The ASUS ROG Phone 5 was launched earlier this year and it is the ultimate gaming smartphone with not just the most powerful smartphone processor you can find in a modern smartphone. We are talking about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 5G platform here. But they squeeze up to 18GB of RAM into a smartphone. You are essentially getting the performance of a modern PC in the palm of your hands, and it still fits in your pockets.
The ASUS ROG Phone 5 packed a fast display too. At 144Hz, it is one of the fastest, if not the fastest, smartphone display you can get in a modern smartphone. It also came with one of the fastest responding displays you can find in a modern smartphone as well at 240Hz of touch sampling rate.
While all of that made the ASUS ROG Phone 5 series one of the most powerful and desirable smartphones in the market, the recipe is not unique to ASUS’ ROG Phone 5 series. Other flagship smartphones started using the same recipe in their smartphones. You still will not get RAM sizes as big as 18GB in most flagships from major manufacturers. But you will get the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G platform and even up to 512GB of storage onboard. You also get up to 240Hz touch sampling rate with displays that refreshes at up to 120Hz in most cases.
The ASUS ROG Phone 5s series takes things up a notch in power though. It now packs a specially tuned Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G chipset. They call it the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ platform and it is marginally more powerful that its Plain Jane counterpart.
That is not all they improved though. They also made the 144Hz display a little faster to the touch. Instead of 240Hz in touch sampling, it now responds at 360Hz for an even faster 24ms latency from touch to action. It is still a Full HD+ display that measures at 6.78-inc though.
You also get mostly the same hardware as the current ASUS ROG Phone 5. The behemoth 6,000 mAh battery is still present to ensure you can work with it the entire day. You still get the high-resolution 64-Megapixel shooter supported by a 5-Megapixel macro camera and 13-Megapixel ultra-wide camera. Out front is a 24-megapixel shooter still.
We said that there is a series in the new line-up. That is because there will be two devices from the series – a regular ROG Phone 5s and an extreme ROG Phone 5s Pro. The difference between the two devices, at least in terms of visual, is found at the backplate. The regular ROG Phone 5s only packs the dot matrix RGB graphics at the back. The ROG Phone 5s Pro has the small OLED display that trickle down from the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate. Of course, the Pro also gets the 18GB RAM + 512GB storage treatment that was signature to the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate. Because the new ROG Phone 5s series shares similar dimensions with the original ROG Phone 5, you can use accessories that you have from the older ROG Phone 5 series.
ASUS says that the devices will launch on the 30th of September 2021 in Taiwan. The ASUS ROG Phone 5s (16GB + 256GB) starts at NTD 29,990 (MYR 4,559*). You can get the ROG Phone 5s in 512GB storage flavour too at NTD 33,390 (MYR 5,167*). The ROG Phone 5s Pro will set you back NTD 37,990 (MYR 5,773*) at launch. There are no specific dates for an international launch at this time. Considering that the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate just arrived in Malaysian shores, we think the ROG Phone 5s series might not come all that soon.
* Approximately based on exchange rate of NTD 100 = MYR 15.20 on xe.com as of 17/08/2021