Popular Android brand scraps its smartphone | Tech News

Asus seems to be following within the footsteps of LG by confirming it’s quitting the smartphone business. The Taiwanese tech giant is understood primarily for its Windows PCs, together with its Republic of Gamers (ROG) gaming vary, however has additionally produced Android telephones for more than a decade.

These included many telephones with the Zenfone branding through the years, culminating within the well-received, smaller kind issue Zenfone 9 and Zenfone 10, launched in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Asus additionally persistently produced ROG branded gaming telephones, with the ROG Phone 9 collection debuting in 2024.

2025 noticed the launch of the Zenfone 12 Ultra, a super-sized cellphone that wasn’t bought within the UK or US.

Now, in an interview with Taiwanese publication Inside, Asus’s chairman Jonny Shih mentioned the firm would stop making smartphones.

“Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future,” Shih reportedly mentioned in a media briefing (translated utilizing Google Translate). The article frames the announcement as an indefinite hiatus as Shih added he “will continue to take care of the brand’s mobile phone users,” which means the company intends to proceed to release software program updates to latest fashions, although this was not particularly confirmed.

“Chairman Jonney Shih confirmed that Asus will temporarily cease launching new mobile phones and will fully shift its R&D resources to the fields of commercial PCs and “Physical AI,” making a full-fledged push for the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Inside reported.

The report additionally acknowledged that Asus’s 2025 income grew 26.1 p.c 12 months over 12 months to NT$738.91 billion (£17.35 billion). Just like LG determined to stop the cellphone business in 2021 to focus on different applied sciences, so Asus seems to have determined to do the identical.

While the Zenfone brand was by no means a bestseller within the UK, the road up has proved widespread in Asia through the years, whereas the ROG Phone vary helped pioneer the concept of a specialist gaming cellphone as an various to Apple, Samsung and the remaining.

The ROG Phones had vapour cooling chambers, RGB lights and set off buttons, in addition to side-mounted USB-C ports for charging whereas gaming vertically. But many high-end telephones now have improved cooling and efficiency that may deal with the most recent premium cellular video games, maybe making gaming telephones much less interesting to customers.

I used to be a massive fan of 2023’s Zenfone 10, which has a 5.9-inch screen and a headphone jack, with a distinctive textured back. It was very pocketable and had great battery life, too. But Asus solely promised two years of Android updates, leaving that three 12 months outdated cellphone caught on Android 15. We are already up to Android 16 elsewhere.

With restricted assets in its cellphone division to keep telephones up to date in comparison with the market leaders, it appears as if Asus has seen the writing on the wall.