Asus ROG Phone II is the First Phone to Have USB 3.1 Gen 2

As the successor to last year's original ROG Phone, Asus's newly-announced ROG Phone II is one of the most powerful Android phones to date.

Powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 855 Plus with improved Adreno 640 graphics, the device packs up to 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM, a 6.59-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate for smooth gameplay, an under-display fingerprint sensor, 6,000mAh battery with 30W fast charging, and either 128GB or 512GB of built-in UFS 3.0 storage.

One of the unique features about the ROG Phone II is that it has two USB-C ports: one on the side, and one on the bottom. According to Asus, the side USB-C port can 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.

Weibo user @肥威 put his ROG Phone II into real-world testing (connect the phone to an external SSD) and got impressive results with up to 797.19 MB/s (burst) speed. The phone utilizes the F2FS file system. As we know, the maximum bandwidth for UFS 3.0 two-lane interface is 2.9GB/s, and the maximum speed for USB 3.1 Gen 2 is 10Gb/s (1250MB/s). According to Samsung, their UFS 3.0 solution can reach a sequential write performance of 410MB/s.

Taking a look at the current smartphone market, it's really disappointing to see that a majority of phones are still equipped with the dated USB 2.0 port, even some flagships. The Asus ROG Phone II sets an excellent example by sporting the fastest USB-C port, and we hope that other phone makers would follow suit to bring us better user experience.