Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro Review: Essential for Gamers

If the game is The most important smartphone, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is looking for you. This gaming beast combines performance with high-end features and enough durability to keep you gaming for days. It also has a built-in fan to keep the buttons cool, flexible, and highly customizable apps. All of this comes at an affordable starting price of $649 (£579) for 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage if you buy directly from Nubia.

There is always a catch with very expensive phones. Assuming you’re okay with its small, pocket-friendly design, you might hate the janky software, camera inconsistencies, or lack of wireless connectivity. But keep in mind that devices like the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset are now usually found in more expensive phones.

Gamer Chic

I tested the display of the RedMagic 10 Pro, which Nubia calls Moonlight, and it’s an industrial design with a solid metal glass that gives you an internal view and RGB lighting that comes to life while you play. There are vents on either side of the frame with a visible fan designed to keep the processor cool. This can be useful for long games, but it makes noise, and sometimes you can hear hot air coming out.

Nubia has integrated a customizable capacitive-touch trigger on the top edge when you hold the Redmagic 10 Pro in focus, and a glowing red switch that automatically launches a game app. The rectangular profile and circular power button remind me of Sony’s old Xperia designs, but this is a very large phone and can be tricky to fish out of a jean pocket. I’m talking 6.5 inches long and 3 inches wide.

The Redmagic 10 Pro is very smooth and slippery, and has fallen off tables, chairs, and my leg several times over the past few weeks. Surprisingly, the end of Gorilla Glass remains unharmed so far, but I’m afraid it won’t be there for a long time. It is best to use the pen that comes in the box. Being breathable, water resistance is expected, and it does not have a dunk.

It is worth noting that the entry level of the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is available only in black or white (Shadow or Lightspeed), and you have to spend more on the transparent colors ($799), although you get a hit of 16. GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. If you long for the sci-fi gamer aesthetic, stretch out the transparent color.

Supersize Me

It’s pretty silly, but the size of the Redmagic 10 Pro gives gamers two important advantages. First, there’s the unbroken, nearly bezel-less 6.85-inch AMOLED screen that’s gorgeous. It has a slightly odd resolution of 2,688 x 1,216 pixels, up to a 144-Hz refresh rateand brightness peaks at 2,000 nits. It’s perfect for playing games, watching movies, or browsing the web. At the bottom there is a fingerprint sensor and a front camera under the screen at the top.

Another advantage of going big is the battery. Redmagic 10 Pro has a large 7,050-mAh battery, and it can last several days between charges, even stretching for several days of intensive use. Now, you don’t get wireless chargers, but there is a red USB-C cable and an 80-watt charger in the box, and you can charge the battery from empty within 40 minutes.

Nubia has also made strides in efficiency. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite can handle any of the latest mobile games and it is supported by the speed of RAM (LPDDR5X) and storage (UFS 4.1). I played the mixer The Immortal Diablo, 80 Days Around the Worldand Asphalt 8 for a few hours on the Redmagic 10 Pro, and it didn’t break a sweat, although the fan noise can be distracting when you’re working on the processor. Benchmark results were excellent across the board, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find better performance elsewhere without spending a lot of money.

Compromises are bad

Perhaps the biggest disagreement here is the camera. You can take good pictures with the main 50-megapixel shooter in good lighting conditions with a lot of detail, although it tends to overdo it, unnatural colors and can struggle in bright areas. Good sensor size and aperture to allow for strong low-light shots, and it has a stable image quality, although I found that moving subjects often looked blurry. Unfortunately, the 50-megapixel ultrawide isn’t quite as consistent (there’s a wide range of colors), and it produces very soft, noisy shots.

The 2-megapixel macro lens is useless. The 16-megapixel selfie camera below the screen is great for the odd selfie, but you need the right lighting, or you can expect a lot of noise. There is a Pro mode if you want to control it, and various effects and filters in the camera software, although I am not a fan of Nubia’s processing, and the image quality sometimes distorts the edges of the subjects when trying to use bokeh. blur.

Nubia’s Red Magic OS is very good compared to previous versions, but I would have preferred stock Android 15. Nubia’s Android skin is loud and boring. Everything is very large, and has complex options that you have to click to understand. There are many ways to get rid of bloatware, so I recommend cleaning up and switching to Google’s suite where you can. Fortunately, this is possible, and you will also find Google Gemini on board.

One of the most popular software features is Nubia’s Game Space, where you can tweak and adjust all kinds of settings to make sure you’re looking for the hardware, create different game configurations, and browse through an impressive library of plugins. . Although the additional buttons are useful, I prefer to connect the Redmagic 10 Pro with a mobile game controllers.

One of the biggest downsides to the Redmagic 10 Pro is Nubia’s disappointing commitment: You only get one version of Android, two Redmagic OS updates, and three years of security updates, which is woefully short.

If sports aren’t your priority, you’ll find a number of options around our goodies Best Android Phones the director. The most popular competitor of Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is that Asus ROG Phone 9and it has advanced software, a good display, wireless charging, and IP68, but it starts at $ 1,000. In the end, for its price, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is probably the most affordable and compact display that gamers can buy right now.