The Razer Phone needs to watch its back, because it’s no longer the only gaming-focused smartphone on the market. Red Magic — the gaming arm of ZTE-owned Nubia — has taken the wraps off its first phone: the Red Magic Phone. If you’re an avid mobile gamer and your current phone just isn’t cutting the mustard, then you’ve suddenly got more than choice for your next upgrade. Here’s everything we know about the Red Magic Phone.
Design
The Red Magic Phone is the smartphone equivalent of the mullet — business in front, party in the back.
The front of the phone is dominated by the 5.99-inch IPS LCD display running a 2160 x 1080, 18:9 resolution. You’ll find slim bezels around the edges and a minimal forehead and chin at the top and bottom of the black anodized aluminum frame. The front-facing selfie camera is situated at the top of the phone, right where you’d expect it to be. So far, so good.
Then you flip the phone over and everything goes completely crazy. The back of the phone steadily rises toward the center, sloping upwards from the edges into a prism shape. According to Red Magic, the Red Magic Phone went through hundreds of design iterations, with special attention going towards making the phone ergonomically comfortable during long-play sessions. It’s certainly a unique shape and look, and we can’t wait to get our hands on it to tell you how it feels.
The weird back panel isn’t even the best part — instead, one of the phone’s wow factors waits at the top of the raised ridge. Gamer culture is apparently obsessed with RGB lighting, and that’s why you’ll find an RGB strip extending along the phone’s back, running below the fingerprint sensor and camera lens. This strip can output 16 million different colors, and comes with four different lighting modes so users can customize their phone’s look.
You’ll also find four speakers on the back, highlighted in red. These speakers use smart amplification technology and an inbuilt DAC to provide an extensive soundstage. The Dolby-enhanced speakers on the Razer Phone were one of that phone’s highlights, and we’ll have to see how this phone compares.
There’s a USB-C port at the bottom of the phone, and a headphone jack at the top. You’ll find the power button below the volume rocker, and above both is the Red Magic Phone’s dedicated GameBoost button — which, when flipped, will divert more of the phone’s resources to whichever game is active, reducing loading times and enhancing visual fidelity and frame rate.
Specifications
Red Magic Phone Specs
CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Memory: 8GB
Storage: 128GB
MicroSD storage: No
Display size: 5.99-inch IPS LCD
Resolution: 2160 x 1080
Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0
Battery: 3,800mAh
Size: 158.1 x 74.9 x 9.5 mm
Weight: 185 grams
Operating system: Android 8.1 Oreo
You’d be right to expect a gaming-focused smartphone to have strong specifications, and that’s what the Red Magic Phone delivers. The phone is packed with 8GB of RAM to make sure it’s able to handle a bunch of demanding tasks, as well as 128GB of onboard storage for loads of games. Unfortunately there’s no MicroSD storage, so that’s your lot — but 128GB is still a lot of memory. The phone has dual-SIM support too, for the jet-hopping mobile gamers out there.
The CPU is perhaps the one area that the Red Magic Phone could let us down — it’s packing last generation’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. While the Snapdragon 835 is still a powerful chip, we’re living in a post-Snapdragon 845 world, and it’s weird to see a phone that sells itself on high gaming capabilities not show up with the latest hardware. Red Magic claims to have tailored its hardware’s output to reduce power consumption by 40-percent. There’s no need to worry about overheating either, as Red Magic has equipped its phone with an air convection cooling system that takes heat away from the phone using a series of heat-conductive materials and multiple layers of graphite.
Finally, the phone is also rocking a huge 3,800mAh battery that Red Magic claims can last for up seven hours of Arena of Valor gameplay.
Camera
The Red Magic Phone sports a single 24-megapixel lens on the back of the phone, with an aperture of f/1.7 and EIS. The camera also comes equipped with Nubia’s NeoVision 7.0 Imaging Engine, a software package that adds a bunch of extra features. This seems like a decent little snapper, but with the focus of the phone on gaming performance, don’t be surprised if the camera turns out to be one of the weaker parts of the phone. Still, we look forward to testing it out.
You’ll find an 8MP selfie-shooter around the front of the phone, and the phone is also able to record at 4K at 30 frames per second, as well as 120 fps slow motion video at 720p.
Software
The Red Magic Phone will ship with Android 8.1 Oreo, without a manufacturer skin. We like stock Android, and a bare-bones version of the operating system makes sense on a phone so enamored with performance.
However, Red Magic is a part of Nubia, which is a part of ZTE — which was recently banned from buying U.S. technology for seven years. Those legal issues could make using Android a bit trickier, and could spell trouble for the phone down the line. We’ll keep you updated here if anything changes.
Release date and pricing
The Red Magic Phone will be available worldwide as part of an IndieGoGo campaign launching April 26. Early adopters will be able to snag the phone for a reduced price of $399, and while we don’t know what the price will be after the deal expires, $400 is a steal for these specs. It’s currently unknown what the release date of the Red Magic Phone will be, but we expect to find out more on April 26. As always, be aware of the pitfalls of crowdfunding.
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