The ROG Phone II is a “Pocketable Gaming Powerhouse”

The phone is made of matte black metal and the screen is made of Corning Gorilla Glass 6 for extra protection against drops. The diagonal screen size is 6.59″ which makes it one of the bigger phones on the market, but is still comfy to hold. The phone has classy copper accents that make it home on a conference table as well. The back of the phone has a copper accented vent fan for the huge cooling system inside. The back also sports an Aura-powered RGB LED logo in the back glass, which you can program freely with the pre-installed Armory Crate utility.

The ROG Phone II has small bezels at the top and bottom to fit the sound system and front camera. It has twin speakers with DTS:X Ultra processing to have super crisp audio for anything you’re listening to, be that music, games, or movies; which can also be listened to in private with the 3.5mm headphone jack. USB Type-C ports have become popular of late so the ROG Phone II has two of them, one on the bottom, and a second on the left edge of the device so your charger won’t get in the way of gaming. It also has a huge 6000mAh battery so you can spend less time connected to said charger.

This side port can also:

move data at up to 10Gbps using USB 3.1 Gen 2, and it can output 4K video using DisplayPort 1.4. You can use Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0, Quick Charge 4.0, and USB Power Delivery 3.0 adapters with the side port to juice up the ROG Phone II in a flash. The bottom Type-C port supports USB 2.0 transfers, plus fast charging via Quick Charge 3.0 and USB Power Delivery 3.0 adapters.

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The ROG Phone II also has a proprietary connector that lets you hook up many ROG accessories, with more details on that coming soon.

The Snapdragon 855 Plus powers up for mobile gaming dominance

The next stop on our journey to mobile gaming superiority is the very heart of the ROG Phone II. Whether on PCs or phones, games need as much single-threaded CPU performance as they can get to run at their best. We’ve teamed up with Qualcomm once again to put the highest-performance Snapdragon Mobile Platform possible in the ROG Phone II: the Snapdragon 855 Plus.

The Snapdragon 855’s Prime Core already pumped up single-threaded performance with the highest clocks and largest L2 cache on the chip, and the Snapdragon 855 Plus’ Prime Core goes even further. This extra-beefy core boosts clocks from 2.84GHz to 2.96GHz for even more performance and responsiveness from games and apps.

More single-core CPU performance is exciting indeed, but GPU power is even more important for the most demanding mobile gamers. Qualcomm’s Adreno 640 graphics processor is muscular to begin with, but the version in the 855 Plus can bring even more strength to bear on mobile games. The 855 Plus’ Adreno 640 GPU can run at up to 672MHz, a whopping 15% increase over the regular Adreno 640’s 585MHz clocks. That increase means more computational strength for higher frame rates or more complex graphics effects. We pair the Snapdragon 855 Plus with a desktop-class 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM to provide both high capacity and high bandwidth, as well as up to 512GB of UFS 3.0 storage for lightning-quick app installs and game loading.

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They didn’t stop there though, they wanted to make completely sure that the phone would be properly cooled during long sessions so there wasn’t any latency or frame rate issues. So they added in the GameCool II heatsink system that uses a 3D vapor chamber which is able to dissipate up to 7.5W of heat waste. This is also where the copper accented vent on the back comes in to get rid of that excess heat.

Live in a super warm place or just want that extra ventilation? ROG’s got you covered with the clip on AeroActive Cooler II fan for active cooling. It plugs into the side connector (but doesn’t disrupt charging or audio), and directs airflow to the hottest bits of the phone, lowering the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius. Its also useful for sweaty palms!

True Colors

Gamers intuitively understand that higher frame rates equal a competitive advantage, but high-frame-rate gaming on phones isn’t as simple as it is on desktops or laptops. Most mobile games use vertical sync, or vsync, to eliminate ugly tearing artifacts. That means the maximum refresh rate of a phone’s display can put an unbreakable ceiling on how many frames per second it can usefully generate. For example, a 60Hz display means that with vsync on, 60 FPS is as fast as a game can ever run. 

We aren’t satisfied with a 60 FPS limit on any device, hence the original ROG Phone’s 90Hz refresh rate. We’re always looking for ways to push the limits, though, so the ROG Phone II takes a page from high-end TVs and gaming monitors with its 120Hz OLED panel. This is no average OLED phone screen, mind. It’s capable of showing HDR videos and games in all their glory. 

To balance crisp reproduction of text and images with the amount of GPU power available to run the latest mobile games, we chose a 2340×1080 resolution for the ROG Phone II. In landscape mode, the screen is over twice as wide as it is tall. That exceptionally wide vista brings the latest ultrawide gaming monitors to mind, but going wide has a different purpose on a phone than it does on a desktop display. More on that in a second.

HDR may sound like overkill for a relatively small phone screen, but we want gamers to be able to enjoy this revolutionary technology anywhere. HDR content lets creators capture and reproduce brighter highlights and darker shadows than ever before. The perfect blacks and per-pixel illumination inherent to OLED tech are a great match for HDR content. A higher dynamic range for video needs a wider color gamut to maintain precise reproduction, too, so we made sure that the ROG Phone II can reproduce 108% of the wide DCI-P3 color gamut commonly seen in digital cinema projectors. 

To ensure that HDR content looks just like its creators intended, we target an average Delta E of less than 1 for the ROG Phone II. Delta E is a measurement of deviation from a reference standard for color, and even high-end monitors do well to achieve a result that’s less than three, on average. This level of color accuracy in a mobile display is quite something, to put it mildly. 

On top of its superior color gamut and dynamic range, the OLED panel in the ROG Phone II has a pixel response time of just one millisecond – similar to the response time of our fastest desktop gaming monitors. Pixel response time is directly related to the perceived blurriness or smeariness of images in motion, so a 120Hz refresh rate combined with such incredibly low response times ensure that gamers will see a clearer picture of the action on the ROG Phone II than they might on competing devices that still use LCDs. 

HDR gaming is in its infancy on phones, but HDR video is relatively abundant online through a variety of streaming services. The ROG Phone II can play back HDR content from YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Tencent Video. When you want to take a break and enjoy the latest movies on the train or on long flights, we’ve got your back.

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The ROG Phone II has a ultrawide screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio so that you’ll have plenty of room when playing games with onscreen controls.

Thanks to its exceedingly keen senses and smarts, this phone can go from motion to photon – for example, from tapping an onscreen trigger to displaying a gunshot – in as much as 35% less time versus competing devices. In games where milliseconds separate victory and defeat, that’s an undeniable competitive advantage.

The original ROG Phones’ amazing AirTrigger technology makes an amazing comeback for the ROG Phone II:

… the AirTriggers confirm input with haptic vibrations in as little as 20ms, compared to 63ms on the original ROG Phone.

The ROG Phone II has a twin-camera at the rear of the phone and a streaming-ready selfie camera at the front. The main camera uses Sony’s Exmor IMX586 image sensor. Anywhere you take pictures, this phone is ready to capture them at amazing quality. The second camera has an ultra-wide lens that offers an 11mm equivalent focal length.

The second camera also solves the problem of linear distortion by having real-time distortion correction. The final image keeps straight lines straight. The front camera is offset and great for pro gamers or streamers– anytime, anywhere. This means you can use the camera and on-screen controls without blocking the lens.

ROG Phone II Specs At A Glance

And that’s it! all the news on the ROG Phone II so far! What do you think, are you gonna grab one?