Asus ROG Phone 9 Review

Asus isn’t waiting for the rest of the market to catch up. Hot on the heels of the ROG Phone 8 from earlier last year, it has the ROG Phone 9 ready to go already. While from the outside, it doesn’t look like a remarkably different device, it has promise under the hood, serving as one of the first smartphones to market with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC that shakes things up with new Oryon CPU cores and a Hexagon NPU – as seen in the recent Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus laptop SoCs. And where performance is concerned, the Asus ROG Phone 9 has it. With a starting price of $999 (though it’s now been reduced to $899) and configurations that go up to $1,499, it’s commanding a high price for the privilege of enjoying its gaming phone promises, but it has the chops to back them up.

Asus ROG Phone 9 – Design and Features

The Asus ROG Phone 9 is hard to distinguish from the ROG Phone 8, bearing much the same looks. Asus has slowly whittled away some of the most ostentatious aesthetics, which would normally set a gaming phone apart from standard phones in the looks department. In fact, the ROG Phone 9 has very little in the way of gamer aesthetic beyond a few very subtle hints. It has a few ROG logos on the back, the text “dare to play” along one side of the back in glossy black lettering over matte black. And the camera bump has “GLHF” written on it.

Beyond that, there’s just the LED dot matrix, dubbed “AniMe Vision” on the back. For the ROG Phone 9, that’s just a small 5×17 array of white LEDs to display various notification details, phone status info, and other effects. It’s not more gamery than the arguably much more interesting LEDs on the back of a Nothing Phone. The ROG Phone 9 Pro goes a little heavier on the AniMe Vision LEDs, using a bigger 27×19 array of white LEDs lined with a 27×5 array of red LEDs, enough for more complex icons, animations, and even some little games – also an upgrade over the ROG Phone 8.

With so little gamer aesthetic going on, the ROG Phone 9 ends up rather indistinct. Short of a stylized camera bump, which sticks out absurdly from the back of the phone and the ROG logos, there’s little in the design to make the phone memorable or iconic.

All that is to say it’s not winning any style awards. It’s at least built well, coming with typical premium phone regalia: Gorilla Glass Victus on the front, more Gorilla Glass on the back, and an aluminum frame all sealed tight to provide IP68-rated protection against water and dust ingress. For a phone costing $99, I’d expect no less.

Naturally, the ROG Phone 9 includes an excellent display for gaming on. It’s a sizable 6.78-inch LTPO AMOLED display with a 185Hz max refresh rate as well as an adaptive refresh rate range from 1-120Hz. It’s wonderfully smooth in operation. The display also has upgraded touch sampling at 720Hz to register inputs faster. The display looks fantastic, offering vibrant color and exceptional contrast for visuals that pop. HDR content is especially poignant and an area where bright OLED displays like this shine. Asus is lagging behind Apple on bezels, which are thicker here than on the iPhone 16 Pro Max, but they’re still minimal enough to overlook when soaking in the glory of the display. The phone’s speakers combine well with the screen. They offer punchy volume and clear stereo sound.

The display is cut into by a selfie camera, but it’s a minor intrusion. Asus’s software also provides a way to block out this top strip of the display so that it’s only used for status and notification icons, thereby hiding the selfie camera and ensuring it never interrupts games or videos.

The Asus ROG Phone 9 has a few extras around its frame that the typical phone doesn’t. Its right edge features two areas with the ROG logo engraved into them, which serve as pressure-sensitive shoulder buttons while gaming. The right one can also double as a camera shutter button when the camera app is open, though it doesn’t do this by default, and it’s not quite as comprehensive a control as the iPhone 16’s Camera Control button.

The bottom edge of the phone includes a 3.5mm headphone port – a true rarity on $1,000 phones. The bottom also houses the SIM card tray, a speaker, and USB-C port. If it sounds a little cramped down there, it is. Asus also continues to leave the bottom USB-C port off to one side, rather than centered. While this ensures compatibility with some prior ROG Phone accessories, it also compromises compatibility with third-party controller grips, car phone holders, and likely plenty more. That’s not the only USB-C port though, as the left edge of the phone also includes one, so you can easily plug in while gaming without having the cable get in the way of your hands.

Given all the ROG Phone 9 is packing and the extra cooling it has to squeeze inside, it should be little surprise that it’s a big and heavy phone. At 6.45 x 3.02 x 0.35 in and 227 grams, it’s narrower but thicker and taller than both the iPhone 16 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and just as heavy as the former.

Asus ROG Phone 9 – Software

The Asus ROG Phone 9 comes running Android 15, which is impressive to see given how often non-Google phones will come running a prior version of Android for a while before eventually catching up to the new OS. Despite being a gaming phone, Asus allows for some customization of the Android skin right from the get go, giving a gamer vibe or a simpler one. It also includes some impressively extensive options for how volume control works and for the look of the quick settings panel. There’s even software support to make the status bar permanently black to prevent the camera cutout from interfering with the display.

After setup, the phone takes you right into a special experience that sounded like it was voiced by AI and constantly cranked the volume back to a painful 100%. It’s a very strange little game that offers an introduction to the shoulder buttons, poor gyroscopic aiming controls, and other features of the phone. Afterward, it jarringly throws you out to the system cloner.

The ROG Phone 9 includes Asus’s Game Genie software, which will constantly ask for draw-over permissions whenever a game launches until you eventually give it over – no way to stop it asking. Without the permission, you won’t be able to use it or tap into the shoulder button controls in gaming, which need to be mapped onto in-game controls. Game Genie also requires notification permission to run and won’t start up if you deny it. So if you’re inclined to skip these permissions, there’s good reason to skip this phone entirely, since you’ll be passing up on a key feature.

Like many phones coming out in the last year, Asus has hyped up some of its AI features, which include a call translator, transcriber, custom wallpaper tool, and a semantic search (which works across the device to look for settings, photos, etc.). These all are said to run on-device with no internet or subscription required to use. The AI wallpaper tool is rather walled in, with a few selections to choose from before it generates something within those guardrails. I wasn’t stunned by the semantic search either, which returned no photo results (despite having a half-dozen) when I searched for “drink” but did pull up two when I searched for “photo of a drink.” Impressively, it did pull up a photo when I searched for “condensation,” though only one of the six similar shots I took. Call translation and transcription are common on recent Android phones, so nothing to set the ROG Phone 9 apart.

While the ROG Phone 9 is setting itself up against Samsung and Google in terms of price, it’s not competing on software support. Asus has only promised two major OS updates, getting it to Android 17, which is far shy of the 7 years the other two are offering. On the plus side, Asus is offering 5 years of security updates.

Asus ROG Phone 9 – Gaming and Performance

When it comes to performance, the ROG Phone 9 does not disappoint, though it does confound at times. It’s one of the first phones arriving in the US with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC, and that has come with some monumental performance improvements. Just recently, I tested by far the fastest Android phone I’d seen in the RedMagic 9S Pro, which turbo-boosted a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Leading Versions SoC with an active air cooler to outpace even the iPhone 16 Pro Max across most benchmarks that I ran, and the ROG Phone 9, with passive cooling, steps that up to yet another level still.

In Geekbench 6, the Asus ROG Phone 9 (3125 points) is nipping at the iPhone 16 family’s heels in single-core performance (3375 points for the Pro Max), leaping up from the RedMagic 9S Pro’s 1953 single-core and 7002 multi-core scores. The ROG Phone 9 leads the way in multi-core performance with a 9959-point score, dramatically outpacing the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s 8237 points.

The system performance continues in a big way through 3DMark’s graphics benchmarks, where it cleaned house. The ROG Phone 9 topped all of the recent high-performance phones I’ve tested, (including the Pixel 9 Pro, OnePlus 12, iPhone 16 and 16 Pro Max, and Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra), and not by tiny margins. The RedMagic 9S Pro didn’t fall far behind, with the ROG Phone 9 performing about between 8 and 18% faster. Everyone else fared worse. It was more than twice the speed of the Pixel 9 Pro in Wildlife Extreme and Steel Nomad Light. It beat the iPhone 16 Pro Max and OnePlus 12 by over 20% in Steel Nomad Light, and it beat the iPhone 16 Pro Max by over 40% in Wildlife Extreme and Solar Bay.

These are rather dramatic victories, enabled in part by the phone’s boosted “X-Mode,” which automatically activates when demanding applications launch (i.e., benchmarks or games). High performance doesn’t require X-Mode though, and that raises a slight complication for the ROG Phone 9. Its performance could be very hard to predict and wasn’t always intuitive. I assumed disabling X-Mode would see the phone perform worse, but in a few cases it was bafflingly the opposite. In 3DMark’s Solar Bay and Steel Nomad Light, the ROG Phone 9 actually ran even faster with X-Mode disabled. But, and this is a big one, it would only do so briefly and then quickly throttle back performance. For instance, in Steel Nomad Light, the phone earned a mind-blowing 2532 points (in X-Mode it was at 2179 and still blowing away the competition), then a second run hit 2477 points, but the third saw it drop off a cliff to 1104 points. Meanwhile, in X-Mode, the phone could hit a score over 2100 points even after running the benchmark 20 times in a row. It seems X-Mode simply prioritizes performance while the phone would otherwise provide bursty speeds but prioritize comfortable temperatures by throttling back performance.

The ROG Phone 9, like early ROG Phones, has an optional cooling attachment, which is no cheap extra. Unfortunately, it’s also rather unpredictable. With the cooler attached, I saw Geekbench 6 results drop slightly without X-Mode enabled. With X-Mode on, Geekbench 6 saw minor improvements compared to running without the cooler. In 3DMark, the phone consistently failed to run as fast as it did without the cooler, too. The big difference was that it wasn’t heating up as much. After 20 runs in the Steel Nomad Light stress test, the phone went from 33 to 50 Degrees Celsius without the cooler but went from 29 to only 34 Degrees Celsius with the cooler. It seems the phone is happy to max out performance even at higher temperatures, and the cooler is only serving to keep the phone comfortable. That said, in some early testing prior to certain release patches, I did see performance tank in a stress test after temps reached 57 Degrees Celsius. Following official updates, I haven’t seen this behavior even once.

Now, benchmark numbers can seem a little nebulous, but they translate quite plainly to gaming performance here. Playing Wuthering Waves at the maximum graphics quality settings, Ultra High resolution, and 60fps, it ran smoothly without a hitch. And even after a half hour of this gameplay, the phone had barely warmed up. It seemed the game wasn’t even taking full advantage of the performance the phone had to offer, and that’s great news for the theoretical longevity of the phone as a mobile gaming platform with an eye towards future game releases. The ROG Phone 9 also situates its SoC near the middle of the phone, so gaming with the phone in landscape will effectively keep your hands away from the hottest component.

That extreme level of gaming performance all but guarantees that everyday performance is exceptionally smooth, and that has been my experience. The ROG Phone 9 never once felt slow. It launches apps quickly, jumps back and forth between running apps in a flash, and plays out all of its interface animations smoothly on the 185Hz display.

Battery life is also impressive. After 30 minutes of Wuthering Waves, with the display at 50% brightness, the battery life drain was in the single digits. In general use, the phone always saw a full day of uptime from its 5,800mAh battery.

I have noticed one small issue when the battery is low: If running Geekbench 6 when the battery is below about 30%, the phone will invariably shutdown mid-run with X-Mode enabled. Disabling X-Mode, the phone can run the test even on a low battery. It seems likely that the phone is keeping voltages to the SoC higher in X-Mode, and when the battery is low, it can’t supply those voltages, thus seeing the phone power down on the spot. It’s unclear how the issue could impact the rest of the phone, as it has so far only cropped up for me in Geekbench. Gaming and running 3DMark, the phone persisted in X-Mode in spite of a low battery, even completing a WildLife Extreme stress test that saw it drain from 20% to just 1% with 89.5% stability (scores ranging from 5062 to 5657).

Asus ROG Phone 9 – Cameras

Like most gaming phones, the Asus ROG Phone 9 isn’t going all out on its cameras, especially since it has reserved a 32MP telephoto sensor for the higher-spec Pro model. Here are the cameras that the ROG Phone 9 packs:

• 50MP wide, f/1.9, 1/1.56-inch Sony Lytia 700 sensor, PDAF, OIS
• 13MP ultra-wide, f/2.2, 120-degree FoV
• 5MP macro, f/2.4
• 32MP selfie, f/2.5

The cameras aren’t stunning, but are largely serviceable. The main sensor captures light well enough, avoiding overly dark shots or too much noise in scenarios that ought to be clear for shooting. It provides pleasant color and good sharpness without oversharpening and introducing distracting artifacts. Bumping the main sensor up to 2x zoom, it maintains its respectable qualities, but there’s not much leeway to zoom in further. On the bright side, the 2x digital zoom actually does offer a noticeable advantage over simply cropping in on a 1x shot to achieve the same framing.

The ultra-wide sensor gives a modest bit of extra field of view without too much distortion. And it actually keeps the colors consistent with the main sensor. That’s great news when you want to create a series of photos without having to do a ton of work on the back-end to get them looking similar. This camera doesn’t feel as sharp as the main sensor though, and it shows some notable blur toward the corner of images.

The macro sensor is almost not worth mentioning. It handles light so differently from the other sensors that unless you’re taking a largely colorless photo, it will look like the photos are coming from an entirely different device. It can certainly get up close to a subject, but the main sensor is quite capable of getting up close, too. And comparing close-up shots taken with both the macro sensor and the main sensor, I can’t find any reason to use the macro sensor.

The selfie camera is good and sharp, capturing a decent amount of light even in suboptimal conditions. It doesn’t look great if you zoom in too much on the shots, but it’s going to do the job when you just want to snag a quick selfie.

It’s a shame the cameras weren’t better. Having a shoulder button on the phone that can serve as a shutter button is fun, even if it’s still not up to snuff compared to what Sony’s offered on its Xperia line.