We got a sneak peek at the Asus ROG Phone 9, one of the first Snapdragon 8 Elite phones, and it's going to be fast

Will this be the best gaming phone of 2025?

News By Myriam Joire published 23 October 2024

Monday at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Qualcomm unveiled its new flagship mobile SoC – the Snapdragon 8 Elite – which is powered by the company’s 2nd-gen Oryon CPU cores. Qualcomm flew TechRadar to Maui to check out the latest chips, and I managed to track down some surprises that will soon delight mobile gamers.

During the keynote, Xiaomi announced that its 15 series flagship would be the first phone to ship with the Snapdragon 8 Elite later this month. Honor then revealed that its Magic7 series handsets would also feature Qualcomm’s new mobile chip and launch Oct 30.

ASUS followed suit with the ROG Phone 9, a gaming flagship coming Nov 19 that also packs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite. But unlike the competition, ASUS reps were on hand with its new handset and I got to check it out at the event. While the company wasn’t willing to share any specs or pricing, I was able to handle the new ROG Phone 9 for a few minutes. So here are my brief first impressions.

The ROG Phone 9 looks a lot like the ROG Phone 8

The ROG Phone 9 shares the same industrial design as the ROG Phone 8 Pro ($1,199) that our own Jon Mundy reviewed back in January – down to the camera pod shape and port/button placement. Dimensions are similar, too, but this new phone feels lighter than its predecessor. You’ll find a couple of red accents in the back, alongside a redesigned dot-matrix LED display – which is now positioned horizontally when holding the handset in portrait orientation.

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Obviously, under the hood, the big news is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite. ASUS told me that the rest of the ROG Phone 9’s specs should be slightly improved over its predecessor, so I don’t expect too many surprises here. To jog your memory, the ROG Phone 8 series boasts a 6.78-inch 1080p 165Hz AMOLED screen with 2,500 nits peak brightness and an under-display fingerprint sensor. It’s rated IP68 for water and dust resistance.

The ROG Phone 9 should also inherit the ROG Phone 8 series’ shooters, which include a 50MP f/1.9 main sensor with PDAF and gimbal OIS, and 32MP f/2.4 3x telephoto with PDAF and OIS, and a 13MP f/2.2 120-degree ultrawide. A 32MP f/2.5 selfie camera rounds things up in front. In terms of battery power, the ROG Phone 8 series comes with a 5,500mAh dual-cell battery and 65W wired charging plus 15W wireless charging.

You also get stereo speakers, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and dual USB Type-C ports (one along the bottom edge and another on the left side). This allows you to charge the phone while holding it in landscape orientation without the cable getting in the way. On the memory front, the ROG Phone 8 series offers 12GB, 16GB, or 24GB of LPDDR5x RAM, and 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage. There’s no expandable storage.

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