The big picture: Asus just unveiled a pair of new gaming-focused smartphones with high-end specs and, naturally, lots of RGB lighting. The ROG Phone 7 and ROG Phone 7 Ultimate have a number of advantages over most conventional flagships, including higher screen refresh rates, bigger batteries, and improved cooling solutions that should result in higher sustained performance.
Just like their predecessors, the new ROG phones feature a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 1,080 x 2,448 and a 165Hz refresh rate. The only improvement here is the higher 1,500 nits peak brightness, compared to the 1,200 nits last year's models touted.
Asus equipped its new gaming flagships with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, pairing it with up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. The company also revamped the phones' vapor chamber cooling system, claiming it improved thermal efficiency by 10 percent compared to the ROG Phone 6.
The ROG Phone 7 and Phone 7 Ultimate come with a triple camera array on the back, which includes a 50-megapixel primary shooter, a 13-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel macro. On the front, there's a 32-megapixel selfie camera that uses pixel binning to output 8-megapixel images.
Powering it all is a large 6,000mAh battery with support for 65W fast charging. Unfortunately, the new ROG phones still don't support wireless charging, but they do include a second USB-C port on the side for more convenient charging while using them in landscape mode.
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The ROG Phone 7 lineup ships with Android 13 out of the box, with Asus promising two years of Android version updates and four years of security updates.
Lastly, the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate comes bundled with Asus' new AeroActive Cooler 7. When it's attached, a small motorized vent opens on the phone, allowing the fan to direct fresh air over the cooling fins of the vapor chamber. The accessory also features a subwoofer that works in tandem with the phone's front-facing stereo speakers, another USB-C port and headphone jack, and four physical buttons, allowing it to be used as a controller.
Asus' new flagship gaming phones are already available for preorder in Europe, with shipping scheduled to start later this month. The vanilla ROG Phone 7 starts at €999 (about $1,106), while the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate with the included AeroActive Cooler costs €1,399 ($1,549).
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