• ASUS has announced its ROG Phone 6 is coming to South Africa.
• The smartphone designed for gaming features a 3.2GHz CPU and 16GB of LPDDR5 memory.
• The handset will retail for R22 999 and is available in Phantom Black.

With cloud gaming coming to South Africa next year, what we really need is a smartphone that is designed to play games and ASUS has just the thing. The ASUS ROG Phone 6 is a device that is designed to run games as well as any smartphone can and it’s coming to South Africa.

As per a press release sent to Hypertext this morning, pre-orders for ASUS’ gaming smartphone are now open. The handset will retail for R22 999 and availability is limited. ASUS South Africa also tells us that only one model will be shipping to South Africa at first.

So what’s inside this smartphone? Running things is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. The CPU in this configuration can hit a boggling 3.2GHz and its paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 to keep things zooming along. As for storage the ROG Phone 6 coming to SA will have just 512GB of storage.

The battery is a 6 000mAh behemoth that charges to pull in record time thanks to 65W HyperCharge technology.

The display is a Samsung AMOLED HDR10+ affair that measures in at 6.78inches. The display also boasts a 165Hz refresh rate, 720Hz touch sampling, and 23ms ultra low latency.

As for cameras, up front is 12MP snapper. At the back of the handset you’ll find a Sony IMX766 50 MP main wide-angle camera with improved image quality and HDR processing, an ultrawide 13 MP second camera, and a macro camera.

The ASUS ROG Phone 6 is only available in Phantom Black and as of time of writing there are 21 handsets in stock.

Is this handset worth R22 999? Well cards on the table, we’ve actually been playing with this handset for the last two weeks and we’ll have a full review up a bit later today. As a teaser, we were blown away by the ROG Phone 6 and we believe that the this price tag, you’re getting an incredible smartphone for your money.

There are of course some oddities which we’ll get into in the full review, but we absolutely love this handset.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the ASUS ROG Phone 6, head to this link.