Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro Review: Value for Gamers

If the games are your smartphone priority, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is aimed squarely at you. This massive mobile gaming beast combines impressive performance with a large high-quality display and enough durability to keep you playing for days. It even has a built-in fan to keep things cool, programmable buttons, and customizable gaming software. All of this comes at a relatively affordable starting price of $649 (£579) for the 12GB RAM, 256GB storage model if you buy directly from Nubia.

There is always a catch aggressively priced phones. Assuming you don’t mind the bulky, angular design that isn’t very pocket-friendly, you might balk at the slightly choppy software, inconsistent camera performance, or lack of wireless charging. But remember that hardware like the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset here is usually 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 thick glass with a metal frame that lets you see some internals and RGB lighting that comes alive when you’re gaming. There are vents on either side of the frame with a visible fan designed to keep the processor cool. This can be useful for longer gaming sessions, but it creates some noise and you can sometimes feel the warm air.

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 default Game Center software. 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 slip out of a jeans pocket. I’m talking about 6.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide.

The Redmagic 10 Pro is smooth and super slippery and has slid off tables, chairs and my leg several times over the past few weeks. Surprisingly, the Gorilla Glass coating 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. Limited water resistance can be expected with the vents and it will not survive submersion.

It’s worth noting that the entry-level Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro only comes in opaque black or white (Shadow or Lightspeed) and you have to pay more for the transparent models ($799), although you get a bump in specs to 16GB of RAM and 512 GB memory. If you’re craving the sci-fi aesthetic of gamers, look no further than the see-through model.

Supersize me

It’s a big deal, but the size of the Redmagic 10 Pro gives gamers two important advantages. First, there’s an all-over, nearly bezel-less 6.85-inch AMOLED screen that’s simply gorgeous. It has a slightly odd resolution of 2688 x 1216 pixels, to 144-Hz refresh rateand brightness peaks up to 2000 nits. It is perfect for gaming, watching movies or surfing the web. There’s a reasonably responsive fingerprint sensor at the bottom and an under-screen front-facing camera at the top.

The other advantage of the big one is the battery. The Redmagic 10 Pro has a huge 7050 mAh battery and can run for days between charges, even up to several days of intensive 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 fill the battery from empty in about 40 minutes.

Nubia has also advanced in terms of performance. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite can handle any of the latest mobile games and is supported 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 be distracting when working with this processor. Benchmark results were excellent in all areas, and you’d be hard pressed to achieve this level of performance elsewhere without spending more.

Trade-offs and cons

Perhaps the main compromise here is the camera. You can take decent photos with the main 50MP 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 steady shots in low light, and there’s optical image stabilization, though I found that moving subjects often looked blurry. Unfortunately, the 50MP ultrawide isn’t well matched (there are significant color differences) and produces much softer and noisier photos.

The 2MP macro lens is useless. The 16-megapixel selfie camera below the screen is fine 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 handling, and the portrait mode sometimes messes around the edges of objects when you’re trying to apply that bokeh blur.

Nubia’s Red Magic OS is much improved over earlier versions, but I’d prefer stock Android 15. Nubia’s Android skin is loud and downright nasty. Everything is too big and littered with confusing options that you have to click through to understand. There’s too much junk so I’d advise cleaning up and switching to the Google suite where you can. Fortunately, this is mostly possible, and you’ll 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 delve into an impressive library of supplements. 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 update, two Redmagic OS updates, and three years of security updates, which is woefully short of the norm.

If gaming isn’t your top priority, you’ll find some more well-rounded options in ours The best Android phones guide. The most obvious competitor to the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is Asus ROG Phone 9and boasts superior software, a better display, wireless charging and an IP68 rating, but starts at $1,000. Ultimately, for its price, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is probably the best combination of display and performance gamers can buy right now.