Announced at an event in London, ASUS' gaming brand, Republic of Gamers, has announced the UK launch of the ROG Phone. Keen gamers can expect to get their hands on it from December 14 for a reasonable price of £799.
Pre-orders will begin at 9 a.m. on November 16, and as a bit of a sweetener, the first "limited run" of people pre-ordering from ASUS's own store will get a £100 discount, knocking the price of the ROG Phone down to £699.
The price puts the ROG Phone on a level playing field with arguably its number one competitor, the Razer Phone 2, in the UK market, though it takes a very different approach to that from Razer.
The ROG Phone is packed to the gills with the latest hardware, including the highest clock speed found on any Snapdragon 845 CPU at a sustained 2.96GHz. ASUS says each is specially selected and "speed-binned" for maximum performance.
This is backed up by the Adreno 630 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. The display is 6-inches, 18:9 and, importantly for gaming, notchless. The 90Hz AMOLED panel also boasts a 1ms response time, as you'd get on a top gaming monitor, and a 108.6% DCI-P3 color gamut as well as HDR.
Of course, the phone is only part of the madness. Perhaps the defining feature is all the other, gamer-fied bits you can get to attach to your ROG Phone. These include an external cooler, a desk dock to turn your phone into a mini gaming PC and a handheld with an additional 6-inch display that produces some kind of crazy Android version of a Nintendo 3DS.
There's no pricing or availability information right now for the accessories, but the phone itself is a pretty enticing prospect, especially if you can get one at its launch discount.
