Asus ROG Phone 6: All you need to know about the upcoming gaming phone

Asus is due to release another no-holds-barred gaming phone, but what can we expect from the Asus ROG Phone 6? Here’s all you need to know.

It’s fair to saw that we were big fans of the Asus ROG Phone 5. Awarding it four and a half stars out of five, we reserved particular praise for its responsive screen, fantastic stereo speakers, and long-lasting (and fast-charging) battery.

Evidently then, we’ve got high expectations for the sequel to this top class gaming phone, so in the below article we’ve collected all the information we know about it so far.

Release Date

We’ve not yet had any official announcement regarding the launch date of the ROG Phone 6 and what’s more, there is not a strong established launch pattern for this phone, so we can’t simply pencil a date into the calendar as we might be able to do for the likes of the iPhone 14.

However, we have received one big clue as to its eventual release date; this handset will be one of the first to run on the Snapdragon Gen 8 Plus 1, which is scheduled for launch in 2022 Q3; therefore, we can at least narrow down the new ROG Phone’s release date to sometime between July and September this year.

Price

We’ve not received any official word on price yet either, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise given that there’s some while yet until the phone is released.

The standard ROG Phone 5 cost $1099/£999 upon launch, and we expect its sequel to fall into a similar ballpark, especially seeing as there aren’t many rumours about wide-ranging changes to the new generation that might necessitate a heftier price tag.

Design

Despite being quite a few months away from release, we’ve actually got a pretty good idea of what the ROG Phone 6 might look like, thanks to an Easter Egg in Asus’ lastest Android update.

And from the same firmware, a sketch of the ROG Phone 6. I am really curious to see how the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 performs on this phone, cause it’s not looking good on the Moto Edge X30 or Xiaomi 12 😬 pic.twitter.com/RhOElpL6OV

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) January 4, 2022

The above image, published by Twitter tipster Mishaal Rahman, was taken from the Android 12 update for the Asus Zenfone 8, and the text on the back of the handset quite clearly seems to mark it out as the ROG Phone 6.

The appearance bears quite a bit of similarity to its predecessor, and it certainly seems to have held onto that strong gaming aesthetic that’s characterised the other phones in this series too.

We got an even clearer insight into what the phone might look like when Android Central published a hands-on with a ROG Phone prototype. While the ROG Phone 6 might not be identical to the device pictured in the article, it seems likely that it will form the basis of what Asus is currently planning for its next gaming phone.

We certainly hope that this edition maintains the versatility of its predecessor in terms of its design, with the ROG Phone 5 hosting touch-sensitive shoulder triggers, two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, and a pogo pin connector, in addition to two stereo speakers and volume and power buttons.

Specifications

There’s one specification we know for sure, and fortunately, it’s likely to please gamers. The Asus ROG Phone 6 will be one of the first smartphones around that will run on the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, the newest and most powerful mobile chipset ever produced by Qualcomm. This impressive silicon is claimed to boast 10% improved speeds and 30% improved efficiency across both the CPU and the GPU.

In the informative video above, published above by Dave2D, we get a closer look at that aforementioned prototype ROG Phone, and it certainly seems that those improved performance standards are brought to bear, with faster speeds but also less energy consumption too.

Aside from that, we’ve not really got that much to go on at this stage. We would expect some broadly similar specifications to its predecessor, but one potential area for further improvement could come if the refresh rate is boosted further from 144Hz to 165Hz, matching some of the other highest spec gaming phones out there like the Red Magic 7 Pro and delivering an incredibly smooth screen experience.