Weekly poll results: the Asus ROG Phone 9 and 9 Pro are too expensive | Infinium-tech

Last week’s survey brought bad news for the new Asus ROG phones – they’re too expensive. Of the two, the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro stands the best chance of gaining some popularity. Yes, it costs more, but it is also more capable.

Meanwhile, there were very few votes in favor of the Asus ROG Phone 9, so let’s start by looking at its poll results first. As you can see from the green section, more people are interested in the 9 Pro than the vanilla 9. This means that if they are going with Asus, other gaming phones seem to be more popular, judging by the surveys and comments.

The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro fares better, but it’s clear that its premium price is too much for most gamers. As commentators say, gaming phones not only have to compete with other gaming phones, but they also have to win over phones like the Asus ROG Ele and Valve Steam Deck. These offer access to a PC library of games, years of support, and are cheaper than the ROG Phone.

Speaking of support, this was a major point of criticism for both – Asus didn’t get any points for extending the security patch window to 4 years and having only 2 OS updates on a phone over $1,000 put many people off. Are moving away. The locked bootloader isn’t helping matters – gamers are more likely to run custom software, which can extend the phone’s useful life, but Asus prefers to keep them locked.

It turns out that the company has managed to alienate some older fans too – for example, while the older Asus ROG phones had front-facing speakers, they didn’t need the help of a case for that (the 9-series has cases ) with “audio redirection” because one of their speakers points downwards). Another thing that was lost as the screen bezels shrank was the flawless screen – now the ROG has a punch-hole selfie camera like all the other phones (well, Some? Gaming phones have under-display cameras instead).

Asus has proven that enthusiast brands like Republic of Gamers can charge a high price – but they also need to provide quality and features to live up to that price. And the ROG Phone 9 and 9 Pro have the value-for-money balance wrong.