Asus ROG Phone II hands-on review

Battery

Gaming is a battery-intense task and you want to be prepared, so the ROG Phone II packs in a huge 6,000mAh unit - that's why it's so heavy and thick. Practically, you can't have a Snapdragon 855 (Plus or otherwise) phone with a bigger power pack and this makes a case for the II as just a mainstream flagship alternative and not just a gaming phone.

The plentiful capacity comes with the added benefit of long-term longevity too - having more battery means you'll be charging it less often thus reducing the number of charge-discharge cycles. Asus also mentioned that the II's battery swells less than competitors' power packs although that probably has less to do with the capacity.

The ROG Phone II supports Qualcomm QuickCharge 4+ and USB Power Delivery and Asus didn't miss the opportunity to point out that the phone is capable of 30W charging with standard adapters and cables as opposed to, say, the OnePlus 7 Pro with its proprietary charging bits.

Software

The ROG Phone II runs Android 9.0 and offers you the choice of a stock look (like the ZenUI you'd find on Asus' own Zenfone 6) or the heavily themed ROG UI. An interesting tidbit is that the Android navigation gestures have changed compared to the original ROG. As opposed to swiping from the bottom where the bar buttons were and the pill-style implementation on the Zenfone 6, the ROG Phone II adopts the Android Q gestures - you swipe from the side for the Back action.

Navigation aside, the ROG Phone II's software isn't all that different from its predecessor's and includes a bunch of gaming focused features (duh!). There is the Armoury Crate, which is a game launcher of sorts, bringing all of your installed games under one roof. It's named after similar software available in ROG laptops and motherboards.

It allows you to save very detailed profiles for each game where you can tweak touch settings, display refresh rate, performance mode (you can pick the CPU speed and also customize the thermal threshold for CPU throttling), and network handling (like turn off background system syncing).

As before, the Game Genie system overlay provides a bunch of quick controls while gaming - like notifications, calls and brightness. This time around to summon it you swipe in from the left side of the screen (when in landscape) instead of the right one where it somewhat interfered with the navigation gestures on the previous model.

Asus already has a partnership with certain game publishers to optimize their game titles specifically for the ROG II. Tencent is on board - it's Asus' main launch partner in China, so much so that it has its name written on the back of the phone, but there are others too.

Asphalt 9 that we already mentioned comes with support for high frame rates and dual vibration plus extra UI for the second screen of the TwinView Dock II. There's also a set of exclusive ROG-themed Porsche 911 decals and whatnot - a $60 value Asus says, although we are sceptical anybody would spend that much on virtual merchandise.

Other partners at launch include Shadowgun Legends (120Hz support, dual vibration support, Kunai Gamepad and TwinView Dock II support, ROG in-game content) and RockMan X Dive (120Hz, Kunai Gamepad, but no TwinView, plus exclusive content). Others will follow, Asus assures.

Performance

The Asus ROG Phone II is the first handset to come with Qualcomm's updated Snapdragon 855 Plus chipset. The Plus in this case means a higher clock rate on the main core of the CPU (2.96GHz vs. the 2.84GHz in the regular 855) and also of the GPU (Qualcomm doesn't specify the number, but Asus says 675MHz). In the chipmaker's promo material we read things like 4% improvement in CPU performance and a rather more significant 15% improvement in graphics performance.

The ROG Phone II also features UFS 3.0 storage, same as the OnePlus 7 Pro, offering theoretical improvements in both random and sequential read and write speeds. The practical benefit in this case would be 15% quicker game load times on the ROG Phone II than what you'd get out of a UFS2.1 device like the Galaxy S10.

To keep the innards performing to their full potential, Asus has designed a multi-layered cooling system which includes a vapor chamber, a heatsink and some vents, and then there's the snap-on AeroActive Cooler II that you attach to the side connector to blow air at the back of the phone. Asus says it's refined this add-on fan and it now keeps the temperature up to 5 degrees lower (4 to 4.5 on the previous model) while also being 4 times quieter. The final result is that Gamebench reports a 98% fps stability, or effectively no thermal throttling.

Our early experience of running benchmarks on the phone is that the cooler does indeed lower the temperature tangibly. That's about the fan, though. As for performance, we did observe some noticeable improvements in the results from this S855+ device - to the tune of 10-15% in 3DMark and 5-10% in Antutu over competing phones with the non-plus version of the chip. However, due to the non-final nature of the software on the ROG Phone II, we won't be publishing those benchmark results. We'll be doing more benchmarking and we'll also thoroughly test the fan's effect on sustained performance once we get a retail-ready review unit.