Red Magic 8 Pro

If you’ve watched the phone reviews we uploaded these few weeks, you might understand our concerns about gaming phones in 2023. Our concerns are not unfounded. In fact, the niche market for gaming phones has been cooling down. You may even find some famous gaming brands would stop updating their lineups in 2023. But this doesn’t seem to affect the brand RedMagic. Surprisingly, the latest Red Magic 8 Pro in my hand is one of the best gaming phones we’ve ever reviewed. It really looks cool with a brand-new design, and I was attracted to it at first sight.

This is probably my favorite phone look this year. The RedMagic 8 Pro goes beyond its traditional e-sports fancy heritage with a more streamlined futuristic design. It’s much sharper, like a much low-profile iron plate, which reminds me of the black monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey.

But when got my hands on the phone, I immediately felt its weight and the slightly big body size. Although it’s not a big deal as a gaming phone, the sharp edges and frame make it hard to operate with a single hand. On the other hand, the sharp edges make the thickness more perceptible when held in hands.

But when I lit up the screen for the first time, these discomforts were instantly replaced by the joy of the whole screen. It’s a truly all-screen display with super narrow edges. And visually there’s no visible hole-punch selfie camera, which is hidden down below the display. It’s so elegant that I began to imagine how exciting it would be if it were a new model of famous gaming handheld series.

In fact, if not considering the platform, it’s also far more powerful than Nintendo Switch over performance. But of course, back to reality, among only a few excellent handheld platforms, we have no choice. Anyway, this is just some of my ridiculous imagination. Latter I will show you more detail about this display.

On the back there’s a whole metal cover with a matt finish, texturing a few mech-style patterns. And there’s a light strip hidden below the RedMagic text logo and the shoulder-trigger indicators. I pretty like the smart design, which reminds me from time to time that this is a gaming phone.

We’ve seen too many phones made extra bloated to emphasize their camera modules, whether that’s necessary or not. However, the RedMagic 8 Pro doesn’t do that. The cameras do not bump up a lot. They’re just right there in a vertical sequence, without disrupting the overall design of the phone. Personally, I would say that the RedMagic 8 Pro is a machine that allows us to miss the orderly industrial era, although it doesn’t add to actual uses.

No-hole-punch Display

The front face is the biggest surprise for the RedMagic 8 Pro. The 120Hz AMOLED display is jointly created by RedMagic and BOE, with an FHD+ resolution, 10bit colors, 1440Hz PMW dimming, and a 1300nits peak brightness.

But in our test, we couldn’t get its advertised peak brightness. It achieved around 600 nits of manual overall peak brightness, and the maximum adaptive brightness in a 20% window is about 1000 nits. But the results are already close to the best results that we got on a gaming phone.

In addition to gaming, the display is also perfect for watching videos or movies as the big display achieves an almost perfect screen-to-body ratio without any punch hole. And the area of the under-screen camera doesn’t look different from the rest of the screen unless you check it very closely when displaying pure white.

But I’m sure most users wouldn’t do that. Then you might wonder how the selfie camera performs. Well the 16MP lens can shoot but does suck. But if you are a gamer, it shouldn’t be a big deal.

For daily use, the display’s sampling rate is about 350Hz. But if you add any apps or games into the Game space, its sampling rate can go up to around 500Hz. And you can even boost it up to 960Hz in the software, where we tested a result close to 900Hz. 

Sound & Vibration

As for vibration and audio, the phone still has a 3.5mm headphone jack and is equipped with dual speakers. You can check the vibration and sound here.

Shoulder triggers

The shoulder buttons are preserved like other gaming models. The capacitive triggers feature an excellent sampling rate of 520Hz, which did feel near instantly responsive, especially in some FPS games like PUBG Mobile. The red switch next to the shoulder button is for triggering the game space.

Gaming features

The new game space has been greatly improved along with rich gaming plug-ins and in-game overlay. The overlay now can display CPU and GPU frequency in a better alignment, and you can access almost all the plug-ins from it, such as hunt mode, scout mode, 4D Vibrate for FPS Games.

Multiple notification options and three gears of performance modes can be found easily. There’s a shortcut list to open up a small window for most apps while gaming, which can be moved around, resized, and opened in full-screen.

Return to the Game Space and there’re more gaming-related features to unlock the potential of the gaming phone. Like a true game console, the phone offers wide connectivity with wired and wireless gaming accessories, such as a Keyboard and mouse, game controller, and display.

The gaming experience with the input accessories is great. In some games like Genshin Impact and PUBG, the phone provides convenient mapping solutions, so you no longer need to set up the key functions manually.

Projection

To support wired projection via DP or HDMI cables, the phone’s charging port features USB3.2 connection. It can offer up to 1080P resolution at 240Hz or 2k at 120Hz, which is the best projection capacity we saw on a smartphone. If you only got a display offering USB connection, it still supports a 1080P resolution at 120Hz.

On the other hand, the phone also supports decent wireless projection via WiFi or millimeter-wave projection. The easiest way is to install the RedMagic Studio software on your Windows PC. It can cast up to 1080P streaming at 120Hz without any cables. Meanwhile, the software also supports key mapping with PC’s keyboard and mouse. And the mouse movement is even got optimized in FPS games. But here I don’t really recommend that you play competitive multiplayer games in this way, since it feels like cheating.

And if you still like to have gaming operation on the phone, please note that the latency is about 50ms here, which is fine for most games. But in shooting games like PUBG Mobile, the lag could be a big problem.

Performance & Gaming

The last thing you need to worry about is the phone’s performance. Generally speaking, you’ll hardly encounter performance bottlenecks on a phone with a Snapdragon 8Gen2 chipset, let alone the RedMagic 8 Pro with a built-in cooling fan.

It achieved the best results in almost all the benchmarks. And in all stress tests and gaming tests, it maintained good stability while offering high performance, and never had overheating problems. The highest surface temperature we tested is only 43.8℃ if we turn on the cooling fan. Even without fan-assisted cooling, its temperature didn’t exceed 46℃. The fan usually achieved a cooling effect of 1 to 3℃.

Red Magic has also made power-saving optimizations for Genshin Imapct. The phone would automatically reduce the framerate to 30fps when it detects the player not operating. When the player continues to operate, the frame rate will instantly increase to a stable 60fps. In Genshin Impact, it can run at the most stable 60fps we have ever seen, which is even more stable than the Xiaomi 13 series that we tested last month.

Upgraded Main Camera

As for the phone’s camera module, the main camera is upgraded with a Samsung GN5 sensor, followed by an 8MP wide-angle lens and a 2MP macro lens. The samples shot on the main camera have pretty natural colors and rich detail, and it’s the only lens that supports night mode. Surprisingly its night shooting has been greatly improved with much better exposure.

Since we are not particularly concerned about the camera performance of the game phone, you can just check the samples we shot here, including the other two lenses.

The phone is insanely equipped with a 6000mAh battery with 80W fast charging, which is also the only difference from the RedMagic 8 Pro +, which comes with a smaller 5000mAh battery with 165W fast charging.

But personally, I preferred the Pro version, as the long battery life for gaming is obviously more important than faster charging. And actually, the Pro model’s charge is already fast enough. It only took us 37 mins to collect back the full power of the 6000mAh battery.

Verdict

So that’s all about the RedMagic 8 Pro. I must admit that the phone made me a bit embarrassed as I expressed the view that ‘Gaming phones are about to become history’ last month. Now the RedMagic did hit me hard in the face with its great industrial design, long-lasting high performance, long battery life, and wide connectivity. And we noticed that the brand also released an adapted gamepad for the new series, which would make the phone become a switch-like game handheld. But unfortunately, it’s not available yet.

Once we get it, we will update its experience for you guys. Another feature to look forward to is that RedMagic will update a cloud gaming platform called X Gravity for the 8 Pro series in the future, where gamers can remotely run PC games via streaming. But I’m not too optimistic that the could platform can run smoothly in regions beyond China.

Anyway, though it got a few drawbacks like the absence of NFC, it’s still the best gaming phone I’ve ever reviewed.

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