Despite the presence of several powerful flagships today,gaming phonesare not quite as common as they should be. But one of the few companies that continues to provide something for gamers is Asus. Under its ROG (Republic of Gamers) range of gaming handsets, the company has annually released power-packed phones, albeit with a steep price tag. We loved this year’sROG Phone 7, which serves as the rightful heir toour gaming phone of 2022. We’re now getting official confirmation of the next-generation ROG Phone 8’s imminent launch, along with a small glimpse of the phone itself.
Asus gave out the good news through its X account, pairing it with a teaser image. The accompanying hashtags and the text on the image itself reveal that the next-gen model will be known as the ROG Phone 8, though it’s unclear if there will be an Ultimate version as we saw with the ROG Phone 7 earlier this year.
The teaser points to a revamp of the rear camera arrangement, with one camera (possibly the primary sensor) positioned on the left-hand side of the island, flanked by the two vertically aligned sensors on the right. By contrast, the ROG Phone 7 features a horizontally-aligned triple camera setup. This could be the company’s way of spicing things up in the design department since the layout has remained unchanged for a couple of iterations now.
Expectedly, not a lot of hardware info is divulged here, though we can rely on leaks to give us some insight into these attributes in the days and weeks ahead. Considering the fact that Asus likes to bundle the latest and greatest Qualcomm chipset in its ROG-branded gaming phones, it’s fair to guess that Qualcomm’sSnapdragon 8 Gen 3would be the SoC of choice.
Qualcomm claims the new chipset features “console-defying” capabilities, while the boosted Adreno GPU features a 25 percent bump in efficiency and performance, respectively. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2’s hardware-accelerated ray tracing is also picking up an upgrade with the new Qualcomm mobile SoC. With these factors in mind, the ROG Phone 8 could well be the gaming phone to beat in 2024.
It’s worth noting that the ROG Phone 7 was unveiled in April this year, so if that timeline holds, we could be in for a bit of a wait before seeing the ROG Phone 8 on shelves. But with that being said, brands like Samsung are already looking to unleash the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-poweredGalaxy S24 seriesby mid-January, whereas OnePlus has alreadyunveiled its flagshipfeaturing the new Qualcomm silicon this week, although only in China for the time being. The early teaser by Asus points to the launch timeframe being pulled back by a few months, but we’ll have to wait and see.
We were pretty impressed with the ROG Phone 7, though there are areas where it could be better, such as in terms of display resolution. We also hope Asus reconsiders the $1,000 starting price for the ROG Phone 7, which climbs to $1,400 for the Ultimate trim. The only real rival to the ROG gaming flagship, theNubia Redmagic 8 Pro, has similar hardware but starts from $649.
