ASUS announces the ROG Phone 9 series with a November launch

ASUS has now officially announced the ROG Phone 9 series and it’s coming a lot sooner than the previous model. Aimed at gamers the ROG Phone series has always been about delivering top-end performance for mobile gaming and that isn’t changing. What is changing is ASUS’s launch timing. With the ROG Phone 8 series, ASUS announced the phone in late December of 2023. It then fully revealed the phone at CES this year in January. The phone was available by the end of the month, with the US launch happening at the beginning of March.

This time around ASUS is pushing things up a bit. Now that the phone is officially announced, it plans to have a full reveal of the phone in November. Naturally, this is also going to push up the launch date of the phone, too. However, availability will vary depending on the region, and launch dates will be different for the US.

ASUS has announced the ROG Phone 9 will launch on November 19

Today’s announcement of the phone really only serves as a means to confirm that the phone’s launch date is coming up.

At this time ASUS hasn’t shared much information about the phone itself. Those details are being saved for the November 19 launch date, where the company will reveal the full set of specs and features for the phone. That being said, ASUS has shared an official image of the ROG Phone 9, along with one major spec detail. ASUS also teases that the ROG Phone 9 series will offer some new AI features. Again there are no specifics here. But, there is a message that says “AI on, Game on” that accompanies the event page.

AI features aren’t new to the ROG Phone series. The ROG Phone 8 series offered a handful of AI features that would help enhance gaming. It seems like the company will have more up its sleeve for the latest ROG Phone.

The ROG Phone 9 series will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite

The only specification that ASUS has confirmed at this time is the phone’s chipset. It’ll be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the new mobile platform that Qualcomm just announced at the Qualcomm Summit this afternoon. The Snapdragon 8 Elite comes with “an innovative Oryon CPU and the enhanced Adreno GPU,” ASUS says.

The phone will no doubt be powerful when it comes to performance. That being said, this is always the case with every ROG phone. ASUS always used the most powerful Qualcomm chipset at the time and there was no reason to believe it would be any different with the new phone.

Although ASUS doesn’t mention specifics, it does state that the ROG Phone 9 will deliver unparalleled performance. “The ROG Phone 9 series pushes the boundaries of mobile gaming to new limits, delivering industry-leading speed, power, and graphical fidelity,” ASUS says.

Now judging by the image that ASUS shared, the phone’s physical design is hardly changing from the ROG Phone 8 series. Which we love since we loved the ROG Phone 8’s design. The rear camera bump is the same shape and it has three sensors. It does appear to have a slightly different finish on the back that’s more like the ROG Phone 8 Pro models. Additionally, the standard model now appears to be using the AniMe Matrix LED display.

ASUS only mentions a standard model

For now, ASUS hasn’t confirmed anything other than the standard model of the ROG Phone 9. However, it does refer to this announcement as being about the ROG Phone 9 “series.” There will no doubt be more than just the standard model launching, but it’s unclear what ASUS will officially call it. It’s also likely to have most of the same specs as the standard model. What you can expect to be different are the RAM and storage.

With the ROG Phone 8 for example, ASUS offered the device with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, but only with 256GB of storage. The ROG Phone 8 Pro bumped up the RAM to 16GB only, and the storage went up to 512GB. Then there was the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition model which came with 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

We can’t say for certain if ASUS will do something like that again this year. What is certain is that ASUS has offered a “pro” version of the ROG Phone for several generations now. So that probably isn’t changing here.