Oh, did I mention the headphone jack? That makes it one of the very few high-end smartphones with the port if you prefer to jack in. Asus also throws in a 65-watt charging brick, going against the grain of the competition, which nowadays doesn’t include a power supply in the box.
Much of this is the same as prior ROG Phones. The latest lineup includes the Asus ROG Phone 9 ($1,000), ROG Phone 9 Pro ($1,200), and ROG Phone 9 Pro Edition ($1,500). The latter maximizes some specs of the Pro (like 24 GB of RAM instead of 16 GB) and 1 TB of storage, and it includes the AeroActive Cooler X Pro in the box. The Cooler X Pro brings back the subwoofer that used to be on an older model, boosting the bass of music played from the phone.
The 6.78-inch Phone 9 only has 85 mini LEDs on the back, so it doesn’t have the full breadth of features; you can play some animations on it, but upgrade to the ROG Phone 9 Pro and that’s when you can use the haptic shoulder triggers to play arcade games. You’ll probably get a lot of looks staring at the back of your phone in public.
It’s powered by the newly announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which is currently the fastest processor in the Android world. Asus claims the CPU is 45 percent faster than the ROG Phone 8, with a 40 percent faster GPU too. There are improvements to the phone’s natural cooling capabilities, like the inclusion of a 57 percent larger graphite sheet, which produces lower temperatures by dissipating heat. Asus claims the most demanding mobile games, like Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero, should consistently hit 60 frames per second for smoother gameplay, even more so if you pair it with the cooler attachment.
Other notable upgrades over the ROG Phone 8 are the bump in battery size from 5,500 mAh to 5,800 mAh, and the primary 50-megapixel camera now sports Asus’s fourth-generation stabilization technology. The company claims this delivers 66 percent improved motion compensation, so the six-axis gimbal should produce super-smooth footage when you record videos. The stabilization has typically been strong in my testing on prior ROG phones, but the overall camera quality is generally lackluster, so I’m interested to see how it fares now.