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

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Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Intro


Early 2024 graced us with a new super-powered gaming smartphone — Asus launched the new ROG Phone 8 and ROG Phone 8 Pro duo. And they look different. Crazy accents, secondary displays, huge bezels — all gone. The ROG phone of today wants to look and feel like a "regular" flagship phone — we have this thin, uniform bezel around the device now, and the edgy gamer aesthetics are toned down quite a lot.

The regular ROG Phone 8 still has an RGB logo on its back, but the top-tier ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition has a stealthy, low-res LED matrix back there that can either show simplistic logo icons or nothing at all. Funnily enough, Asus then launched the ZenFone 11 Ultra, which basically looks like a spinoff of this new ROG Phone. 

The stereo speakers are back, but not front-firing anymore. The gamer triggers are also present, but a bit less ergonomic, since there are no top and bottom bezels to fill your palms while gaming. There's a new, but so is an upgraded camera module with an actual gimbal stabilization. The ROG Phone 8 is supposed to be the mainstream evolution of the gamer phone, or so it seems — Asus is marketing it as a "premium phone for everyday use", but it also happens to be a top-tier gaming phone.

The ROG Phone 8 will sell in the US from $1,099 for the 12 GB / 256 GB variant, the 8 Pro will start at $1,199 for 16 GB / 512 GB, and the Pro Edition, which we have here, hits $1,499 for 24 GB / 1 TB.

Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro
What we like
  • New design, thin bezels, IP68
  • Speakers are loud and meaty (but not as good as before)
  • Fast and buttery performance
What we don't like
  • Speakers are no longer front-firing
  • Gripping the device for gaming is a bit less comfy (lack of bezels)
  • The camera is OK, but not as great as the big bump suggests
7.1
PhoneArena Rating
7.3
Price Class Average
Battery Life
8.6
7.6
Photo Quality
5.6
7.1
Video Quality
5.1
6.3
Charging
8.2
7
Performance Peak
8.3
6.6
Performance Daily
7.7
6.9
Display Quality
8
8.3
Design
8
7.6
Wireless Charging
3.7
6.9
Biometrics
7
7.6
Audio
8
7.9
Software
4
8
Why the score?
This device scores 2.7% worse than the average for this price class, which includes devices like the Honor Magic 6 Pro, OPPO Find X7 Ultra and Google Pixel 8 Pro
User Score
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As you can see above, the ROG Phone 8 Pro total score is now slightly higher than the one at the time of writing. That is not because of some error on our end, but because we have implemented a new rating system at PhoneArena that gives readers a better idea of the performance of a phone across different categories. Remember to look at the scores and compare them to the average for the class, and we believe you will find these scores tremendously useful. Learn more about the new PhoneArena Review Scoring system here.

What’s new about ROG Phone 8 series

  • A new design with slimmer bezels, thinner body
  • Still has ultrasonic shoulder buttons
  • Stereo speakers moved to the asymmetrical format (bottom + earpiece)
  • New camera system with physical gimbal stabilization
  • New AeroActive Cooler X is also smaller

Table of Contents:

ROG Phone 8 Pro Specs

Fastest racer on the block

Asus ROG Phones have always had the crazy over-the-top specs and cutting edge hardware. And this hasn't changed, even with the new facelift. The "base" tier ROG Phone 8 still has 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of UFS 4.0 storage. It's all uphill from there — up to 24 GB of RAM for the most expensive ROG Phone 8 Pro!


ROG Phone 8 Pro Design & Colors

Would you like yours in Black or Black?


Since inception, the ROG Phones have had a bit of a chin and forehead — housing the front-firing stereo speakers. Now, Asus has went for a more modernistic, compact look, with a super-thin uniform bezel all around. That would mean that the speakers moved to the commonly-seen setup with a bottom-firing driver and an amped earpiece at the top. 

Gamers that dislike the camera "punch hole" aesthetic can still customize the display experience — within the Armoury Crate app, which is your game launcher, you can set up the display aspect ratio, black bars can come in from the sides and hide the camera hole.

The Pro version of the ROG Phone 8 comes in black and that's it. It has a matte glass back with some very subtle accents, and the Pro Edition model has a hidden LED matrix, which can show a plethora of icons, depending on what the phone is doing. The ROG Phone 8 and 8 Pro have an RGB logo here.

The phone looks and feels nice. It's understated, it's soft to the touch, it's all metal and matte glass, and the thin bezel on the front is lovely. However, there's a give and take here. The new design does it make super-comfortable to use the ultrasonic shoulder buttons. They are just way too close to the edge — not a place where our index fingers would naturally rest.


Sure, maybe it's a matter of adjustment, or just using the AeroActive Cooler X a bit more often. However, we think Asus might want to move the buttons a bit more inwards, if they reiterate this design next year.

We have IP68 rating for dust- and water-resistance, which is a first on the ROG phones and — Asus says — a first on any gaming phone. And the ROG Phone 8 family now supports wireless charging, again — for the first time.


The ROG Phone 8 Pro unboxing process is — as always — accompanied by a mini-game for new owners. The ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition 1 TB / 24 GB comes with the AeroActive Cooler X fan inside the box. It's definitely a smaller accessory than before — it now adds two hardware buttons instead of four, and the subwoofer that was on the AeroActive Cooler 7 is also gone.

Whichever ROG Phone 8 you get, you will receive the 65 W charger and a nice braided USB Type C cable. No headphones in the box it seems, but it's worth noting that the ROG Phones still have headphone jacks. 

ROG Phone 8 Pro Display



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:



While the screen's minimum brightness may seem a bit high in raw measurements, the settings menu offers extra dimming, blue light filter, and low brightness anti-flicker settings. You can even have them scheduled to activate all at once — the toggles are under a common Eye Protection Mode setting.

ROG Phone 8 Pro Camera

Asus steps up


The ROG Phone 8 Pro comes with a brand-new camera module on the back — a 50 MP main camera with a 6-axis gimbal stabilizer, a 13 MP ultra-wide camera, and a 32 MP 3x telephoto camera. We were already pleased with the ROG Phone 7's above-average camera performance — it may be a gaming phone, but its camera made "good enough" photos, and we didn't mind rocking it as a daily driver.

Now that the ROG Phone 8 Pro put heavy emphasis on the camera and wants to play the "regular flagship" game — well, we found it to be a bit lacking.

The 50 MP main camera uses Sony's IMX890 sensor — it's a rather new sensor that we've seen throughout 2023 in phones like the OnePlus 11, Oppo Find N2 Flip, even the Nothing Phone (2). It hasn't floored us, but has definitely been taking at least satisfactory-level photos when in those phones. Here's how it performs in the ROG Phone 8 Pro:

Main Camera - Day



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.

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

Main Camera - Low-light



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.

Zoom Quality



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.

Portrait Mode



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.

Ultra-wide Camera



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.

Selfies



The ROG Phone 8 uses a 32 MP sensor for the selfie camera, but bins pixels in clusters of 4. So, it takes 8 MP photos, but it does collect plenty of light — we like its selfie capabilities. It does slightly lean towards a more yellow-ish skintone, and it needs to tame highlights by a bit. But otherwise — the details are there, as unflattering as they may be.

Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro
PhoneArena Camera Score
BEST 157
126
PhoneArena Photo Score
BEST 162
135
Main (wide)
BEST 85
73
Zoom
BEST 28
19
Ultra-wide
BEST 25
19
Selfie
BEST 30
25
PhoneArena Video Score
BEST 153
124
Main (wide)
BEST 79
71
Zoom
BEST 27
11
Ultra-wide
BEST 23
20
Selfie
BEST 28
22

We have rigorously tested the camera on the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro and above you can see the results of those tests. We carefully measure the performance of all cameras in various test scenes, ranking the performance across important metrics like exposure, subject exposure, color accuracy, detail, artifacts and more. We do these tests for both photos and videos. 

You can learn more about our PhoneArena Camera Score testing protocol here.
 

ROG Phone 8 Pro Performance & Benchmarks


As before, the ROG Phone 8 Pro comes with special tuning modes that optimize performance — the X Mode, which goes all guns blazing, the Balanced Mode, for everyday use, and Ultra Durable Mode for power saving.

X Mode activates whenever you are gaming or benching the phone — it will not allow the phone to throttle and keep aiming for the best performance. Because of this, the phone can get quite hot — we do recommend playing with the Aero Active Cooler X if you plan to run a heavy game for a long time. 

Performance Benchmarks:


Geekbench 6
Single
Higher is better
Geekbench 6
Multi
Higher is better
3DMark Extreme(High)Higher is better3DMark
Extreme(Low)
Higher is better
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro2286
7266
4963
4801
Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate2003
5466
3722
3673
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max2958
7288
4236
2632
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra1971
5115
3828
1951

Those are some massive numbers on the 3DMark test. We did also run it with X Mode off — the result was that the ROG Phone 8 Pro throttled at about loop 14, which is still quite good cooling and endurance before it hit inevitability, and the lowest score it got to was 2,490, which is still up there with the current competition.

In fairness, we did try gaming in Balanced Mode and it felt just fine. We assume that a prolonged session of a heavy 3D game may introduce some random stutters, or maybe a frame drop to a certain degree, and that's where the X Mode and fan would come in handy. But for casual mobile gaming for like 30 minutes per session, the ROG Phone 8 Pro did just fine (Mighty Doom, Ronin: The Last Samurai, CoD: Mobile)

ROG Phone 8 Pro OS / Android version



The ROG UI is a light reskin of the stock Android 14 — there's the Armory, which is your game launcher and holds all the settings for the gaming triggers and the lights on the phone. Then, you can edit how your Quick Toggles in the notifications shade look, and now there's even a new setting where you can pull down your notifications by swiping on the left side, and your controls when swiping down on the right side of the display. You know, if you just can't shake the iPhone muscle memory.


There's the new Enlarge Folder option for the home screen, which lets you store a bunch of icons in even less space, yet tap on them without opening the folder. And there are a bunch of Asus-made widgets with the gamer aesthetic to place around.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro will get 2 years of major Android updates, but 4 years of security patches. 

ROG Phone 8 Pro Battery

Still packs a powerbank

Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro
( 5500 mAh )
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro
Battery Life Estimate
8h 34m
Ranks #3 for phones tested in the past 2 years
Average is 6h 49m
Browsing
18h 27m
Average is 15h 30m
Video
13h 29m
Average is 10h 5m
Gaming
11h 13m
Average is 8h 55m
Charging speed
65W
Charger
75%
30 min
0h 47m
Full charge
Ranks #30 for phones released in the past 2 years
Wireless Charging
15W
Charger
16%
30 min
3h 45m
Full charge
Ranks #28 for phones released in the past 2 years
Find out more details about battery and charging for all phones we have tested on our PhoneArena Battery Score page

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.

PhoneArena Battery Test Results:


Web Browsing(hours)Higher is better
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro18h 27 min
Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate16h 33 min
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max19h 20 min
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra18h 57 min
Video Streaming(hours)Higher is better
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro13h 29 min
Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate11h 38 min
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max9h 45 min
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra8h 54 min
3D Gaming(hours)Higher is better
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro11h 13 min
Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate8h 12 min
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max9h 36 min
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra10h 59 min

Above, you can see how the ROG Phone 8 Pro performed on our in-house battery tests.

ROG Phone 8 Pro Charging Speeds



The ROG Phone 8 Pro comes with its own 65 W charger inside the box. It utilizes dual cells inside the body, which will charge in parallel for optimized speed and battery health. It's pretty quick to top up — combined with the long battery life, we never felt percentage phobia with this phone. The wireless charging is a standard affair of 15 W — feels slow by comparison, but always useful to have.

PhoneArena Charging Test Results:


15 MinsHigher is better30 Mins(%)Higher is betterFull Charge(hours)Lower is better
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro44%
75%
0h 47 min
Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate44%
78%
0h 44 min
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max28%
53%
2h 1 min
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra41%
68%
1h 6 min


PhoneArena Wireless Charging Test Results:


15 Mins WirelessHigher is better30 Mins Wireless(%)Higher is betterFull Charge Wireless(hours)Lower is better
Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro6%
16%
3h 45 min
Asus ROG Phone 7 UltimateNo data
No data
No data
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max18%
29%
2h 36 min
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra11%
26%
1h 56 min

ROG Phone 8 Pro Audio Quality and Haptics


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.

ROG Phone 8 Pro Competitors



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. 


ROG Phone 8 Pro Summary and expectations



The ROG Phone 8 Pro definitely has a bit of give and take to it. It's very fast, we like how it looks, its speakers are great (though not as good as before), its display is beautiful. The camera is OK by today's standards — it doesn't wow us, and occasionally disappoints, but we don't mind using it as a daily carry.

Hardcore fans have already reacted to the reduced bezels, therefore the change in how the phone handles for actual gaming. Others are ecstatic over the inclusion of water-resistance this time around.

We would have no trouble recommending it, as it has a lot going for it. But, since its asking price is north of $1,000, we do feel the need to point out that it comes with the promise of 2 years of software updates and 4 years of security patches, in an industry where 4 years of updates is becoming the minimum.

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