Asus marked a milestone in the Philippines recently with their 100th retail store opening in that country. As part of the ZenFone 5 launch event in the Philippines, a number of Asus executives were part of a group interview. Asus CEO Jerry Shen was part of that panel and he dropped a pretty obvious hint about a possible Asus gaming smartphone.
When one of the media asked about whether Asus would ever release a gaming phone, Jerry Shen replied in a bashful way and said repeatedly, “you can expect”. You could get the sense he wanted to say more about it but obviously he couldn’t divulge details. Nothing more was shared so the timeline and price would be complete guesses at this point.
We did notice that during the Indonesia ZenFone 5 launch event there was a segement specific to gaming on the ZenFone Max Pro M1 and additionally we saw marketing materials prior to the event that targeting the gaming audience. In this sense, Asus is quite clearly showing their desires to meld gaming and mobile phones together.
So far in the past number of weeks there have been two gaming phones released or announced. Most feature unique cooling systems which is something you would expect. The question is how a cooling system could enhance battery life because as most people realize, a warm battery mean far less battery life. Asus are clever in terms of design and their strong ROG background should help them put a gaming phone above the competition.
One question does remain. How would Asus brand a gaming phone? ZenFone ROG? ZenFone Arez? Remember that stories have emerged about AMD graphic cards from Asus as being part of the new Arez brand. With ROG, that’s now going to be exlusive to Nvidia GPUs. Perhaps it’s just some new brand within ZenFone series.
Stay tuned on this one, you can expect news very soon. ZenFone gaming is about to get real folks!
[source: astig.ph]
