Asus ROG Phone II Review

The ROG Phone II was the first phone with a 120Hz OLED, a 6.59-inch 1080p panel with 240Hz touch sampling and 10-bit HDR, and it arrived months before Samsung put 120Hz on a Galaxy S. It was also the first phone with the Snapdragon 855 Plus, cooled by a vapour chamber and an optional clip-on fan, and it held full clocks longer than any phone of its year. The 6000 mAh battery is the other headline: two days for a normal person, a full day of actual gaming, with 30W charging through a second USB-C port on the side so the cable stays out of your hands in landscape.

AirTrigger II ultrasonic shoulder buttons work in any game that accepts touch mapping. It weighs 240 grams, has no water resistance rating, and the design looks like a gaming laptop, which is either the point or the problem. The 48 megapixel IMX586 main camera and 13 megapixel ultrawide are fine in daylight and ordinary at night, with no telephoto. Software is where Asus fell down.

It shipped on Android 9 with the choice of a stock look or the ROG skin, got Android 10 in 2020, then waited until November 2021 for Android 11, a year after everyone else, and that was the end. Sold in the US from September 2019 at $899 for 12GB and 512GB, which undercut every flagship it outran.