Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro review: the gamer goes mainstream!

Despite having a much smaller footprint than its predecessor, the ROG Phone 8 still packs a 6.78-inch screen on the front. It is, again, an AMOLED panel that can deliver a wowing sharpness, vibrancy, and brightness. No surprise there — these are great displays.

And, since it's a gaming phone, of course it can hit a 165 Hz refresh rate, and its touch response is sensitive, fast, and precise. Also, the specs page says that it's an LTPO panel that can actively switch between 1 Hz and 120 Hz. That would be the "adaptive" mode, which can drop the refresh rate when you are looking at still images, to conserve battery. And then, you can activate 165 Hz when looking to game.

It's a 1080 x 2400 pixel screen, protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2. We have an optical fingerprint scanner hidden under the glass, as before. It's accurate and fast most of the time, but we did have one or two missed reads. The fingerprint scanner itself is fine, but we did find that the phone sometimes doesn't register a "tap to wake" unless we were really... persistent.

Display Measurements:

The main camera has a fairly wide dynamic range, but it can burn highlights when pushed. Colors appear soft and warm, and pretty close to reality. It does oversharpen small details to a point where you can tell, but the noise reduction is doing a good job at preserving said details to begin with.

All in all, not bad photos — they won't be defeating the market leaders in terms of dynamics, but they are definitely share-able.

The camera is pretty good at dealing with tiny light sources, like the Christmas lights spread all around the city. However, the oversharpening and aggressive noise reduction are becoming a bit more evident as we go to darker ambience. The building in sample 3 looks all jagged, and light bounces off the branches in a very harsh manner. The facade of the building in sample 4 appears almost fuzzy with the mix of sharpness and noise reduction applied.

Again, the pictures are not bad, and can serve as memorabilia. However, one might question if the new camera was worth "sacrificing" the gamer feel of the phone for.

Typically, the main sensor takes care for 1x and 2x shots. For 3x zoom, the phone switches to the telephoto lens, which does improve things quite a lot — 2x just looks way too soft already. From then on, up to 10x, we'd say the phone keeps it together — dynamics are starting to become a problem during the day, and noise reduction washes out too many details during the night.

Oversharpening is very apparent, but — again — up to 10x, you can take a photo for social media if you have enough light. The maximum the ROG Phone 8 can hit is 30x, and we don't see many people going up to it. Though, to be fair, the Pixel 8 and Galaxy S23 don't have an amazing 30x zoom either.

The edge detection and the faux bokeh for the background are... not great. Especially when you are trying to capture a pet instead of a human. Our recommendation is to just shoot portraits with the 3x zoom lens, and don't mind that you don't have a creamy blur in the background.

The ultra-wide camera is pretty good, we don't see a major difference or jump in color calibration here. It's a bit softer than the main camera, but objects in the center still look detailed and visible. In some shots, you can see that the distortion correction around the edges has kind of chewed up some details, but that's something we often see in ultra-wide shooters. It's worth noting that the ROG Phone 8 ultra-wide camera only does to 0.7x, meaning it's not very... ultra-wide. But it can serve its purpose for an epic shot.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro is a bit thinner and a bit lighter than before, but has a 5,500 mAh battery. That's only 500 mAh smaller than the cell in the large ROG Phone 7. But it seems that both the software optimizations and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 play their parts well — we did not notice any big dip in battery endurance. Our benchmark tests show as much, but in real-life use — it's among the longest-lasting phones we've tested in recent months.

As previously mentioned, the speakers on the new ROG Phone 8 are not in a front-firing setup. They do sound loud and meaty, but just not as good as the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate. What hurts even more is that the subwoofer inside the Active Cooler — something that was introduced just last year — is now gone.

Our ROG Phone 8 Pro doesn't sound bad — it sounds better than most flagship phones out there, its alarm is super-loud, and definitely turns some heads with its meaty, bassy sound. But it has a persistent boxiness with its lower mids, and instruments just don't sound as well defined as on the ROG Phone 7 (despite our efforts with the EQ). The point is that the compromises made to achieve a more appealing design can be felt here.

As for haptics, they are great — strong, precise, responsive, just the way we like them.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro starts at a price point, which feels... dare we say... normal for flagship phones these days. At $1,200 it finds itself in the range of the Galaxy S24 Ultra (assuming it keeps last year's pricing model). And it does feel like it will be the main rival here — the Samsung flagship will supposedly come with its own Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside, and a camera that benefits from years of evolution and experience.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max will also be a big rival here. Sure, the iPhone doesn't have gaming triggers or an external fan, but it does have games. Games like Resident Evil 4 Remake and Assassin's Creed: Mirage are making their way to the iPhone 15 Pro series, and no other phone (at least not currently). Blinking lights and shoulder triggers can't really beat a robust gaming catalogue.

Two swallows do not a summer make, but Apple has indicated that it intends to push into gaming with all of its devices. In the mean time, Android manufacturers haven't revealed any similar partnerships with AAA game studios.

That said, we'd feel much more comfortable gaming on a ROG Phone for prolonged periods, specifically because of the availability of an active cooler and software tune-ups that have been designed for system torture. To this day, we still have the iPhone 15 Pro's early overheating issues on the back of our minds.