If you’re wondering just how much the high-end gaming-focused smartphone from Asus was going to cost, then you’ll be interested to learn that a Finnish mobile carrier has the handset up for preorder at €999.
The network in question is Telia – as spotted by a Reddit user, via Slashgear – and that price tag would roughly translate to the Asus ROG Phone costing around £895, $1160, or AU$1560.
Of course, the pricing will never be a direct currency translation, but if the mobile network in question has things on the mark, then you’ve got an idea of the ballpark figure you’ll be paying for this gaming smartphone.
Whichever way you dice it, that’s a lot of dough to fork out for a phone, but then there is an increasing trend towards more expensive handsets these days – you only need look at Apple and the iPhone X which also tips the scales at a grand. Plus the Asus ROG Phone has a chunky spec and some nifty gamer-targeted features, so it was never going to be cheap.
Cool customer
The handset boasts a 1080p AMOLED display with HDR support and a 90Hz refresh rate, 8GB of RAM, a clocked-up Snapdragon 845 (hitting 2.9GHz, 100MHz faster than normal) and nifty vapor-cooling tech that tackles the heat problems which plague compact gaming devices – and apparently does a very good job as we found in our hands-on.
It has a load of other gaming tricks and accessories to boot, but the rival gaming handset from Razer is priced considerably cheaper at £699 or $699 (around AU$940). Now, it looks like Asus has packed a lot more into its product, but still, the price tag – if it does turn out to be pitched as Telia has revealed – may well give some pause for thought.
On the plus side, those in Finland pre-ordering the Asus ROG Phone from Telia will get a bonus in the form of a pair of Asus ROG Delta headphones thrown in, worth €199 (around £180, $230, or AU$310).
Also interesting is that the carrier claims the Asus gaming phone will be shipped from ‘week 38’, meaning we’re looking at a mid-September release date (again, if the company is correct in this assertion, and indeed the date doesn’t slip on the hardware production side).
As ever, we shall have to see, and we’ll have to wait until we get the ROG Phone in for review before we can truly see what this gaming handset is capable of, and whether it might be worth those who fall into its mobile gaming niche forking out a lot of money for the device.
- We’ve chosen the best phone for gaming in 2018
