still waiting to learn more about them. I hope the ROG Phone 9 offers some valuable AI implementations other than image generation or note summaries.

Unfortunately, the ROG Phone 9 won’t be coming to Canada, but with it sporting an 8 Elite chipset, and available to get through other methods, we’re still going to cover the device, so keep an eye out for more ROG Phone 9 on MobileSyrup in the coming weeks.