I often question what exactly is a flagship phone. Some would argue that a top-tier silicon is the first requisite. Others go for a more holistic approach that involves a fast screen and big camera sensors.
The boundaries, however, vary wildly, depending on the brand you’re chasing. Then there are mavericks like Red Magic, which play in the outlier category of “gaming phones.”
Asus is the big dog in the game, but a starting price of $1,199 for the ROG Phone 9 Pro instantly killed the appeal for me. At that kind of financial hit, I can get a far more well-rounded phone like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the Google Pixel 9 Pro, or the iPhone 16 Pro.
Now, along comes the Red Magic 10 Pro, offering Qualcomm’s best silicon and a lot more, all for just $650. The ask is almost unbelievable from the moment you lay your eyes on the phone and go through its expansive sheet of niceties.
The Red Magic 10 Pro is a sight to behold
Even if this was not a typical “gamer-first” device, I can easily recommend this phone for more reasons than one. There are also a few quirks, especially one tied to software longevity, that I will discuss later in the story.
The first phone I tried from the Nubia-backed brand was the first Red Magic Phone in 2019. It had a beautiful, sloping metal chassis with an RGB strip running across the back. It looked more like a gizmo from sci-fi flicks and was an absolute joy to hold.
In the years that have elapsed since, Red Magic shifted to a glass and metal design, but not in the same industrially bland fashion as mainstream players like Samsung and Apple. The Red Magic 10 Pro, I believe, is the finest design to come out of the brand’s labs so far.
Despite the asking price being lower than that of the entry-level phones from Google or Apple, Red Magic has used aviation-grade aluminum and Corning Gorilla Glass. And here’s the best part — there’s no camera hump or ring. This is a phone that can lie flat on its back.
The entire back is level despite fitting three cameras (two of them use a 50-megapixel sensor) and a 23,000 RPM physical fan. It’s slightly taller than the iPhone, but narrower and roughly as thick as the Apple flagship.
Oh, by the way, the 50MP cameras at the back click sharp pictures, and the low-ight results surprised me. Have a look:
The see-through aesthetics of the phone aren’t as gaudy as the LED-lined mess that is the Nothing Phone series. Yes, there’s the whole RGB shebang here — it’s a gaming phone, of course — but it has been done tastefully.
The fan, X chip highlight, and Red Magic logo in the lower corner light up. There’s a red mode switch key on the side, breaking the all-black stylistic monotony. At the end of the day, you certainly won’t be mistaking this phone for anything else out there.
There are a couple of other surprises, too. The Red Magic 10 Pro serves up a 3.5mm headphone jack, too. Plus, an 80-watt GaN power brick also comes in the box.
There are also two air vents on each side. These air passage lanes for internal cooling also mean there is no meaningful dust and water resistance on the Red Magic 10 Pro. That’s the only weak spot in the phone’s armor, but you get a protective case in the retail package.
Flip the phone over, and you will get bowled over again. The bezels are uniform, and they are just 1.25mm, out-slimming the best out there. It looks stunning in person, and I can’t help flaunting it with bright wallpapers.
Also, notice that there’s no hole for the selfie camera on the front. The front camera is hidden underneath the screen, and this time around, you can’t even discern it with the naked eye. It’s the result of sandwiching two display layers, which involves a 20-step coating process and thrice as much time.
I have seen implementations of an under-display camera from Samsung and a few other brands, and it doesn’t always look great. What we have here is simply stunning and results in an interrupted full-screen experience. Yet, it’s not all show and glitz here. There’s plenty of innovative substance, too.
Show, substance, and then some
The Red Magic 10 Pro offers one of the nicest screens I have ever seen. This 6.85-inch OLED panel offers a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. The refresh rate stands at 144Hz, while the instant touch sampling rate is 2,500Hz.
The result is an amazingly responsive screen that’s tailor-made for fast-paced action games. Lending a hand in that gaming endeavor are a pair of capacitive shoulder triggers with responsiveness figures of 520Hz. Remapping them for duties like reloading, firing, and peeking is pretty convenient. You can also assign specific in-game controls to gestures like tilt or rotate.
Using these triggers almost feels like cheating in mobile games, as they offer a more console-like feel. For anyone reliant on the claw grip, these shoulder triggers are far more comfortable and serve as excellent inputs compared to awkwardly dealing with cramped onscreen controls
On most occasions, I am the one whom my pals carry in shooter games. But with these shoulder triggers, I can come out of battle royale rounds with some extra damage and a bit of the quintessential gamer respect.
Talking about games, this phone is made for gaming above anything else. And it doesn’t disappoint. Qualcomm’s work with the custom Oryon cores aboard the Snapdragon 8 Elite has delivered some stunning results, not just in terms of peak performance, but also stability and efficiency.
To top that off, Red Magic has done some impressive thermal hardware engineering here. The company tells Digital Trends that the Red Magic 10 Pro is “the world’s first phone to feature a liquid metal cooling system.” However, this is not liquid metal in the same vein as desktop processors.
Instead, Red Magic engineers have used an Indium alloy composite with potassium liquid metal medium, creating what one would roughly classify as a solid heat sponge. It is placed between the fan and the vapor chamber cooling kit. The heat absorbed from the vapor chamber is fed to the fan.
On the ray-traced loop test in 3D Mark Solar Bay, the Red Magic topped the charts and even surpassed the MediaTek Dimensity 9400. Running a synthetic CPU stress workflow, the peak CPU performance only throttled down to 90% of its peak value, which is mighty impressive.
The whole system makes a real difference, especially when you’re eyeing long gaming sessions. After playing Zenless Zone Zero for about an hour on the Red Magic 10 Pro, the temperature barely crossed the 104-degree Fahrenheit mark, while the iPhone 16 Pro climbed above the 115-degree Fahrenheit level.
In half a dozen games — including titles like Call of Duty: Mobile and Genshin Impact — the phone lets you activate an in-house Frame Rate Boost tech that interpolates the performance from 60 fps to 120 fps and enhances the visuals to 2K resolution. There are a whole bunch of plug-ins that give a meaningful edge in games.
Now, you are buying a phone like the Red Magic 10 Pro to play a lot of games, and that means it needs a fittingly large battery. On this one, you get a massive 7,080mAh battery, and to go with it, support for up to 100W fast wired charging.
I got astounding mileage out of this battery with above-average usage, easily ending my day with over half of the electrochemical juice still left in the bank. Even if you squeeze about 3 to 4 hours of graphics-intensive games into the mix, you still won’t have to hunt for a charger.
With the supplied 80W unit, you can get the phone charged halfway in roughly 15 minutes and it takes little over 35 minutes for a full charge. Those figures beat the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro. Plus, there’s also a cutoff system that only keeps the lights on, but doesn’t supply any electrical power to the battery.
There’s also a setting that automatically enables the fan to keep the battery cool during charging. The only key omission here is the lack of reverse charging, even though the battery is large enough to share some juice and still survive a whole day with ease. Wireless charging is also absent, but for the price, it is acceptable, especially when you have 100W wired charging at your disposal.
A trust investment, above all else
Red Magic has been selling phones internationally for over half a decade now, but so far, it has followed an online global sales pipeline. The lack of an on-ground outreach footprint and after-sales support channel would make any buyer do a double-take before handing over their hard-earned cash.
In case of any damage, you have to send the Red Magic 10 Pro over to the brand’s office and bear the shipping costs, in addition to the necessary repair and replacement work. Red Magic doesn’t officially sell repair parts, but you can find resellers hawking them on platforms like Alibaba.
A healthy few Red Magic owners have imported the parts and got their phone fixed at a local shop or did it themselves. The former is the safer route. In India’s national capital, New Delhi, I talked to a couple of electronics shops, and they were willing to handle the part sourcing and repair on my behalf, but the same can’t be said of most other cities.
The other conundrum is the software update situation. Red Magic is only promising one year of OS upgrades (up till Android 16, which is already out for Pixels as a developer beta) and security updates for three years. That’s bad. Really bad.
Yes, you likely won’t be running into a situation where a game demands the latest version of Android to run. Moreover, Android 16 will not be devastatingly outdated in the next few years, so most of your apps and games will run just fine.
If you are, however, eyeing the latest shiny tricks of Android, then you have no option but to install a custom ROM. Unfortunately, the year 2024 hasn’t been great for custom ROMs.
At the heart of the tussle is the Play Integrity API, which lets an app check whether it runs on a genuine Android device and in a secure software environment. Right now, it is flagging unlocked bootloaders and rooted devices — essentially anything that hasn’t passed the standard Google GMS certification.
Earlier this year, users of the two-factor authentication app Authy discovered that it will no longer support phones running a custom ROM. Why? “If it’s not an official OS, we have to assume it’s bad,” explained Shawn Wilden, who works on Google’s Android hardware security team.
That means the first set of apps to run into issues with custom ROMs will be banking apps, wallets, or other sensitive scenarios. Earlier this year, users reported that Google was blocking RCS messaging on rooted devices or those running custom ROMs.
Not everybody agrees with Google’s approach. “Play Integrity API is based on lies,” the makers of Graphene OS wrote on Mastodon. There are a few “fix” modules to handle the Play Integrity fingerprinting, but as per reports, Google has also started “mass banning” them.
Pound for pound, an absolute ace
With so much happening in the custom ROM community, the real question is how you handle the Red Magic 10 Pro once it goes past the Android 16 lifeline or the three-year security update promise. Do you upgrade your phone then?
It’s a $650 investment, as the very minimum. Do you simply turn it into a handheld gaming console that can handle 120 fps casting to a large screen in wired and wireless mode? Yeah, this phone does that really well, and so does its tablet sibling. It’s not a bad option, given the Red Magic 10 Pro’s primary appeal.
It doesn’t take much to see the outrageous level of hardware packed into this device, for nearly half of what established brands would take from your wallet. The silicon is top-notch, and with it comes a fantastic design, fast memory, a lovely display, console-like triggers, one humongous battery, lightning-fast charging, and a dependable pair of cameras.
Is it a flagship, though? I’d say yes. Is it a good value? Unbeatable, I reckon. Nothing even comes close. The only undoing is the brand’s status as a minor player and the infrastructure challenges that come with that status quo. If you can ignore that, this phone will leave you mesmerized in more ways than one. Just don’t forget to wipe it clean from time to time.
The Red Magic 10 Pro will be available starting December 12.
