If the game is your priority for a smartphone, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is aimed squarely at you. This massive mobile gaming beast combines impressive performance with an expansive, high-quality screen and enough endurance to keep you gaming for days. It even has a built-in fan to keep cool, programmable buttons, and highly customizable gaming software. All of this comes at a relatively affordable starting price of $649 (£579) for the model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage if you buy directly from Nubia.
There is always a trap with aggressively priced phones. Assuming you don’t mind the huge, angular design, which isn’t very user-friendly, you may balk at the slightly wonky software, inconsistent camera performance, or lack of wireless charging. But remember that hardware like the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset is usually only available on much more expensive phones.
Classy player
I tested the transparent RedMagic 10 Pro, which Nubia calls Moonlight, and it’s an eye-catching industrial design with a thick glass frame that gives you a view of some internal components and RGB lighting that comes to life when you’re playing games. games. There are vents on either side of the frame with a visible fan designed to keep the CPU cool. This can be useful for longer gaming sessions, but it makes noise and you can sometimes feel the hot air escaping.
Nubia has included customizable capacitive touch shoulder triggers on the top edges when holding the Redmagic 10 Pro in landscape orientation, as well as a glossy textured red switch that launches the gaming hub software by default. The rectangular profile and round power button remind me of Sony’s old Xperia design, but it’s a much larger phone and can prove difficult to get out of a jeans pocket. I’m talking 6.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide.
The Redmagic 10 Pro is smooth and super slippery, and has slipped off tables, chairs, and my leg several times over the past couple of weeks. Surprisingly, the Gorilla Glass finish remains unscathed so far, but I fear for its long-term survival. It’s probably best to use the clear case that comes in the box. With fan vents, limited water resistance is to be expected and it won’t survive a dunk.
It’s worth noting that the entry-level Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro only comes in black or opaque white (Shadow or Lightspeed), and you have to fork out more for the transparent models ($799), although you get a spec at 16. GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. If you want the sci-fi gamer aesthetic, opt for the transparent model.
Supersize me
It’s a big brute, but the Redmagic 10 Pro’s size gives gamers two important advantages. Firstly, there’s an uninterrupted, almost bezel-less 6.85-inch AMOLED display that’s simply lovely. It has a slightly odd resolution of 2,688 x 1,216 pixels, down to a 144Hz refresh rateand peak brightness of up to 2,000 nits. It’s ideal for gaming, watching movies, or browsing the web. There’s a reasonably responsive fingerprint sensor at the bottom and a front-facing camera under the display at the top.
The other advantage of going large is the battery. The Redmagic 10 Pro has a massive 7,050mAh battery, and it can last for days between charges, even extending to a few days of heavy use. Now you don’t get wireless charging, but there’s a red USB-C cable and an 80-watt charger in the box, and you can fill the battery from empty in about 40 minutes.
Nubia has also become big on the performance front. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite can handle all the latest mobile games and is backed by fast RAM (LPDDR5X) and storage (UFS 4.1). I played a mix of Diablo Immortal, 80 days around the worldAnd Asphalt 8 for several hours on the Redmagic 10 Pro, and it never broke a sweat, although the fan noise can become annoying when working on this processor. Benchmark results were excellent across the board, and you’ll be hard-pressed to get this level of performance anywhere else without spending more.
Compromises and disadvantages
Perhaps the biggest compromise here is the camera. You can get decent photos with the 50-megapixel main shooter in good lighting conditions with plenty of detail, although it tends toward oversaturated, unnatural colors and can struggle with very bright areas. The sensor’s decent size and aperture allow for solid photos in low-light conditions, and it has optical image stabilization, although I found that moving subjects often look blurry. Unfortunately, the 50-megapixel ultrawide isn’t well matched (there are significant color differences) and it produces much softer and noisier shots.
The 2 megapixel macro lens is useless. The 16-megapixel under-display selfie camera is fine for the odd selfie, but you need decent light otherwise you can expect a lot of noise. There’s a Pro mode if you like to tinker, as well as various effects and filters in the camera app, although I’m not a fan of Nubia’s processing, and portrait mode sometimes messes up the edges of subjects when you try to apply this bokeh. get confused.
Nubia’s Red Magic OS is much improved over previous versions, but I would prefer stock Android 15. Nubia’s Android skin is noisy and downright unpleasant. Everything is too big and is littered with confusing options that you have to click on to understand. There is way too much unnecessary bloatware, so I advise you to clean up and upgrade to the Google suite when you can. Fortunately, this is practically possible and you will also find Google Gemini on board.
One useful software feature that stands out is Nubia’s Game Space, where you can tweak and customize all kinds of settings to get the look you want for the hardware, create setups for different games, and dive into an impressive plugin library . . Although the extra buttons are handy, I preferred to pair the Redmagic 10 Pro with a mobile game controller.
One of the biggest downsides of the Redmagic 10 Pro is Nubia’s disappointing update commitment: you’ll only get one Android version upgrade, two Redmagic OS updates, and three years of security updates, which is woefully far from the norm.
If the game is not essential, you will find several more complete options in our Best Android Phones guide. The Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro’s most obvious rival is the Asus ROG 9 Phoneand it has superior software, a better display, wireless charging, and an IP68 rating, but starts at $1,000. Ultimately, for the price, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is probably the best value combination of display and performance gamers can buy right now.
