Asus ROG Phone 2 update arrives, adds live wallpapers, camera portrait mode improvement & tons of bug fixes

In 2018, the video gaming industry was estimated to be worth about $131 billion. Going by the stats collected by GlobalData Thematic Research, smartphone gaming accounted for the biggest revenue compared to PC and Console gaming with about $40 billion of the revenue.

By 2025, it is estimated that video gaming will be a $300 billion industry and apparently, this figure will be arrived at thanks to the growing number of smartphone gamers. If the forecasts are to be believed, smartphone gaming will account for over $120 billion of the total revenue.

According to the report, the growth of mobile gaming that is aided by gaming-specific smartphones as well as innovative offerings such as cloud gaming will play a crucial role in realizing these forecasts.

Since 2017, the mobile phone market has been receiving new gaming-centric smartphones from popular players in the industry such as ASUS and Razer and it is these devices, their successors and competitors that are expected to propel the mobile gaming industry to the next level.

One of the most recent additions to this growing family of gaming-centric smartphones is the Asus ROG Phone 2. Unveiled in July and only available in a handful of markets, the ROG Phone 1 successor packs some punch in addition to the usual gaming perks.

However, we all know that any smartphone, be it a powerful gaming-centric device like the ROG Phone 2 or even the entry-level Asus ZenFone Max Pro M2, needs regular software updates to not only keep the sanity of the device but also that of the users as well.

In an attempt to keep the latest ROG Phone 2 up to date and free from bugs, Asus is now seeding a new update carrying version 16.0622.1907.33. The update is rolling out to the ZS660KL (WW) variant and besides new features and improvements, it also fixes tons of bugs in the Pie-based ROG UI.

Some of the new additions after the update include three ROG live wallpapers and support for live wallpaper effect for Light Luminous Core theme, a Netflix shortcut, ROG Lighting Armor Case now supports “Activate the Force” sound effects such as alarm, ringtone, notification sound, and so on.

The update also brings tons of bug fixes to issues like the occasional inability to turn on Wi-Fi hotspot, preview lag in camera portrait mode, video or system sound occasionally won’t play, AirTrigger’s force level adjustment, and much more.

Below is the entire changelog as provided by Asus.

1. Added three ROG live wallpapers
2. Light Luminous Core theme supports live wallpaper effect
3. Fixed the issue where occasionally can not turn on WiFi hotspot
4. ROG Lighting Armor Case supports “Activate the Force” sound effects, such as alarm, ringtone, notification sound etc.
5. Added Netflix shortcut
6. Improved the preview lag issue in camera portrait mode
7. Optimized camera parameters
8. Optimized the flow of switching to the classic Pixel-like system style in setup wizard
9. Optimized edge touch suppression effect
10. Fixed AirTrigger’s force level adjustment issue
11. Fixed the issue where video or system sound occasionally cannot be played
12. Fixed the occasional system restart issue in “MLTD (ミリシタ) ”
13. Fixed the issue where the phone screen app will appear quickly on the external screen when launching/leaving a portrait-only app on TwinView Dock II
Source

This is an OTA update, meaning it may take days before the download notification hits your particular ROG Phone 2 unit. It’s the second software update for the global variant of the ROG Phone 2 and so far, Asus hasn’t published the firmware for manual installation.

NOTE: You can check out more Asus-related stuff here.

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