It’s quite early for Asus to unveil its latest gaming smartphone, but here we are. The Asus ROG Phone 8 series made its debut at CES 2024, and we have confirmation from Asus Malaysia itself that the gaming phone – which looks a lot more subdued now – will be coming to Malaysia very soon.

Asus Malaysia further elaborated that the company will be revealing more details on the ROG Phone 8 series for the Malaysian market come 30 January 2024. With that in mind, there’s a chance the ROG Phone 8, ROG Phone 8 Pro, and ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition – yes, the naming convention is rather odd – will be launched here on that day itself.

Design wise, the ROG Phone 8 phones look more like a smartphone than a dedicated gaming device now, which is great in our opinion. The standard model has a two-tone finish on the back with an RGB logo, while the two Pro versions have a more understated, “stealthy” all-black finish with an LED dot-matrix display instead.

Beyond the different design and memory configuration, all devices in the ROG Phone 8 series have similar hardware. The three gaming phones feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, a 6.78-inch 2400 x 1080 AMOLED display with 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate – though the panel itself is capable of 165Hz – a triple camera system (50MP primary + 13MP ultra-wide + 32MP telephoto), a 32MP selfie camera, and a 5,500mAh battery.

It’s also worth noting that the ROG Phone 8 series now features IP68 water and dust resistance; an improvement over the IP54 rating of the ROG Phone 7.

To recap, more details on the Malaysian availability of the Asus ROG Phone 8 series will be revealed come 30 January 2024. Hopefully, the gaming phones will be launched locally on that day itself.