Asus doesn’t make as many phones as it once did, but the Taiwanese manufacturer has established itself on two major fronts in the smartphone world: gaming phones and compact flagships. The Zenfone 9 is the brand’s mainstream flagship phone with a focus on one-handed usability, while the ROG Phone 6 range is still the benchmark in the gaming phone segment. Let’s see what went well and what could be improved.
Winner – Zenfone 9
Asus has built the best compact phone of the year and it’s not even close. The size of the Zenfone 9 is perfect for one-handed handling, and there’s no sacrifice in performance or build quality here. Zenfone 9 ticks all the ticks of a 2022 flagship with its 120Hz AMOLED display, Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, and a vastly improved main camera over its predecessor.
Add in a clean design that stands out from other phones on the market, and battery life that’s superior to other similarly sized phones, and you’ve got yourself a real winner. Zenfone 9 is also featured in many of our editor’s top 5 phones of the year which is another form of praise for this device.
Winner – ROG Phone 6 Pro/6D series
It’s hard to find fault with the ROG Phone 6 Pro and ROG Phone 6D series – they represent the pinnacle of gaming phones for 2022. Asus offers the complete gaming phone package and this year it brought the two best flagship chipsets available in the Android realm: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in the ROG Phone 6 and 6 Pro and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+ in the ROG Phone 6D series.
The 10-bit AMOLED screens with 165Hz refresh rates are a real joy to use, as are the AirTigger 6 ultrasonic touch sensors and class-leading stereo speakers and battery life. You can configure the ROG Phone 6 Pro with up to 18GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and Asus offers an extensive list of first-party accessories that are unrivaled in the segment.
The extra effort put into the thermal management of the notoriously demanding latest generations of Snapdragon chips and the bevy of user customization options are what stand out in the ROG Phone range to date. If we could see one area of improvement for next generation ROG Phones, it would have to be the cameras.
Loser: timely software updates
Google announced Android 13 in August and took Asus four months to push the update to the Zenfone 9. Even worse, the latest ROG Phone 6D series and the ROG Phone 6 Diablo Immortal Edition still launched with Android 12 in the fall of 2022.
The official Asus Android 13 update schedule has the ROG Phone 6 series scheduled for Android 13 in Q1 2023, but with no specific date in mind yet. This doesn’t seem convincing to users who are splurging on a high-end ROG Phone 6 Pro or 6D Ultimate priced above $1,200/€1,200.
To make matters worse, Asus only provides two Android version updates and two years of security patches compared to four on Samsung, Google, OnePlus and Oppo devices. Given the high asking prices and a relatively small number of new devices, we’d like to see longer software support on flagship Asus phones in the years to come.
Underdog: flagship of the non-ROG big screen
The Zenfone 9 is an excellent phone with flagship builds and specs, but the market wants phones with large screens, so why not give in and make your own? Yes, the ROG phones are flagships too, but all their gamer aesthetics and crappy cameras don’t sit well with consumers who just want a sleek flagship to rival the Samsung Galaxies and iPhones of the world.
Asus had its Zenfone Flip models for the last few years, although they didn’t do well in terms of sales and were discontinued. Hopefully we’ll see more of an entry into the Zenfone lineup in the coming year as Asus makes some of the best, if often underrated, phones on the market.
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