It is a tough day for anyone who loved the underdog energy of the Zenfone or the sheer overkill of the ROG Phone. Asus has officially confirmed what the rumors were hinting at: there will be no new smartphones in 2026.
They are calling it a “strategic pause,” but let’s be honest—this feels a lot heavier than just taking a gap year. According to reports from early January, the company has basically frozen its development pipeline. That means no ROG Phone 9, no Zenfone 12 Ultra, and likely nothing else for a long time. They are taking the resources that used to go into building cool pocket computers and shifting them toward the unsexy-but-profitable world of AI hardware and enterprise tech.
A “Pause” that feels like a goodbye
Asus is using safe corporate language, but the industry writing is on the wall. You can’t just “pause” smartphone development for a year and expect to jump back in; these devices take 12 to 18 months to build. If they aren’t working on them now, they aren’t coming out anytime soon.
Analysts are looking at this and seeing a quiet exit. It’s the classic tragedy of the enthusiast brand: Asus made incredible phones. The Zenfone was the king of compact Androids, and the ROG Phone was the undisputed champion of mobile gaming. Reviewers loved them. Hardcore fans swore by them. But in the end, great reviews don’t pay the bills if you aren’t moving millions of units like Samsung or Apple.
The reality is that the smartphone market in 2025 and 2026 is a meat grinder
You have the giants (Apple, Samsung) and the aggressive Chinese brands (Oppo, Vivo) squeezing everyone else out. On top of that, the cost of making phones—specifically RAM and storage—has skyrocketed. For a smaller player like Asus, the margins just weren’t there anymore.
Meanwhile, look at what else Asus does. They are seeing massive growth in AI servers, data centers, and robotics. That is where the industry is heading, and frankly, that is where the money is. Why fight for scraps in the phone market when you can sell the shovels for the AI gold rush?
If you have an Asus phone in your pocket, you aren’t being abandoned immediately. The company has promised to keep the lights on with software updates and security patches. But let’s be real: when a company stops making new hardware, the clock starts ticking on how long they will support the old stuff.
Asus insists the mobile division isn’t “dead,” but this silence on any plans beyond 2026 is deafening. It feels eerily similar to when LG pulled out of the market in 2021. For now, we have to accept the reality: the Asus smartphone era is on indefinite hold.