Technologies

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro: $1,300 Phone Maxes Out Everything but the Camera

This high-priced gaming phone puts power and style at the front, with plenty of ideas I’d love to see in mainstream phones.

The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro is a $1,300 gaming phone behemoth. Released last summer, the phone justifies its high price with more premium specifications that offer more power and style than the average phone. This includes the phone’s 6.78-inch OLED display with a 165Hz refresh rate, a 6,000mAh battery and a colorful second LED display on the back that adds a dynamic look to the rear of the phone.

I’ve been using the Phone 6 Pro for the last few months — testing it both as a gaming device and as an everyday phone. While I largely enjoy using the Phone 6 Pro, some of the choices Asus made for gamers do not necessarily benefit a mainstream phone user. There are some design quirks, and the camera isn’t as impressive as it should be for such an expensive device. It’s also missing wireless charging, which may not be a necessity but is considered common on most phones.

But if you can cast aside these shortcomings, the Phone 6 Pro has a number of features that could end up on a future iPhone or Galaxy device. Asus also succeeds at catering to those who want to get the most out of their phone as a gaming device.

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro with LED display on — The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro has a rear LED display that lights up with various animations and notification icons.

Mike Sorrentino/CNET

A futuristic design highlighted by a rear LED display

The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro’s design makes a statement. My review unit is a satellite-like white color that’s adorned with blue accents and a black line that diagonally traces around its LED display.

That rear display reminds me of the notification LED that I used to see on BlackBerry phones, but evolved into something more like the cover screen on a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4. The display shows icons for notifications, a Game Start animation (for when you start a game of course), a battery indicator and other animations that you customize within the phone’s settings.

A static LED that outlines the words “Ready to Play” is also on the back of the device to really emphasize that this is a gaming phone. The color of that text can be customized from within the menus.

I would love to see other phones experiment with more artistic colors and designs like Asus. The midrange Nothing Phone 1 is already doing something similar with its Glyph LED design. For now, the closest most mainstream phones get to customization is when you throw on a skin or case.

Yet another design choice to place the phone’s front-facing camera in a bezel above the phone’s display makes sense in order to provide an uninterrupted screen, but that choice is a rather dated idea for a phone this expensive. This makes the phone a little bit taller than the display, which harks back to older designs like 2018’s Samsung Galaxy S9. Gaming phone rival RedMagic now uses an under-display front-facing camera, starting with its 7S Pro, but image quality is still a work in progress on phones giving that a try.

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro with Marvel Snap — The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro has a 6.78-inch screen, and chooses to put the front-facing camera within a bezel above the display.

Mike Sorrentino/CNET

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro’s screen animates and reacts fast

As one would expect with an expensive phone, the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro’s 6.78-inch OLED looked great no matter what type of content I was viewing. By default, it uses an automatic refresh rate that changes depending on what you’re using. After turning on the setting that keeps it at 165Hz at all times, I was able to enjoy extremely smooth scrolling, gaming animations and reading. While Marvel Snap maxes at 60 frames per second, the card game seemed to animate especially well with all of its graphics settings turned on. The same goes for quickly jumping in and out of Gameloft’s Modern Combat 5 and Warner Bros.’ Mortal Kombat — the latter of which natively supports the 165Hz refresh rate.

The screen also has a 720Hz touch sampling rate, or how quickly the screen reacts to taps and scrolls for games. In my experience, that’s particularly useful for first-person shooters and fighting games.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a 165Hz refresh rate or a 720Hz touch sampling rate; last year’s $629 RedMagic 7 phone also includes those features. But features like these are starting to make their way into more mainstream devices at lower prices. Motorola’s $500 Edge phone from last summer, for instance, has a display with a 144Hz refresh rate. I’m expecting these higher frame rates to continue reaching mainstream phones and perhaps pushing even higher on gaming phones, a trend that we’re also seeing on some televisions and computer monitors.

The 720Hz rate is still largely found on gaming phones, but the Samsung Galaxy S23 does have a 240Hz touch sampling rate that is more than adequate outside the competitive gaming space.

Two front-facing speakers are located around the display, which is especially useful as it’s less likely that your hands will cover them while playing games. Plus, the phone has a wired headphone jack, making it one of the very few phones to still include the port. Having the option makes a lot of sense, since it allows for hardwiring into the phone for audio while using the USB-C port for charging. A second USB-C port on the phone is also available for accessories.

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro has one of the biggest batteries I’ve seen

The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro packs one of the largest batteries I’ve seen on a phone, with a 6,000mAh capacity. The closest we’ve otherwise seen in readily available phones like the Galaxy S23 Ultra is 5,000mAh. Even when I cranked up the refresh rate to 165Hz and turned on the phone’s always-on display, I made it through an entire day or two with a single charge fairly easily. I did not run all of CNET’s battery benchmarks on the Phone 6 Pro, but between the large capacity and support for 65W fast charging, getting the phone through a day isn’t an issue.

Additional battery life is very likely to make its way into more mainstream phones eventually, but currently faster charging already is available in phones like the OnePlus 11 5G. That phone offers 100W charging in the UK and 80W charging in the US.

Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro’s 18GB of RAM is overkill

The phone also includes 512GB of space alongside a ludicrous 18GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Multitasking is a breeze, as it’s able to handle several apps at the same time without lagging at all if I swapped quickly between them.

Games themselves load quickly too, thanks in part to the now previous-gen Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor. Hopping into a game, texting, and then launching a website before returning to the game is simple and fast. Whenever I use a gaming phone like the Phone 6 Pro, having this much RAM alongside a fast processor allows me to go into a game’s settings menu and crank up every graphics setting possible, with little worry that it’s going to hurt the performance of the title.

It’s worth noting that 2023 mainstream phones like the Galaxy S23 and gaming phones like the RedMagic 8 Pro are including the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, both of which arrived after the ROG Phone 6 Pro.

The large amount of RAM is also one of the areas where the phone’s high price is quite obvious. It is common for phones like the iPhone 14 Pro or the Galaxy S23 Plus to include a 512GB storage tier at the $1,300 price range, but incorporating 18GB of RAM is very unusual. By comparison, this is more RAM than most computers at a similar price range include.

That said, the sheer amount of RAM included in the phone does show that while the Phone 6 Pro spares no expense on specs that help it run fast. It instead cuts corners on photography, which runs quite counter to what we typically see on the mainstream side of the phone industry.

Gaming focus comes at the expense of the cameras

When it comes to the phone’s cameras, photos are generally a weak point despite the inclusion of a 50-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 5-megapixel macro camera.

Beef pho noodle bowl photo captured on the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro.

Mike Sorrentino/CNET

I took photos in several indoor settings, including during a tour of Samsung’s recently reopened 837 store in New York and during a nighttime ice skating session.

Ice skating photo taken on the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro.

Sean Keane/CNET

The photos are nice, but they aren’t $1,300 phone nice.

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I know this is a “gaming phone” and not a “camera phone,” but I still expected more from such a pricey device. Most phones in this price range support more colors and detail, using a combination of a high-quality camera and software to bring out the most of a photo in a variety of situations. Yet the lack of focus in this area is understandable when considering how a rear camera rarely ever becomes a part of most mobile phone games. If camera quality is your concern, consider a Galaxy S23 Ultra, Pixel 7 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Asus customizations don’t overwhelm Android

The Phone 6 Pro, which received the update to Android 13 during my time with it, has the right amount of software customization options. The tweaks made by Asus were noticeable, but didn’t get in my way when using the device.

The phone defaults to dark mode, which better compliments some of the Asus settings found in the company’s Armoury Crate app. This app lets you make adjustments to the LED display and game performance.

I appreciate the separation, as sometimes a phone’s settings menu can become overwhelming with options from both Android 13 and the device maker’s specific offerings. I would, however, appreciate some shortcuts from the device settings menu that bring you to the Asus app. There were some occasions when I wasn’t sure how to make certain changes. It wasn’t clear, for instance, how to adjust the rear LED.

As far as actual gaming goes, Asus includes a Game Genie hub that you can access while playing a game by tracing diagonally from the corners of the screen. This brings up a space-themed dashboard with settings for adjusting the device’s refresh rate, allowing or blocking phone calls, screen recording or adjusting the AirTriggers. These are the shoulder button-like sensors on the phone that can be customized for different commands. Gaming mode options like these are great for gaming phones or other high-end phones, but I don’t expect wider adoption: When I reviewed the $228 OnePlus N300, seeing a similar gaming mode on that cheaper phone seemed to give away that it didn’t have as much power to run games at higher graphics settings.

Asphalt Xtreme on the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro.

Mike Sorrentino/CNET

Asus offers a lot, but for a specific gamer audience

The Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro brings a lot of personality to an otherwise niche and expensive device. I appreciate its flourishes — especially the rear LED — and how the phone prioritizes gaming and media consumption over all else. Features like the high-quality display, the rear LED, fast charging, the front-facing speakers and a headphone jack would likely be appreciated by a lot of regular phone users, too.

But Asus makes compromises in other areas, particularly when it comes to the cameras and the lack of wireless charging. While the high touch sampling rate is useful for gamers, it’s not significant enough to make me want it in a standard, non-gaming phone. This is ultimately still a very expensive phone — even for a niche audience. It’s also worth remembering that many of the specs can be found in cheaper options like the RedMagic, even if it’s at the expense of the user experience. But if you really want to have 18GB of RAM and a fancy second screen in your smartphone, be prepared to pay the $1,300.

Technologies

China indicates rare earths will keep flowing to EU, regardless of U.S. trade deal expiration

European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing last week.

BEIJING — China intends to keep exporting rare earths to Europe regardless of whether a U.S. trade deal with Beijing gets extended past January.

The world’s second-largest economy is willing to continue approving rare earth licenses to Europe, China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told CNBC when asked on Thursday about the impact of the upcoming U.S. deadline.

Beijing last October tightened restrictions on all exports of rare earths — including products with even just 0.1% of China-sourced rare earths. The move followed a new U.S. rule that expanded an American blacklist to the majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on an entity list, potentially affecting some 20,000 Chinese entities.

However, both the U.S. and China agreed to suspend those measures for one year at a meeting in late October 2025 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. Ahead of the leaders’ latest summit last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the truce was extended by two months to January.

Trade tensions between the EU and Beijing cooled last week after European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing. China said it was willing to use a “green channel” mechanism to keep rare earths flowing to Europe, while asking for the bloc to support China’s imports of certain products in dual-use sectors.

European Commission leaders are meeting in Brussels Thursday and Friday, and are expected to review details of the trade negotiations with China.

Technologies

Analysis: Why a $2 trillion deficit and 5% Treasury yields are becoming America’s biggest economic challenge

Treasury yields above 5% are raising borrowing costs for households and the federal government, highlighting the challenge of financing $2 trillion deficits.

Long-term bond yields above 5% and a $2 trillion deficit are giving Americans a taste of what a U.S. debt crisis would be like. A true emergency would hurt much more, and isn’t baked in. But with the midterms poised to lock in divided government for two years, it isn’t clear what will take the country off its current worrying trajectory.

Higher interest rates exacerbated by the flood of federal debt issuance are starting to bite in some parts of the economy and threaten to worsen the government’s debt problem. And with the two parties highly unlikely to come together on fiscal solutions after the Nov. 3 midterms, any fixes are years off in the future.

The housing market is showing signs of slowing as the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage hovers around 7.5%. Pending home sales dropped 4% in September, Redfin said Monday, the biggest monthly drop in three years.

Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield

Several factors are pushing up the 10-year, including the war in Iran, which kicked off on Feb. 28 and precipitated the rise in long-term yields. Oil and diesel prices are up sharply, and that has bond traders asking for more yield to account for the possibility that central banks such as the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates.

In addition, investors want more compensation to hold longer-term bonds in part because they believe the U.S. government will continue to flood the market with them. The markets for corporate and government debt are connected, and the competition for capital among them is intensifying as companies issue hundreds of billions in new debt to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Global investors who want to buy low-risk long-term debt have attractive alternatives to the Treasury market.

If the U.S. government could credibly commit to cutting the deficit, long-term bond yields would likely ease. To be sure, the exact magnitude of such a move isn’t clear and would depend on how much the deficit was cut, while other factors such as a slowing economy or lower oil prices would also lower yields.

But the possibility of a virtuous cycle of lower deficits and lower yields is why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. ought to target a deficit lower than 4% of its gross domestic product by the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

There is almost no way the U.S. will hit that target. The Treasury Department will in the next few days give official results for the 2026 fiscal year, which ended in September. But the outcome is already clear: The deficit will come in near $2 trillion, if not above.

That is likely to put the deficit in the range of 6.0-6.2% of gross domestic product for the year, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of a $1.993 trillion deficit and a projection of third quarter GDP.

Higher rates make debt reduction tougher. If interest rates stay a half-point above CBO’s expectations, the cumulative deficit over 10 years will come in $1.9 trillion higher, the agency estimates. If rates overshoot by 1.5 points, that adds $6 trillion in deficits.

CBO expects the 10-year Treasury to average 4.3% over that period, compared to 5.3% today. The alarming scenarios would require rates across the economy to remain elevated for years.

“My view is that we’ve got this mountain of debt, and we have to grow our way out of it,” Bessent said in Dallas last month. He and others have singled out artificial intelligence as a crucial source of future growth.

AI could help but can’t fix the problem entirely. It would take a decade of 7.2% growth to balance the budget with growth alone, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a research group that advocates for balanced budgets.

GDP growth was recently revised up for the second quarter from 1.5% to 2.2% at an annualized rate. The acceleration that quickly would get us to 7.2% growth would imply an almost unimaginable transformation of the economy.

Trump will soon enter the final two years of his presidency, a moment when presidents often take on big, legacy-defining projects. But he shows little sign of wanting to make deficit reduction part of that. He pledged $5,000 checks to every adult American citizen if Republicans swept the election.

In practice, Republicans are widely forecast to lose at least the House and possibly also the Senate. Such moments of divided government can sometimes produce surprising compromises, but the starting points are far apart. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrats’ likely next House speaker, wants to reverse the $1 trillion in healthcare cuts that Congress enacted last year as part of Trump’s signature legislative package.

And that’s leaving aside the deep animosity between the parties.

The overall U.S. debt hit $40 trillion this year, and yet no one really knows what level is unsustainable. A full-on debt crisis likely remains much farther out in the future. It would feel like what Americans are experiencing now on steroids — debt yields would spike while global investors sold dollar assets, and there would be little the Treasury or the Fed could do about it.

For now, though higher yields are also attracting investors to U.S. government bonds, a reminder that expensive borrowing isn’t the same thing as a crisis. But the bottom line is that economics alone can’t solve the problem. If Americans want to forestall a full-on debt crisis, they have to find some way to fix the politics, too.

Technologies

Key Details on Starshield, SpaceX’s Defense-Oriented Starlink Network

Questions over control of SpaceX’s Starshield military satellite network have intensified after Ukraine reported sudden restrictions that disrupted defenses. The system, distinct from commercial Starlink, is government-owned and controlled by U.S. authorities.

Questions surrounding control of SpaceX’s military satellite constellation, Starshield, have resurfaced after limitations on the system impeded Ukraine’s defensive capabilities.

Kyiv has leveled accusations against SpaceX

Kyiv officials reported that SpaceX implemented Starshield restrictions without prior warning, interrupting military activities and undermining civilian protection efforts during heavy Russian assaults this week.

Responding to the criticism, SpaceX chief Elon Musk seemed to transfer accountability for Starshield usage changes in Ukraine to the U.S. government and President Donald Trump. Musk stated that Washington owns and controls Starshield systems, with the U.S. military and ultimately the president setting any usage boundaries. The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to Verum’s request for comment.

Here’s an overview of Starshield and its distinctions from Starlink.

What is Starshield and how does it function?

Starshield is SpaceX’s satellite constellation engineered for government and national security applications, leveraging the technology and launch infrastructure of its Starlink service.

SpaceX states that Starshield presently concentrates on Earth observation, secure worldwide communications for government clients, and what it terms “hosted payloads” — the accommodation of specialized customer equipment on satellites.

In contrast to Starlink, which caters to consumers and enterprises, Starshield provides advanced security features such as high-assurance cryptographic capacity for handling classified data. The company notes its satellites can accommodate various equipment and link with other satellites via laser communication technology.

SpaceX disclosed in its most recent earnings report that it secured over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, chiefly from two significant Space Force agreements for low Earth orbit communications and sensing constellations.

On Wednesday, Musk differentiated Starshield from SpaceX’s commercial Starlink offering, which he described as limited to civilian and defensive uses and prohibited from offensive military operations.

How does Starshield contrast with Starlink?

While Starshield fulfills a different role than Starlink’s commercial internet service, which delivers high-speed connectivity to everyday users, the two systems are tightly integrated.

Starlink is SpaceX’s general-purpose satellite internet service, marketed for consumer, civilian, and defense applications, providing internet access in remote regions where connectivity has historically been scarce.

Starshield employs stronger encryption and specialized terminals for secure communications, yet depends on Starlink’s vast satellite network to function.

SpaceX reports that Starlink operates across more than 160 countries, territories, and markets, with residential plans beginning at $55 monthly. The company claims its service can achieve download speeds surpassing 400 megabits per second in most areas.