Gaming smartphones have seemingly taken a backseat lately after having their time within the limelight for the past two years approximately. ASUS, however, doesn’t seem fazed in the least and is trying to flood the market with even more models than one can imagine. Just months after the ROG Phone 5 and ROG Phone 5 Ultimate debuted, it’s launching a small refresh of the road that has little improvement apart from the new ROG Phone 5s Pro.
The ROG Phone 5 series is already powerful for a gaming smartphone, so there’s not much needed to be improved urgently. Still, ASUS probably considered giving its gaming phones the simplest, which probably puts current owners of the ROG Phone 5 at a touch of a loss. Fortunately, the improvements are almost so marginal to be noteworthy.
In a nutshell, the core upgrade for both ROG Phone 5s and 5s Pro is that the Snapdragon 888+, which may be a rather slight improvement over the “normal” triple-8 processor. Gamers might appreciate the 360Hz display response rate upgrade more since it will directly affect gaming. Aside from that, the ROG Phone 5s and 5s Pro are just about almost like the ROG Phone 5 and 5 Ultimate, respectively.
The ROG Phone 5s Pro, however, does get one notable change. Rather than the black and white rear screen of its Ultimate counterpart, it now features a small colour OLED panel. But, of course, it’s still mostly used for displaying fancy animated notifications, so don’t expect much from its out-of-the-box experience.
The ASUS ROG Phone 5s comes during configuration options for RAM and storage, but the ASUS ROG Phone 5s Pro is merely available as a top-of-the-line 18GB RAM and 512GB storage model. It also accompanies a rather steep tag of 37,990 NTD (around $1,370), but a minimum includes the $70 AeroActive Cooler 5 accessory. No word yet on global availability.
