If a flagship phone has been released in the past year, you can bet that it’s got some AI feature or the other.
Whether it’s for transcription, translation, better note-taking, and more, AI has infiltrated a lot of our phone’s software. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a little… boring. Predictable, even.
But what does AI in a gaming phone look like?
I got my answer with the ASUS ROG Phone 9.
We out here g-AI-ming
As a gaming phone, of course the priority would be the use of AI in enhancing the gaming experience.
Admittedly, a lot of it is in the beta mode still, but it already seems promising.
There were a few title games highlighted by ASUS that could benefit from their new AI gaming features: Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Arena of Valor, MLBB, and League of Legends: Wild Rift.
I’ll be focusing on the one that I am most familiar with, Genshin Impact.
For the former, I played around with these features:
- Auto Pick Up
When activated, walking near collectibles would automatically pick them up without you pressing anything—in theory.
For the most part, it worked, but sometimes would be a hit or miss. If I maybe ran too fast past an item, or if they were in clusters, I noticed that the feature would miss picking up a few things.
Great for some lazy, idle gaming when you’re running around the map anyway, but hardcore farmers might end up more frustrated than pleased with this feature.
- Auto Run
By automatically pressing the “up” button for you, this is another feature that I feel is great for those exploring the map.
You still have to control which direction your character goes, but at least you don’t need to keep your finger on the screen the entire time and risk cramping it.
- X Sense – Speed up conversations
For those who hate Genshin Impact’s yap sessions, this would be a half-win. It allows you to move through multiple dialogue lines automatically, but it doesn’t exactly allow you to skip dialogue per se, a la Wuthering Waves.
You still need to give the dialogue lines time to finish, and the AI cannot help you select a response when needed, so you still have to take action at times.
- Quick Escape
Okay, this one’s a legit lifesaver for one of the game’s most annoying mechanics, getting caught in a Hydro bubble or getting frozen, and I can confirm, it works very well.
Enhancing d-AI-ly use
Still in the realm of gaming, another AI feature that’s pretty cool is X Capture, which automatically records your gatcha sessions on Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, while recording kills, victories, or even defeated moments on games like Arena of Valor and MLBB.
In Arena of Valor, MLBB, and League of Legends: Wild Rift, the ROG Phone 9 has an Auto Skill Upgrade which detects when your character gets a new skill, and maps it to the appropriate skill buttons so you don’t have to fiddle with settings.
Available across all games, the AI Grabber feature could come in handy when you’re stuck in a game and unsure of how to progress or don’t understand the game’s objectives.
Just select any text on the screen that you want to copy, and AI Grabber will seamlessly pull it up on Google without needing you to type anything.
It also has a translation feature, which makes chatting with foreign players much easier.
Gaming aside, there are what ASUS calls daily AI features too, to enhance your experience using the ROG Phone 9 as a daily driver.
This includes:
- AI Call Translator, which supports English, Chinese, Cantonese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish
- AI Transcript in the Recorder app, which needs no internet connection to work and can generate summarised notes from the text of your recording
- Circle to Search (this will only be added in Q4 through a system update), which I am very excited about because it’s been a true quality-of-life (QOL) upgrade on my own phone
Powering all these AI features and more is a 5,800mAh battery and a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, and the phone’s capabilities are enjoyed through a 6.78” AMOLED display with up to a 185Hz refresh rate.
Here are some of the phone’s other specs:
| Design | Anime Vision Mini-LEDs (85 dots) |
| Thermal | – GameCool 9 Cooling System – 5-section structure with centred-SoC design – 360° SoC Cooling System Gen 3 with Rapid-cooling Conductor and enlarged graphite sheet |
| RAM / ROM | Up to 16GB / 512GB |
| Display | – 6.78”, 2400×1080, Samsung E6 flexible AMOLED display – HBM 1,600 nits / peak brightness up to 2,500 nits – Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 |
| Cameras | – 50MP Sony Lytia 700 main camera with 6-axis Hybrid Gimbal Stabilizer 4.0 – 5MP Macro – 0.7x 13MP ultra-wide with free-form lens – 32MP RGBW sensor with 22mm ultrawide lens |
| Battery and charging | – 5,800mAh battery with 65W HyperCharge adapter – Wireless charging support (Qi 1.3 standard, 15W) |
| IP rating | IP68 |
| Dimensions | 163.8 mm x 77 mm, 8.9 mm, 227 g |
I wouldn’t say that the ROG Phone 9 is a device geared for work productivity or mobile photography, but you’d probably be able to get decent performance for both out of it anyway.
On the topic of photography, the AirTrigger buttons provide users with another easier way of snapping a photo, and there’s the 6-Axis Hybrid Gimbal Stabilizer 4.0 which is supposed to provide more stability for smoother videos and pictures.
I do find the latter to be a bit overdone, as the movement delay caused by the stabiliser tends to throw me off. If you’re someone who usually has shaky hands though, this would definitely balance things out.
Its 5,800mAh battery is an upgrade from the previous generation’s 5,500mAh capacity, and as long as you’re not doing high-intensity gaming for long stretches of time, battery life shouldn’t be an issue.
Verdict
The gaming AI features on the ROG Phone 9 are a breath of fresh air to explore, but to answer the big question: Did they make gaming more fun?
Somewhat. By cutting out repetitive or disruptive actions in gameplay, they enable you to focus more on the fun parts, be it the exploration or battles, and to some, that equals more fun. If I was still gaming as much as I was about a year ago, these features would probably quite literally be gamechangers to me.
To add, these features are all still in beta, which means there’s more room for improvement, and I’m interested to see how far the AI gaming tech can go.
Give me AI-enhanced QOL features any day, but I hope it doesn’t get to the point whereby the AI just outright plays the game for you, because what would be the fun in that?
The ROG Phone 9 is available at a starting price of RM3,999.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| New AI-powered gaming features | Rather limited as they’re still in beta mode |
| Increased battery capacity | Camera stabilisation is a bit too strong |
| More AI features to improve daily driver experience |
VP Verdict is a series where we personally try and test out products, services, fads, and apps. Want to suggest something else for us to try? Leave a comment here or send the suggestion to our Facebook page!
