ASUS gives gamers the ultimate phone
The ASUS ROG Phone II is certainly complex but its features provide gamers a realm of opportunities.
I’ve spent the past few days playing with a smartphone that morphs into a mobile gaming platform by clipping on accessories. The ASUS ROG Phone II is the most complex phone I have reviewed this year. Unboxing the phone, accessories and other bits and pieces is an operation in itself.
The phone morphs from being a mild-mannered Clark Kent handset into a Superman mobile gaming console when you clip these pieces in. Except it’s not mild mannered to start with. It’s a big phone with some outrageous specs.
ROG aka Republic of Gamers is the brand ASUS uses for gaming and the phone’s sleek design and lines gives away that it’s something special. It has a metallic-glass chassis and the logo on the back lights up in multi-coloured splendour as it does on many ROG laptops.
The phone has a large 6.59-inch, 1080x2340 pixel OLED display, which is an ultrawide version of full HD. The display has a fast 120 Hertz refresh rate, which means it can cope with images being refreshed 120 times per second. That’s great for fast action competitive gaming. Motion is smoother. The usual refresh rate for phones is 60Hz.
The ROG Phone II is powered by an eight core Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus chip set, rated at 2.96 GHz. It’s an even more powerful processor than on the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10 series. This chip is designed for gaming and artificial intelligence applications and the ROG Phone II is the first to have it. There’s also an Adreno 640 graphics processing unit. This is cutting edge kit.
When I ran AnTuTu’s benchmark test, the ROG Phone II scored 501,906 which AnTuTu rates in the top 1pc of phones. That’s with its high performance X-mode enacted. You can switch off X-mode if you aren’t gaming and don’t need the turbo boost.
The phone has an enormous 6000 milliampere hour battery which is designed to last all day and more. It depends how much gaming you do on-the-go. I conducted our usual battery test, playing 1080p video continuously at 50pc brightness (equivalent to 300 Nits) and the phone lasted 20 hours, 37 minutes on a single charge. It is the first phone we’ve tested to break the 20 hour mark.
Using Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+, it recharged from zero to 42 per cent in 30 minutes.
Connectivity is at the edge too. The phone has three USB-C ports. One is at the bottom and two are on the side to support gaming functions. One of these (marked in orange) is for the accessories. The others can be used for powering and general purpose use. I plugged in an external drive to the side USB-C while charging it using the USB-C at the bottom.
There’s a small rubber strip that plugs the side USB-C sockets that you remove and it’s so easy to lose. ASUS gives you two spares in the box, you might need them.
The ROG Phone II has DTS:X stereo speakers. DTS:X offers a form of multidimensional sound and on this phone can be loud. It’s not often I need to turn a smartphone’s sound down in case I wake the neighbours when working late at night. There’s also a 3.5mm socket for your headphones.
That combined with the wide-angle display makes this a great phone for watching movies on the go.
Memory and storage is generous enough. My review unit has 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The camera system too is high specced, with a 48MP wide angle lens and 13MP ultrawide comprising the main camera system and a 24MP selfie camera.
A few things are behind the Eight ball. It runs a slightly modified version of Android 9 (Pie) rather than Android 10, it’s not rated for water resistance and does not support wireless charging. There’s no microSDcard support.
The ROG Phone II is ASUS’s first phone to be sold in Australia. Many Australians would be familiar with ASUS as a laptop manufacturer. Older tech connoisseurs will remember building desktop computers using ASUS motherboards.
However, its phones have eluded this country. ASUS began making phones a decade ago and is up to version 6 of its premium ZenPhone.
ASUS told me last week that its internal research shows Australia is ready for a gaming phone. I see lots of young people playing mobile games on phones when travelling in Taiwan and Japan and mobile gaming is gathering incredible momentum. That’s even more with the introduction of the Apple Arcade and Google Stadia.
There are estimates of $US180bn in revenue from mobile gaming in 2021.
For ASUS, it’s not just gaming. The company is also looking at bringing the ZenPhone to Australia.
Gaming is where the ROG Phone II is ahead of the curve, thanks to its band of accessories. In Australia, several are bundled with the device so that you don’t have to buy them separately.
There’s a fan that clips onto the device and is powered with one of its USB devices. The phone was warm in parts when I played Asphalt 9 without the fan. It was cool bananas with the fan attached. The fan has a pass-through USB-C connector, so you can clip on the fan and plug your charger cable into it and not worry about depleting the battery.
You download games from the Google Play store to use with the ROG Phone II. You then access them through ASUS’s gaming app which add capabilities such as its air triggers, which are pressure sensitive areas on the sides that can be configured for specific games. In this mode I played Asphalt 9 using virtual triggers on the display.
The real fun starts when you add in external game controllers known as the ROG Kunai Gamepad which is like a Nintendo Switch.
The left and right keypad sections are boxed separately and there are two ways to configure them. The first involves sliding these sections into a gamepad dummy and using them as you would an external controller. You connect to the phone using Bluetooth, wireless and cable. You flick a small switch to change between them. ASUS needs to offer a manual explaining all of this.
The second configuration involves clipping the phone onto a frame and sliding in the left and right controllers at each side to create a fully integrated mobile gaming device. The controls are at each end and the phone is in the middle. This was my favourite way of playing. You can map the controls to specific functions for each game.
There are other accessories not included in the bundle, such as the TwinView Dock II which adds a second screen to the gaming experience, and a device for displaying the gaming action on an external monitor.
Overall the ASUS ROG Phone II is an impressive package. On its own the phone is one of the most powerful on the market and a great device for watching media. its big battery offers more than a full day’s use. But you need to like big phones. Add the accessories, and you have a fully blown connected mobile gaming platform.
At $1699, the ROG Phone II is expensive but with the accessories in the bundle, I believe you get good value for your money. It’s available through JB Hi-Fi.
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