Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro hands-on | The NEW gaming phone!”.
This is the brand new Asus Rog Phone 8 Pro, which is a big, bold super stacked, Snapdragon 8 gen 3 gaming phone for 2024, and here are a few of our initial thoughts. So I haven’t spent quite long enough to give you any full thoughts on this device, but I’m pleasantly surprised so far with the Rog Phone 8 Asus has made some aesthetic changes and I think it’s sleeker than previous generations. To be honest, I think it does remind me slightly of the Sony xeria line and that’s genuinely a positive. As far as I’m concerned, the Rog Phone 8 and 8 Pro have identical Footprints as well, with side mounted USBC ports for the cooling module, which does come in the box, and I guess it’s important for keeping this phone cool. If you are doing lots of high-end tasks, you can actually charge using both of these USBC ports too, which is super useful if you want to use other gaming accessories like gam, sir add-on or that kind of thing, the Rog Phone, 8 and 8 Pro do not Look like phones, tailored specifically for mobile gaming, I’ll say that from the outside set.
I think that’s also a positive, but some people might like a more obvious aesthetic that stands out from the crowd. It’S definitely not available on this year’s generation, although you can get it in a few colors there’s even a headphone Port slapped in here too, for wide audio another bonus, and there is an ip68 rating for the first time on an Rog phone, both of which are Going to be super important to lots of people out there, as you can use your phone in more places and with more accessories, whether it’s a result of this design, change or otherwise. The initial setup also includes an interactive game to teach you how to use some of the hardware features like the air triggers and the gyro controls. I thought it was fun for all of about a minute and then I just was begging to skip through this section and get the device set up.
Luckily, you can skip through this, but it is a fun game for some people, I’m sure to get you used to the controls are available on this device. One of the newest features is also called anime, not anime as much as you wish it was. This is just an LED strip at the back of the phone that, in conjunction with software lights up when you get a notification things like when music is playing as well, you can use it for that. Here’S the kicker with this, though you can actually customize this using the Armory crate software, which is baked into Android here with compatible gifts. It’S definitely gimmicky from the outset, but kind of cool at the same time as you can personalize it to suit you, which is something we definitely bang on about on Android wholesale. So I’m not going to be too critical and I think it’s a neat way to add in a little bit of gamer flare to this device and credit where it’s due.
I will also say the screen on this phone is as good as I’ve used for a long time. It has some of the the deepest truest blacks on a smartphone, so far, color me very, very impressed and at 165 HZ. I don’t think I can really see a huge step over 120 HZ, although I will say to add to that, I haven’t seen a single frame drop anywhere in the UI, so maybe those extra frames and the extra Hertz are helping this device stay. Smooth Asus has also kept Android 14 fairly light when it comes to changes, it’s not quite the same as using a pixel.
For starters, I will applaud the quick setting toggles, which use the pre- Android, 12 Siz and layout, so that’s an improvement for usability, especially if you want to quickly turn off Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other settings and I’d love to see more oems revert to this change in The future most of the little adjustments in the software, though, are well thought out and backed up by some of the best haptics I’ve ever used on a phone and that’s the default outof, the boox settings I might actually play around with these and tune them even Further but for starters, I think you’ll be impressed too, especially when using all areas of the OS and those triggers as well, which are backed by haptic feedback. Let me talk briefly about the new processor for the spec heads out there. The Snapdragon hn3 is a fine upgrade and it’s the the heart of this device. It has speed bumps across all of its course, and a supposed 50 % Ray tracing performance uplift.
I think mobile Gamers will love that this is the processor at the core of the Rog Phone 8 and the Phone 8 Pro, and if you do want to tweak things, you can do so using the Armory crate settings. Of course, you can tweak this to adjust core performance and all that kind of thing, but it’s not not something I have done readily, but you can tune to your heart’s content if you do want to ever pick up this device later down the line you will, Though have to wait till our full review to get a thorough rundown of the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 and how it runs on the Rog Phone 8 and 8 Pro. Of course that applies to the camera capabilities and we will give you a full performance rundown, but take it from me. The latter seems very good on its own. At this stage, I think often as well with gaming phones.
The cameras tend to be one of the weaker areas, but on paper things look fairly acceptable on the Rog Phone 8, Pro at least from afar. Of course. I’M sorry.
This isn’t a fully comprehensive first look at this device, but it is a few of our early impressions of one of the first globally available Snapdragon 8 gen 3 phones, one of the first dedicated gaming phones with this new chip as well Asus has done a super Solid or is offering a super solid package at least this year. If you have any questions ahead of a longer look at the rphone 8 Pro in the coming weeks and drop them down below and I’ll try my best to answer them before that review. But until then I will catch you in the next one.
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