The ROG Phone 5 series launched five months ago, and today, Asus upgraded the series by launching the ROG phone 5s duo. The Asus ROG Phone 5s & ROG Phone 5s Pro are now official, so unlike last time, there aren’t three phones (last time, there was an ultimate edition as well). The major upgrade is in terms of performance as these two phones now feature the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Plus SOC. This means, on paper, these two phones offer an AI Engine that is 20% faster than the ROG Phone 5 series. Moreover, the CPU is now clocked at up to 3.0GHz instead of 2.84GHz.
Design-wise, Asus hasn’t changed anything. The vanilla ROG Phone 5s still has the same RGB ROG logo on the back. The headphone jack is still intact, so that’s a good thing. There is a secondary USB Type-C port on the side, as well as the accessory connector. There are two color options named Storm White and Phantom Black.
Just like previous phones, there is a 6.78-inch Super AMOLED panel with a Full-HD+ resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate. What’s new this time is the 360Hz touch-sampling rate which is an upgrade over the 300Hz touch-samplng0-rate of the ROG Phone 5 series. This results in a touch-latency of just 24ms, the lowest on any smartphone (ROG Phone 5 series had 24.3ms). One extra thing this time is that you can now choose between 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz refresh rates. Earlier, there was no 90Hz option.
Both the phones have a 6,000mAh battery and support 65W fast charging.
One thing that made the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate a truly ultimate phone was the mind-blowing 18GB of RAM and 512GB of storage configuration. Well, this time, Asus decided to offer the same configuration with the ROG Phone 5s Pro, so that’s one reason why there is no ROG Phone 5s Ultimate this time. The Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro has a secondary color display on the back instead of a PM-OLED panel like on the ROG Phone 5 Ultimate.
The camera setup remains the same on both phones. So, there are three cameras on the back that include a primary 64-megapixel camera with a Sony IMX686 sensor, a secondary 13 Megapixel ultrawide camera, and a third 5 Megapixel macro camera. For selfies, you get a 24MP camera.
One difference between the Asus ROG Phone 5s and ROG Phone 5s Pro apart from the secondary display is that the Pro version has two extra touch sensors on the rear panel, whereas the vanilla variant lacks those.
According to XDA-Developers, the ROG Phone 5s series is going to replace the ROG Phone 5 series as soon as the stock depletes.