The best gaming phones 2025

April 1, 2018

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro with Call of Duty Mobile main menu on screen

The best gaming phones completely revolutionize your app library. Offering up seriously powerful processors, plenty of RAM and high quality, high refresh rate displays, these devices can push your favorite thumb tappers far further. With the rise of Xbox Cloud gaming services, smaller screens are becoming even bigger business, which means there are plenty of gaming phones out there for the Play Store power-user to choose from.

That makes it difficult to work out exactly what you need from your smartphone, and how much you need to pay for a gaming-specific device. Thankfully, as gaming phones develop, we’re seeing prices on the biggest and best falling slightly down the scale. That means there’s now options for all budgets, and we’re rounding up our favorites right here.

Our team of experts is on hand to point out the best gaming phones currently gracing the market, not to mention the best prices. We’ve drawn on our own hands on experience with the latest and greatest releases to ensure you’re getting an overview of the whole space before making that critical decision. Of course, you’re not going to get the performance of a gaming laptop, or even the best gaming tablets, here – but for a pocket-sized thumb twitcher, these are the models we’d recommend.

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Hand holding Asus ROG Phone 9 with Call of Duty mobile loading screen displayed — (Image credit: Future / Phil Hayton)

1. Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro

The best gaming phone overall

Specifications

Screen: 6.78-inch AMOLED, 185Hz

Resolution: 2448 x 1080

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite

Cameras: 32MP front, 50MP main rear, 13MP ultra-wide

Storage: Up to 1TB

Water resistance: IP54

Dimensions: 163.8 x 76.8 x 8.9mm

Weight: 225g

Reasons to buy

+

Extremely powerful

+

Slick 185Hz AMOLED screen

+

Improved AniMe Vision back display

+

Touch triggers are still top tier

Reasons to avoid

–

As expensive as smartphones get

–

Silly offset USB-C port

The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro is the latest in the brand’s industry-topping selection of mobile thumb tappers. Decked out with super-fast processing tech, plenty of storage, and bags of RAM (not to mention the 185Hz refresh rate display to keep it all looking slick), this is the gaming phone to beat in 2025.

Flip that gorgeous AMOLED display over and you’ll find a fairly understated design. It’s a 6.78-inch device with a smooth finish (our review device came in a darker black colorway), and just a hint of red to suggest it’s more than a mainstream flagship. That is, until you tinker in its AniMe Vision settings. This is where a small collection of LEDs spring to life, offering a similar back-panel display as the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro before it. That’s not the only thing that’s journeyed with the ROG Phone 9 Pro from its predecessor – unfortunately, the USB-C port to the bottom of the device is still off-center, which can make finding a mobile controller a little tricky.

Still, it’s what inside that really counts, and with a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, up to 24GB RAM, and a 5,500mAh battery the ROG Phone 9 Pro offers plenty of horsepower to see you through intensive mobile games and streaming. You can now also play games direct on that AniMe screen on the back panel, which is a neat gimmick for this year’s device. You’re still getting the brand’s Air Trigger controls, a touch capacitive set of bumper buttons that make games like Call of Duty Mobile infinitely easier to command.

The ROG Phone 9 Pro also ships with Armory Crate software, which has sipped from the same AI tea as pretty much every other new gaming device. AI is being used here to cancel unwanted audio from your chat, translate text, and automatically record key in-game moments as they happen. Aside from all that, you’re still getting the core Asus experience, with Armory Crate acting as a hub for all your installed games, and offering different performance modes and overlays.

With all that at its disposal, the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro confidently beat both the previous 8 Pro and RedMagic 9S Pro in benchmark testing. I would be surprised if it didn’t considering the horsepower on offer, but you’ll struggle to really get these components sweating with most common mobile experiences these days. The battery kept us going for around five and a half hours of intensive gaming – a considerable uptick compared to cheaper models

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April 1, 2018

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