If games are your priority for a smartphone, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is aimed squarely at you. This enormous mobile gaming beast combines impressive performance with an expansive, high-quality display and enough stamina to keep you playing 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 12GB RAM and 256GB storage model if you buy directly from Nubia.
There’s always a catch with aggressively priced phones. Assuming you don’t mind the enormous, angular design, which isn’t very pocket-friendly, you might balk at the slightly clunky software, the inconsistent camera performance, or the lack of wireless charging. But remember that hardware like the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset here is generally only available in much more expensive phones.
Gamer Chic
I tested the transparent RedMagic 10 Pro, which Nubia calls Moonlight, and it’s an eye-catching industrial design with a thick metal-framed glass that gives you a view of some internals and RGB lighting that comes to life when you’re playing games. There are vents on either side of the frame with a visible fan designed to keep the processor cool. It can be useful for longer gaming sessions, but it makes a bit of noise, and you can sometimes feel the hot air blowing out.
Nubia has included customizable capacitive-touch shoulder triggers on the top edges when you hold the Redmagic 10 Pro in landscape orientation, and a shiny textured red switch that launches the Game Center 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 be difficult to fish out of a jeans pocket. I’m talking 6.5 inches long and 3 inches wide.
The Redmagic 10 Pro is smooth and very slippery, and has slipped off tables, chairs and my leg several times over the past few weeks. Surprisingly, the Gorilla Glass finish remains intact so far, but I fear for its long-term survival. Probably best to use the clear container 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 is only available in opaque black or white (Shadow or Lightspeed), and you’ll have to shell out more for the transparent models ($799), although you get a spec bump to 16. GB RAM and 512 GB storage. If you’re after the sci-fi gamer aesthetic, reach for the transparent model.
Supersize Me
It’s a big brute, but the size of the Redmagic 10 Pro gives gamers two important advantages. First, there’s an uninterrupted, nearly bezel-less 6.85-inch AMOLED display that’s simply beautiful. It has a slightly odd resolution of 2,688 x 1,216 pixels, up to a 144-Hz refresh rate, and brightness peaks of up to 2,000 nits. It’s ideal for gaming, watching movies or browsing the web. There’s a fairly responsive fingerprint sensor at the bottom and a front-facing camera under the screen at the top.
The other benefit of going big is the battery. The Redmagic 10 Pro has a whopping 7,050 mAh battery, and it can last for days between charges, even up to several days of heavy use. Now, you don’t get any wireless charging, but there’s a red USB-C cable and an 80-watt charger in the box, and you can top up the battery in about 40 minutes.
Nubia has also gone big on the performance front. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite can handle any of 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 a few hours on the Redmagic 10 Pro, and it never broke a sweat, although the fan noise can get annoying when you’re running that processor. Benchmark results were generally excellent, and you’d struggle to get this level of performance elsewhere without spending more.
Trade-offs and disadvantages
Perhaps the most important compromise here is the camera. You can get decent photos with the main 50-megapixel shooter in good lighting conditions with plenty of detail, although it tends towards oversaturated, unnatural colors and can struggle with very bright areas. The decent sensor size and aperture allow for solid low-light shots, and it has optical image stabilization, although I found that moving subjects often looked blurry. Unfortunately, the 50-megapixel ultrawide doesn’t measure up (there are significant color differences), and it produces much softer, noisier shots.
The 2-megapixel macro lens is useless. The 16-megapixel selfie camera below the display is OK for the odd selfie, but you need decent light, or you can expect a lot of noise. There’s a Pro mode if you like to tinker, and various effects and filters in the camera app, although I’m not a fan of Nubia’s processing, and the portrait mode sometimes messes around the edges of subjects when I try to apply that bokeh. fade away
Nubia’s Red Magic OS is much improved compared to earlier versions, but I prefer stock Android 15. Nubia’s Android skin is harsh and frankly unpleasant. Everything is too big, and it’s peppered with confusing options that you have to click to understand. There is way too much useless bloatware, so I’d recommend cleaning up and switching to Google’s suite where you can. Fortunately, this is mostly possible, and you’ll 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 sorts of settings to get the look and feel you want for the hardware, create configurations for different games and tap into an impressive library of plugins can dig. . While the extra buttons are handy, I preferred to pair the Redmagic 10 Pro with a mobile game controller.
One of the biggest downsides to 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 short of the norm.
If gaming isn’t paramount, you’ll find several more well-rounded options in our Best Android Phones guide. The most obvious competitor to the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is the Asus ROG Phone 9, and it boasts superior software, a better screen, 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 display and performance combo gamers can buy right now.