Asus ROG Phone 5 Series Official – Snapdragon 888 Gaming Phone From RM2,999

The Asus ROG Phone 5 is here, and the gaming phone is more elaborate than ever. While its predecessor was only offered in one model, the ROG Phone 5 is now a series of three smartphones: there’s the standard ROG Phone 5, the ROG Phone 5 Pro, and the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate. Retailing from only RM2,999 for the Malaysian market, it also offers pretty good value for money.

Of course, the RM2,999 starting price is for the regular ROG Phone 5 with 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM; opting for the 256GB model with 16GB of RAM will set you back RM3,799 instead. The ROG Phone 5 Pro, on the other hand, costs RM4,499 for 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

What about the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate? Well, this model retails at RM4,999, and you get 512GB of storage and 18GB (!) of RAM for that kind of money.

What differentiates the three versions of the ROG Phone 5 are a number of features. The Pro and Ultimate models, for one, come with a “ROG Vision” back panel, which is basically a small PMOLED screen that shows charging information or an incoming call.

Curiously, the ROG Phone 5 Pro model gets a colour PMOLED screen, while the Ultimate variant has a monochrome panel instead; possibly to match the black and white colour scheme of the phone. As for the regular ROG Phone 5, it has a dot-matrix ROG logo on the back – quite similar to the lid design of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.

Beyond that, the ROG Phone 5 Pro and Ultimate also feature two extra capacitive buttons on the rear panel, which work in tandem with the ultrasonic shoulder buttons on the left side of the phone. Beyond these differences, all variants of the ROG Phone 5 have the same hardware. Not surprisingly, they are all powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset clocked at 2.84GHz.

Other specifications of the three ROG Phone 5 devices include a 6.78-inch 2448 x 1080 AMOLED screen with a fast 144Hz refresh rate and 300Hz touch sampling rate, a triple camera system (64MP f/1.8 primary + 13MP f/2.4 ultra-wide angle + 5MP f/2.0 macro), a 24MP f/2.45 selfie camera, a large 6,000mAh battery with support for 65W fast charging, and ROG UI based on Android 11 out of the box.

The Asus ROG Phone 5 series will be available for pre-order in Malaysia from tomorrow onwards until 25 March. The standard ROG Phone 5 will arrive here sometime next month in April, while the Pro and Ultimate models will only be available locally in May 2021.