The ASUS booth(s) was the biggest at Computex 2018, splitting their designated areas into 3 separate areas; ROG, ASUS and TUF Alliance.
Let’s get straight down to business and the most talked about, the most played with product, and the product with the most fingerprints on at Computex 2018 was the ROG Phone which was announced by ASUS on the eve of the start of the event.
This smartphone is literally packed to the brim with top-spec hardware for a phone, and has a plethora of accessories because ASUS wants you to do some many things with it. Let’s get the tech specs out of the way first, the ROG has a 6″ AMOLED display that has a resolution of 2160×1080 at 90Hz with a 1ms response time. Powering this is a 64-bit Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 CPU running at 2.96GHz with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM, and a Qualcomm Adreno 630 GPU. For rest of the specs, you can check it out on ASUS’ own page.
The ROG phone is one serious piece of mobile kit; aimed at the mobile gamers, the power of this phone will put many of the other flagship smartphones to shame. There’s no expandable SD card storage, but the highest spec model comes with an internal 512GB memory.
When it comes to ‘gaming’ phones, other companies just basically release a powerful phone with a good display for gaming and that’s about it. ASUS however has thought of the ROG Phone from all angles. Pictured above if the Fan Dongle that’s supplied with the ROG Phone (sorry Winston, its not called a Fandango…..). The Fan Dongle clips sideways on the back of the ROG phone and helps dissipate some of the heat generated from the phone whilst gaming, more on that later. The Fan Dongle is powered via the side-mount connector on the ROG Phone itself, taking the power from the phone’s internal 4000mAh battery. When you are gaming on the phones, you will mostly hold it in the sideways a charging cable coming out sides (bottom of the phone) would get in the way, so the Fan Dongle has a micro-USB port at the bottom so that you can charge your phone via this port in a more natural angle. Similarly with a 3.5mm audio port at the bottom of the phone, the Fan Dongle’s base has another 3.5mm audio port so you can plug in your headphones whilst gaming with the connectors digging into your hand.
To take things further whilst you holding you ROG Phone sideways for gaming, ASUS has added 2 Air Triggers on either side on top of the phone (when held sideways). These touch sensitive areas acts like the R1 and L1 of your console controllers, triggering a small vibration in the phone, and also illuminates the small bit of the edge of the screen directly under the Air Trigger.
Most phone manufacturers would have stopped there, up ASUS went much much further with their design and ‘game-ability’ with the ROG Phone. Next is the Twin View dock. Insert your ROG Phone into it and you get a handheld gaming console, as you will get an extra 6″ 2160×1080 AMOLED, quad speakers, 2 physical trigger buttons, a dual haptic feedback system for increased rumbles, an improved cooling system and an extra 6000mAh internal battery!
If you can’t make out which of the screens you see in the photo is actually the ROG Phone, its the one on the top. When you start a game on the phone, the game screen is sent to the bottom auxiliary display, leaving you to use the ROG phone itself for other apps such as streaming or chatting.
ASUS has also reached out to other companies for their support of the ROG Phone, and thus there is already a 3rd party analogue joystick and buttons controller called the Game Vice. The Game Vice is connected to the ROG Phone via the USB-C port at the bottom of the phone.
You might be already be blown away with the ROG Phone, but hold on, it gets better. Place the ROG Phone in a ASUS Mobile Desktop Dock and now you have a PC! With the Mobile Desktop Dock you can connect up a 4K UHD monitor, USB keyboard, USB mouse, Gigabit LAN, a 5.1 surround sound system via its S/PDIF port, an full size SD card and even a 2.5″ SATA HDD! The possibility is endless, you can use the ROG Phone as a workstation.
And there’s more….using ASUS WiGig Dock hooked up via HDMI to your TV, you can actually wireless game on the ROG Phone with the screen and sound projected onto your TV! Phew!
Next we have the newest PSU from ROG, the Thor 1200W Platinum Power Supply…..and no you do not get the handle as this was a demo you could swing around. Aside from packing a big punch with its 1200W or a smaller 850w capacity and having AURA Sync, there’s actually not much available information on this. Internal photos are available from ASUS’ website and the layout inside the Thor has a uncanny resemblance to a SeaSonic Prime PSU…. The side of the Thor has a indicator to your exactly how much power the power supply is drawing. Available in Q3, but no price was given.
The ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 is ROG’s latest wireless router claimed as world’s first 10Gbps gaming router. As part of the name suggests, the Rapture GT-AX11000 is the is the world’s first tri-band 802.11ax route offering insanely fast data speeds of up to 1148Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 4804Mbps on each of its dual 5GHz bands.The router will also feature a few gamer-specific features. One of the most interesting of these is its custom Game Boost mode which instructs the router to intelligently prioritise gaming traffic ahead of other processes, kind of like Killer LAN.
…and this is where some the best booth babes were!
Finally we ventured into the vast ASUS area for their consumer hardware, and boy did ASUS lay it all out.
The top of billing was the new premium ZenBook Pro 14 and 15 featuring a ScreenPad, a touchscreen where the touchpad would usually be. The ScreenPad is meant to increase the laptops’ multitasking possibilities, with the 5.5″ ScreenPad functions as a second screen for things like messaging or apps including a calculator, a video and music player or calendar. It can also be used as a launchpad for apps on the ZenBook Pro’s main display or serve as a function command screen for Microsoft Office programs.
The ZenBook Pro 15 has a 15.6″ 4K UHD NanoEdge display with Delta E<2 Color Accuracy and packs an Intel Core i9 CPU, 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. The Pro 15 is 18.9mm thick and weighs 1.88 kg and will go on sale in mid-July.
Another new product by ASUS was the ASUS VivoWatch, a blood pressure monitor that the company says is not a smartwatch or fitness tracker. The Vivowatch delivers real-time blood pressure data in 15 seconds, has a Gorilla Glass screen and ECG sensor on front of device and claims non-stop 28 day battery life.
