Purported ROG Phone 5 photos show a customizable display on the back

ASUS was quick to jump on the gaming smartphone bandwagon when those devices started to show up a few years ago, and the ROG Phone has actually been a fairly impressive family since it first showed up. It's not unexpected that the company would work on a successor to last year's ROG Phone 3, and now, leaked images appear to show what the device will look like. The images were posted on Twitter by Mukul Sharma (via TechRadar).

Some images had first leaked earlier in the week, but the most recent leak shows a notable change - the addition of a display on the back of the phone. The display looks like a small strip, and based on the screenshots, you can customize what's displayed on it, but it doesn't seem to have much of a surface area to have any kind of user input on the display itself.

The display is where you'd usually find the backlit ROG logo, and for users that like customizing the look of their phone with different colors, having a full-blown screen does offer some additional options. nubia allowed for something similar with its nubia Z20 back in 2019, though the rear display was also meant to be used as a typical smartphone screen. As for ASUS, we've seen similar customization in laptops such as the Zephyrus G14, which had a series of programmable LED lights on the lid that could show different images created by the user.

Another notable change with this device is that there doesn't appear to be a vent anywhere on the backplate, which ASUS has typically used to help exhaust hot air. Whether that means the vent is now on the metal frame (similar to the RedMagic 5G) or gone entirely is not yet known.

Based on the writing on the phone's backplate, it's expected to be called the ROG Phone 5, and as we've seen with other companies with a strong presence in China, this is likely because the number 4 has a negative connotation in the country. Other brands such as RedMagic and even OnePlus back in the day have followed similar strategies. Typically, ROG Phone models have arrived in the summer and leaks don't show up this early in the year, so we may be looking at an earlier launch this time around.