RedMagic 8S Pro Review – Still The BEST Gaming Phone Hardware!
So red magic is back with their tweaked version of the eight Pro the 8S now pro has a overclock Snapdragon 8 gen 2. it has some tweaks to the cooling and some other minor changes it still is fan cooled it still does have a very large capacity the battery which is 6 000 milliamp hours up to 80 watt charging shoulder gaming triggers and a design that I think is one of the best you can get for a gaming phone that’s game orientated you’ve got things that you want like those shoulder triggers 3.5 millimeter headphone jack
a flat screen and a under display camera too and this is what we have included in the box so they’ve got this QR code here for the website and their social media sites we have our type c to type c cable SIM tray tool a warranty card and they do include a clear TPU case and I’ll charger depending on what version you are getting it is going to be either 80 Watts for the Chinese version or 65 for the international model now I’m I’m a big fan of this design this phone now it might not
be the latest because it’s 228 grams so yeah it’s a little on the heavy side but it’s got a lot of cooling packed into this and the
and it is just so hidden and it’s that flat screen full screen experience up to 120 hertz and it is an AMOLED screen of course now the resolution is 1116 by 24.80 so that gives us just about 400 ppis so very sharp looking screen really fast and I love the bezels on it I think they look great the frame around the outside excellent too so you can see the antenna lines this is an alloy frame we have this is the exit vent for the little fan that’s inside and sorry that’s the exit vent here so
it’s pulling that air in blowing it out the other side and it does actually make a difference now with our cameras there’s no change from the 8 Pro that we have the 50 megapixel main camera we’ve got the only eight megapixel Ultra wide and then a 2 megapixel depth camera those two last cameras aren’t really that great they’re not that exciting either but the build quality is excellent so I do have that power button easy reach right there and this button on the side here this is to enter the gaming mode so you just flick
that switch you go into it more on that soon and you’ll see we have the capacitive touch sensors here now these are great and they’re at 520 Hertz the touch sensing rate of those so they’re very responsive really good and when you look at the top yes we do have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack dual loudspeakers microphone there and I’ll type c with video out support the SIM tray takes two Nano Sims on 4 fortunately there is no micro SD card support with this model that’s the only thing it really does lack so the glass
on the back this isn’t Gorilla Glass 5 they don’t mention what version it is but transparent of course with this model that I do have I think Hardware wise this is a fantastic looking phone and what really a gaming phone should be now the fingerprint reader I’ve had Sometimes some instances where it doesn’t work when I first boot up the phone I’ve noticed this so of course you need to enter a password but once you’ve already done that sometimes it can be a little bit iffy and if your finger is a little dry or something
it might not work that great to get around this I do recommend adding the same finger twice and now it does seem to work really good now let’s take a look at this display because I think for a gaming phone it’s fantastic because it’s flat there’s just that slight curve on the edge of the glass here and it looks really good those slim bezels that either side and even top and bottom and make it really stand out and the fact that there’s no ugly notch or anything so we have a typical color modes here that
are standard now the brightness of this AMOLED screen 120 hertz it does top out at 1300 nits is the peak I’ve not been able to measure that I’ve not been able to trigger it for some reason and I do measure about just over 750 nits which is still perfectly fine you can see now in direct sunlight yes you can make the screen out is it the brightest no I have seen other phones that definitely have clearer screens indirect sunlight but I do think it’s an acceptable level so you’ve got night mode on there you’ve got
a lot of different options and with the refresh rate this is fantastic red magic gives us 90 Hertz yes that perfect Sweet Spot between fluidity and a little bit of battery saving and of course with this this model here we’ve got a 6 000 milliamp hour battery so it’s a nice decent large capacity to keep you gaming for quite a few hours and I’ll get onto the battery life later on but it is good so with lu I wanted to talk a little bit about this because I’ve noticed that there are just with red magic
OS 8 here a few little bugs and I can demonstrate one just straight away so you go into your camera here you’ve taken a photo and you want to preview it and go okay I want to have a look watch this what happens crashes every single time so they need an update to fix that there’s a few other little minor niggles and some things with the translation and the settings I’ve noticed and if you use photos they don’t have a gallery app for some reason if you do use the photos and you try go into
to view some of them it crashes again so that’s two areas where they need to fix that something’s going on it’s just a minor it should be easy enough for them to fix the other is you just see I can’t see just straight off the top of my head I can’t remember where it is but there’s a few areas where I’ve seen that the translation isn’t quite there and battery stats and that’s something that they into miss out but you have it now that was missing on some previous versions but it’s there now the UI
in general performance is very good it is generally really fast and smooth I occasionally see some of the animations lagging behind a little bit and of course you’ve got your app store there so it’s good it’s just that those bugs they do need to be fixed and I’m sure they will be very soon when you power on your brand new shiny red magic 8s Pro you’ll find that there is no bloatware apart from one app basically that’s it booking.com so that’s really good so many other brands they put on so much bloatware you need to
literally spend 5-10 minutes removing all that rubbish well here you don’t and booking.com just took me about uh 10 seconds to uninstall now free available storage with the 512 gigabyte version I have here is 473 gigabytes on first boot giving you plenty of space remember there’s no micro SD card support with this phone and well most flagships nowadays battery life at 120 hertz is very good I found this result to be way better than I expected and you can game for around about four to five hours on the top settings depending on your screen brightness
which is fear that’s kind of normal for gaming phone and especially with this Snapdragon 8 overclocked version Gen 2 which is slightly faster so it’s gone from 3.2 gigahertz Max 20 to 3.36 so additional performance there now the charge time ignore this right here because that’s not accurate it’s 6 000 milliamp hours that it does have charge time 31 minutes to go from seven percent up to 100 very good really fast that’s at 80 Watts mind you that I charged that here and then the internal storage very good speeds really quick that will not be
bottlenecking this system at all nope and you see here camera two API support So if you want different style of photos gcam ports open camera where you can use those they are supported across all of the cameras including including the front facing one it does have a wide Vine level one cert so Netflix is in full HD and let’s take a look at the performance because I do have antutu that I ran and you’ll see that the scores on this are absolutely phenomenal look at this now this is the latest version mind you so this
is version 10. so it has changed slightly those scores I believe increased a little bit from Version 9 to version 10 but still is a phenomenal score here for a device like this to be able to get these kind of results so really quick you’ll see the big Improvement is I think the GPU that’s gone up even further and you’ll see temperatures yes it did go up 10.3 degrees and lost five percent battery life just from running this single test but there’s no point having such crazy performance if it’s going to throttle does it throttle
well according to 3D Mark here this is their Wildlife extreme test 20 minutes very demanding and you can see it only throttles 2.1 percent yes that is it it’s a phenomenal score look at how high this is that’s almost 4 000 points so if you’re a gamer you’re serious about your mobile gaming and you want pretty much the best performance you can get without any annoying throttling then this is it that fan on the back you can see now with the RGB lights so this has RGB you can change it customize it through the settings
and the little fan in there well that does make a big difference not the RGB of course but that fan you can feel the warm air coming out the side of it and it stops this phone from basically throttling at all and red magic they have tweaked and improved the thermal performance so when you look here you can see that the frame rate well it’s gone from 17 frames per second to 28 and yes the temperature is after 20 minutes of running and pushing this really demanding Benchmark it did get a bit hot so up
to 45 degrees Celsius I measured the frame around the outside which is where it gets the warmest and that did reach 42 degrees Celsius so it was yes a little hot to the touch that’s to be expected but the main thing is there is basically no throttling at all and onto our audio now so I think this is a great phone for gamers because of that 3.5 millimeter headphone jack there at the top is exactly what you need you’ve got no issues then with the latency it is just absolutely spot on of course being hardwired
and you can use your favorite set or 3.5 millimeter headphones earphones whatever this is a good option to have now the loudness very loud out of both 3.5 millimeter and the speakers themselves I’ll give you a sample of them but just before I do I want to talk a little bit about the haptics that with the shoulder triggers at the top with General haptics it’s a nice strong little pulse better than most phones it’s nothing amazing but I would rate it being great good for a gaming phone now call Quality I’ve placed a few calls
no issues there uh no problems at all so I’ll give you that sample with the gaming mode which is really quite loud you’ll be able to hear just how loud these Dual side frying loudspeakers one here of course one on the other side up here really are now to demonstrate what this phone is really all about is that gaming mode the gaming features and performance so when you flick the little switch at the top up foreign by the way it then goes into the game mode with some music just turn that volume down and here
you have all your settings so you can add the games here you’ve got options for each of them the cooling fan that’s currently on you can turn that off if you want but I recommend it for long gaming sessions definitely you want to leave that fan on so I’ll jump into gen chin impact at maximum settings we’ll start the game here and I’ll show you some of the options we do have and those triggers when you’re in your game and you have the gaming switch up you just swipe from either the top right or left
hand side twice and you bring up the gaming menu here so this will give us a lot of information a lot of different settings you’ve got your fan you’ve got info the Wi-Fi uh do not disturb touch everything like that and I have this widget enabled at the moment you can see it so that’s what’s called info I find this really handy handy very handy especially if you’re reviewing these phones like I am you see now that the frame rate is 60 frames per second now what I’ve noticed is playing game Shin impact even though
yes where I am and the map is not the most demanding whatever area I am in it’s always 60 frames per second and it’s on the top settings it basically just like 3dmark it does not throttle it does not lose performance it is the best I’ve seen this game ever run now just going back into those settings if you want to then set up your triggers which are using touch emulation you tap here and you have the overlay So currently I’ve got the overlays just set that aren’t quite spot on so I can set this
one here to be my general attack and this one to be my magic attack there and that’s the left and right so you can set it up as a single tap you’ve got options there for long press rapid fire motion sensing dual operation a lot of different options here really if I go on to everything this video is going to be too long so that’s that saved and you’ll see now when I tap you’ll see how quick the reaction to this is and it makes gaming once you get used to it just so much better
you’ll see now as I tap okay and then I can just do the normal attacks here and remember to do the magic so the frame rate it will be that 60 frames per second you can see it is barely changing you see it dip to sometimes 57 59 58 but really this is the best kind of performance you’re ever going to get out of the most demanding Android games and of course everything in the Play Store will run perfectly fine with this and there’s gaming triggers I really like them I think they’re great and then
this screen look at those bezels nice and slim no ugly Notch no cut out this really is I feel the best hardware you can find for a gaming mobile all right so here is our weakness with this phone and that is the front-facing camera especially video performance because it’s got to look through the under display camera it looks blurry you’re probably thinking hey this guy just hasn’t cleaned the lens come on it can’t be that bad but that’s unfortunately what it’s like so if you don’t take a lot of selfies you don’t take a lot
of front-facing camera video then it’s going to be ideal then for you because you won’t ever be probably using this camera so for front video it’s 1080p maximum here and you can see that there is no electronic image stabilization so it does kind of shake around all over the place so not the phone for front-facing selfies or Vlog footage the rear camera you can shoot 8K 30 and we do have 4K 60 I’m currently shooting in 4k 30. and the quality is all right but the cameras they have improved yes over the years weird magic
I’ve got to give them credit where due but they still do fall behind other flagships the focus here with this phone as intended is the gaming performance not so much the cameras but hey at least we do have this option now I’ve not noticed any problems with the focus and I cannot zoom back over to the ultra wide because the ultra wide camera it does not support 4K 30. you do have to go into the promo to get video using the ultra wide for some reason just with the standard video mode doesn’t show up only
that main camera and probably due to this because the quality of the ultrawide video I think is quite poor as for all camera samples well this shot here of my cat via with the main 50 megapixel camera pretty decent not bad at all this one out in the marina a little bit oversaturated that’s the trend with the main camera I did find as you can see with this shot here of my daughter now the portrait shot stitching is okay background blur all right again over saturated look at those colors it’s just overdone a little bit
it’s almost like Samsung from a couple of years ago this is the ultra wide not looking very good a lot of grain and noise and then the front facing camera selfies ouch yeah not good at all the front-facing camera just because it’s got to look through the screen not good and low light as you can see from this example absolutely terrible the low light performance I don’t think I’ve seen this bad in a long time so overall it is as expected been an S model a tweak an improvement over the original 8 Pro there’s not
much of a difference between them but if you want the best and you demand to have the absolute best performance with your games you really into Mobile gaming uh then this is it you cannot get any better when it comes to the performance that the red magic 8s Pros going to deliver here so I didn’t really see any throttling at all maintains those frame rates yes it will get a little hot around the outside but the fan is doing its job it’s not a gimmick there’s even a bit of RGB bling in there if that
is your thing what I really like about this model is the design of it the frame around the outside the Dual loudspeakers the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack the fact that it’s a flat screen so not a curved AMOLED 120 hertz and it’s using an under display camera so no ugly notch or cut out none of that but the trade-off is of course the camera front-facing camera performance is poor it’s not great as I showed you from my samples so if you’re someone that takes a lot of selfies Vlog footage then clearly this is not the
phone for you it’s gamer focused the rear cameras as well while it’s kind of like a mid-range level not fantastic there and then I did encounter a few little bugs in the UI that need to be ironed out so that is the full story there of red magix 8s Pro the tweaked version of the eight Pro it really is Android’s best gaming Hardware that you can get right now
