The Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro has a lot going for it, as you can read in our newly-published review. But if there's one thing it does truly exceptionally, it's lasting a long time on a charge.
When testing the best phones that come out every year, part of our lab experiments include setting a phone to continuously load different web pages over a 4G cell connection until the battery's flat. To get a spot on our best phone battery life page, a phone needs to last around 12 hours or more. The ROG Phone 8 Pro absolutely smashed this target, lasting 18 hours and 48 minutes in its automatic refresh rate mode.
The ROG Phone can last even longer, as in our 60Hz test it managed to go for 18 hours and 56 minutes. But since this phone has a 165Hz display, including adaptive 1 - 120Hz mode, you're unlikely to be using your phone at the minimum fixed refresh rate for this period of time, even if you can in theory squeeze out another eight minutes of battery life.
Right now, the ROG Phone 8 Pro's main competitors are the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 15 Pro Max, the two top flagship phones on sale today. While they're not gaming-focused in the same way as the ROG Phone is, they're similarly priced and also offer top-shelf performance for running demanding mobile games.
Neither the Samsung nor the iPhone lasted nearly as long on our test. Both are still members of the best phone battery life club, but with the S23 Ultra lasting 12 hours and 22 minutes, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max lasting 14 hours and 2 minutes, you could keep going on the ROG Phone long after the other two would have to retreat to a charger.
We'll have to see if the Galaxy S24 Ultra can change things when it launches soon, but Samsung would have to perform a miracle if it wants to make up an over six-hour deficit.
Better than 2023's best
Now we've dealt with the ROG Phone 8 Pro's more direct competition, we can see how it fares against the best in the battery longevity business, as summarized in our best phone battery life of 2023 feature.
The iPhone 15 Plus, the best-performing iPhone on the list and third-best phone overall, lasts 14 hours and 14 minutes on the TG test, just beating the iPhone 15 Pro Max but still trailing the ROG Phone. 2023's silver medallist, the Motorola Edge Plus 2023, managed an impressive 15 hours and 47-minute result.
And in first place we have… the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate, at 18 hours and 26 minutes. That's right, Asus is taking the crown from itself, with the new ROG Phone lasting over twenty minutes longer than its predecessor. And that's despite the ROG Phone 8 have 500 fewer mAh in its battery to play with. No doubt the more efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset helped it here, but Asus clearly worked hard to improve the ROG Phone 8's power management system since last year too.
It's also worth noting that the ROG Phone 8 Pro charges up faster than all of the other phones we've mentioned too. As you can see in the summary table above, the ROG Phone's 65W charging standard is much quicker than all its rivals other than the Moto Edge Plus, which charges oddly slow for having a 68W brick in its box.
2024 is still young, and there are plenty more phones expected this year, including the iPhone 16 series and the previously-mentioned Galaxy S24 series. These phones will hopefully offer longer-lasting batteries as part of their upgrade packaged, but given that it was an ROG Phone that topped last year's battery life rankings, and the size of the gap between the competition as it stands, it feels a fairly safe bet to call things early and say the ROG Phone 8 Pro will remain the year's battery champion. And if we're wrong, we won't mind — more super-efficient phones can only be a good thing for users.
