If gaming is 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 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 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage model if you buy direct 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 may balk at the slightly janky 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 far 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 metal framing glass that affords you a view of some internals and RGB lighting that comes to life when you play games. 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 does make some noise, and you can sometimes feel the warm air venting.
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 gaming hub software by default. The rectangular profile and round power button remind me of Sony’s old Xperia design, but this is a much bigger phone and can prove tricky to fish out of a jean pocket. I’m talking 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 couple of weeks. Surprisingly, the Gorilla Glass finish remains unscathed so far, but I fear for its long-term survival. 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 is only available in opaque black or white (Shadow or Lightspeed), and you have to shell out more for the transparent models ($799), though you do get a spec bump to 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. If you crave the sci-fi gamer aesthetic, stretch for the transparent model.
Supersize Me
It’s a big brute, but the size of the Redmagic 10 Pro affords gamers two important advantages. First, there’s an unbroken, almost bezel-free 6.85-inch AMOLED screen that is simply lovely. 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 web browsing. There’s a reasonably responsive fingerprint sensor at the bottom and a front-facing camera under the screen up top.
The other advantage of going large is the battery. The Redmagic 10 Pro has a whopping 7,050-mAh battery, and it can go for days between charges, even stretching to a couple of days of heavy use. Now, you don’t get any wireless charging, but there is a red USB-C cable and an 80-watt charger in the box, and you can fill the battery from empty in around 40 minutes.
Nubia has gone big on the performance front too. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite can handle any of the latest mobile games and is backed by speedy RAM (LPDDR5X) and storage (UFS 4.1). I played a mix of Diablo Immortal, 80 Days Around the World, and Asphalt 8 for several hours on the Redmagic 10 Pro, and it never broke a sweat, though the fan noise can get distracting when you work that processor. Benchmark results were excellent across the board, and you will struggle to get this level of performance elsewhere without spending more.
Compromises and Cons
Perhaps the main compromise here is the camera. You can get decent shots with the main 50-megapixel shooter in good lighting conditions with plenty of detail, though it tends toward oversaturated, unnatural colors and can struggle with very bright areas. The decent sensor size and aperture allow for solid low-light shots, and it does have optical image stabilization, though I found moving subjects often appear blurry. Sadly, the 50-megapixel ultrawide is not well-matched (there are significant color differences), and it produces much softer, noisier shots.
The 2-megapixel macro lens is useless. The under-screen 16-megapixel selfie camera is OK for the odd selfie, but you need decent light, or you can expect lots of noise. There is a Pro mode if you like to tinker, and various effects and filters in the camera app, though I’m not a fan of Nubia’s processing, and the portrait mode sometimes messes up around the edges of subjects when trying to apply that bokeh blur.
Nubia’s Red Magic OS is much improved compared to earlier versions, but I’d prefer stock Android 15. Nubia’s Android skin is loud and frankly unpleasant. Everything is too big, and it’s peppered with perplexing options you must click on to understand. There’s way too much useless bloatware, so I’d advise cleaning up and switching to Google’s suite where you can. Thankfully, this is mostly possible, and you will also find Google Gemini onboard.
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 plug-ins. While the extra buttons are handy, I preferred pairing the Redmagic 10 Pro with a mobile game controller.
One of the biggest cons of the Redmagic 10 Pro is Nubia’s disappointing update commitment: You will 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 rival for the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is the Asus ROG Phone 9, and it boasts superior software, a better display, wireless charging, and an IP68 rating, but starts from $1,000. Ultimately, for the price, the Nubia Redmagic 10 Pro is likely the best-value display and performance combo that gamers can buy right now.
