Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro Hands-on

ASUS finally revealed the new ROG Phone 6 series yesterday with the ROG Phone 6 Pro being the more premium variant. For a couple of weeks now, we’ve had an early access to a sample unit so we’re able to share with you our unboxing and initial impressions of the device.

Our review unit is the ROG Phone 6 Pro which has a maxed out specs compared to the Classic variant. Right out of the box, the phone has a familiar look and feel to it. In fact, it would be hard to distinguish it from the previous ROG phones unless you check out the design changes at the back.

The design pattern is now more symmetric with a horizontal orientation so you can better appreciate it while gaming. There’s a small LED indicator or notification bar and another bigger LED display that provides status on the running game and can be customized to project your own text or graphics. Take note though that the rear design is also what separates the the ROG Phone 6 and the ROG Phone 6 Pro.

Powering the ROG Phone 6 Pro is the latest Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset with Adreno 730 GPU. Pretty similar to the previous-gen but with a little higher clock speed. Synthetic benchmarks would show the increase in performance and this unit got over a million points in Antutu.

Geekbench 5.4: 1,318 (Single-core Score), 4,110 (Multi-core Score)
PCMark Work 3.0: 16,555
Antutu Benchmark 9.4: 1,012,102

In actuality, you don’t really notice it but it sure does help to know that you have the latest and most powerful chipset.

This is paired with a whopping 18GB of LPDD5 RAM. Like the ROG 5s Pro and ROG 5 Ultimate, that’s one of the biggest RAM allocations we’ve ever seen in any smartphone these days. It even surpassed the 16GB of our ROG Flow 13 laptop.

As with the previous ROG phones, the RGO Phone 6 Pro also comes with a 6,000mAh battery with a 65W fast charging capability.

Battery life is actually quite impressive on this one. We tried playing a single Rank game of Mobile Legends for about 16 minutes and we only used about 4% of the battery. Our PC Mark Battery test also showed 13 hours, 50 minutes at 50% brightness, zero volume and in airplane mode.

Speaking of that display, we’ve got a 6.78-inch Samsung E4 AMOLED display with always-on HDR technology and protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus. You can set the dynamic refresh rate from 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz and 165Hz depending on the need of the game you’re playing.

Other games such as Asphalt 9 and Apex Mobile played really well and buttery smooth, thanks to that 165Hz refresh rate and 720Hz touch-sampling rate.

Remember the display at the back? It’s called the ROG Vision. This second display has full color and sets to 6 standard scenarios but you can also customize it.

Also at the back are the triple camera setup with the main camera using a Sony IMX 766 sensor, a second ultra-wide lens and a 3rd macro lens. Initial sample shots that we got from the main camera showed really good images but we will test more of that in our full review.

Being a hard-core gaming phone, Asus updated and added new features to the Airtriggers like dual action, press and lift and gyroscope aiming.

The AeroActive Cooler 5 has also been redesigned and now looks more bad-ass. It now has 4 physical buttons, an integrated Thermoelectric AI Cooling System and unbound X Mode+ performance boost.

The rest of the hardware specs include dual-SIM 5G, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, in-display fingerprint sensor, and IPX4 splash resistant.

There are so many other things to check out with the ROG Phone 6 Pro but we’ll be sure to include all of that in our full review soon.

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro specs:
6.78-inch FHD+ (2448 x 1080 pixels) Samsung E4 AMOLED display
165Hz refresh rate, 720Hz touch sampling rate, 1ms response time
ROG Vision secondary display (ROG Phone 6 Pro)
Corning Gorilla Glass Victus
Qualcomm Snapdragoon 8+ Gen1 5G SoC
Adreno 730 GPU
18GB LPDDR5 RAM
512GB UFS 3.1 internal storage
Triple-rear cameras:
• 50MP Sony IMX766 main
• 13MP ultrawide
• macro
12MP Sony IMX663 front camera
Dual-SIM
5G, 4G LTE
WiFi 6e
Bluetooth 5.2
NFC
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS
Dual front-facing stereo speakers w/ Cirrus Logic amplifiers
Dual USB-C
3.5mm headphone jack
IPX4 splash resistance
GameCool6 Cooling system w/ AeroActive Cooler 6
Fingerprint scanner (in-display)
Android 12 with ROG UI
6,000mAh Li-Po battery w/ 65W HyperCharge
173 x 77 x 10.3 mm (dimensions)
229 grams (weight)