ASUS ROG Phone 9 Review: Gaming on the Go

Readtime: 10 min

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• The ASUS ROG Phone 9 is launching today in Australia for AU$1,799
• It’s powered by the impressive Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, which ran everything we threw at it with ease
• If you’re after an Android-based phone to game on, this could be the best

While it’s tempting to turn your nose up at mobile gaming, the reality is that this segment of the market makes up the vast majority of revenue in the wider video games market. Yes, games on phones currently make more money than PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and PC gaming, combined.

It should come as no surprise, then, that more tech brands are launching their own smartphones dedicated almost entirely to improving the mobile gaming experience. They also work as a dedicated smartphone, of course.

Tech brand ASUS latest such phone, the ROG Phone 9, comes packed with some pretty powerful internals. However, it also comes with a price to match, launching at AU$1,799, putting it right in competition with ASUS’ own ROG Ally X gaming handheld, which runs full Windows, and which we liked quite a bit.

That might be a bit unfair, considering one is a phone and one is a dedicated gaming machine, but if you’re interested in picking up a ROG Phone 9 there’s a damn good chance you’ll want to game on it, so comparing it to other gaming devices makes some degreee of sense.

I’m not going to touch on the ‘phone’ aspects of this device much in the review, because you know how a phone works and, honestly, that’s not the most interesting part of the ROG Phone 9: rather, we’re going to focus on the pros and cons of how it works as a gaming device.

Comparing the Models

Why Trust Us

Here at Man of Many, we use a wide variety of technology. We’re not fans of any one brand, like to get our hands on the latest-and-greatest tech before we call it the next-best-thing, and we’ve built up extensive experience in reviewing tech as a publication over the past 10 years.


The author of this article, Dean Blake, is Man of Many’s technology journalist, and has followed the industry for years. He’s reviewed a fair bit of the competition, and was provided the product by ASUS for the purposes of this review. No money exchanged hands, and all opinions expressed are those of the author and haven’t been seen by ASUS ahead of time. For more information on our independence, testing and review guidelines, you can read our full editorial policies here.

The Good

Performance is King

We’re going to start with the obvious: the Phone 9 is meant for gaming, and comes with the chops to make it happen. The Snapdragon 8 Elite chip it rocks launched in late 2024, and is just about as powerful a chip as can fit inside something as ‘small’ as the Phone 9 (so far). During my time playing with the phone, I jumped into Diablo: Immortal, Genshin Impact, and Civilisation VI to see if I could make the Phone 9 sweat. I couldn’t, but I could certainly get it hot (but we’ll come back to that).

Performance in every game I tested was good – the phone’s display can hit 185hz in game mode, though nothing I tried came even close to that. Diablo sat at 60fps consistantly, even as I threw spells and explosions out at the creepy crawlies attacking Wortham. Civilisation, too, ran well, holding a consistent 30fps (though I was only in the early game, I can’t vouch for what that game will be like 20 hours into a match).

Genshin also ran at a very consistant 30fps – considerably better than other high-end smartphones I’ve tested, and didn’t break that even when I had an entire open world loaded up before me. You can switch the game into a ’60fps’ mode which will warn you that you’re overclocking the game beyond safe levels, but we’re on a gaming phone: limits are meant to broken!

Surprisingly, it actually runs very smoothly at 60fps even with the warning. I’d 100 per cent recommend you use the included external fan, though.

I’m a Fan of the Fan

When pushed to the limit, the Phone 9 definitely got hot to the touch. That’s to be expected, honestly, but it is uncomfortable to hold. Well, ASUS seems to understand that that isn’t an ideal gaming experience, as the Phone 9 comes with an external fan in the box which clips on and keeps the phone cool during ‘extended’ gaming periods. It’s a bit silly that unless you’re very careful, clicking it in place presses the phone’s power button and turns off your screen, but it’s a small price to pay to keep your phone from overheating.

See, ASUS themselves says the phone should stay resonably cool if you’re only playing for short periods of time, say 15-20 minutes, but if you’re putting in the hard yards you’ll want to attach the fan. The peripheral attaches into a secondary USB-C port on the side of the phone, allowing charge through and access to a second 3.5mm audio jack.

The downside is that it makes the phone almost impossible to hold and use comfortably – I imagine it’s mean to be used with an external backbone-style controller attached, though I’m not quite sure how you’d have both attached at once. Doing so would make it a fantastic mobile gaming device, which wouldn’t be as bulky as something like a Steam Deck or ROG Ally X, and could be ‘dismantled’ to fit in your pocket when you don’t need the full g4m3r experience.

It even works as a stand, so you could theoretically attach a bluetooth controller instead and use it like a tiny console.

The main thing that I like about the fan, though, is that it’s included in the box. It’s become too common for what are oestenisbly required peripherals to be sold separately, and I appreciate that you’ll pretty much have everything you need to make this system work (and push it to the edge if that’s what you want) out of the box.

The ROG-branded Tessen mobile controller isn’t in the box though, which is a shame. We didn’t get to test it together with the fan and phone, so your mileage may vary.

The Bad

Game Genie doesn’t gel well with Android

As is common with almost every portable gaming system today, the Phone 9 comes equipped with its own ‘gaming overlay’. In this case, it’s ROG’s ‘Game Genie’, a touch-enabled menu system that allows you to control various aspects of how the phone will perform. You can use it to control the attached external fan, for example, to boost cooling when you’re knee-deep in demons in Diablo, for example, or set up macros to record certain gestures or button combinations more easily.

It’s also a bit of a pain in the ass to activate. On other dedicated devices, you’ll typically have a button dedicated to opening whatever the relevant overlay at a moment’s notice, allowing you to get in and fiddle with the necessarily settings mid game. Here, though, I had to activate the ‘Game Genie’ from within Android’s notifications pane any time I wanted to change anything.

Swipe down, swipe down again, swipe to find Game Genie in the panel, and tap it to open. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re playing a game with touch controls (read: almost every mobile game), it does actually get in the way of gameplay, and might activate something in the game you didn’t want to.

It’s not the most elegant solution, and I’d have loved a dedicated button on the phone that opened the overlay, or something programmable, like the Action Button on iPhones, which could be programmed to launch that overlay or put you right back into whatever game you’ve been playing. Would it require some hardware rethinking? Yeah, but ASUS is more than capable.

Sticker Shock

I get it, making products like this is expensive: it’s not easy to pack this much power and memory into something resembling a high-end smartphone – though clearly one made by RGB fanatics. It’s also clearly not made for mass market adoption, but is targeting the high-end gaming crowd, who are well-and-truly known for dropping wads of cash on new updates every few years.

Even so, starting at AU$1,799 raised my eyebrows, and capping out at AU$2,499 for the Pro Edition is … just… a lot of money. For AU$1,799 you could get an iPhone 16e and an LCD Steam Deck and have a little bit of change. You’d also have a speedy, light phone, as well as a fantastic, powerful gaming handheld that could effectively double up as a PC, with the right cables attached.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that the ROG Phone 9 is bad value, because I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s just that with things as expensive as they are, it’s gotten harder to justify dropping AU$1,799 on something as ‘unnessecary’ as this – especially when ASUS themselves make a ‘better’ handheld gaming machine in the Ally X, for less.

Yes, the Phone 9 has the added benefit of also being a phone, but I’m not entirely convinced that combining those things pays off at this level.

Do We Recommend the ROG Phone 9?

If you’re keen on mobile gaming, the ROG Phone 9 is a pretty exceptional piece of kit. It didn’t stutter once in my testing, and, with the right accessories, can turn into an impressive handheld. However, it’s also competing to take the prime spot in your pocket, which is a very hard fight at the moment.

I think this isn’t a phone for everyone, but if its for you, you’re gonna get a lot of mileage from it.