Our Verdict
The RedMagic 9S Pro is a beast of a gaming phone, with a crystal clear display, incredible performance, and rapid charging that puts countless other Androids to shame. Combine this with the newly improved Game Space, and you’ve got a perfect device for play for less than $800. It gets a touch toastier than you might expect given the complex cooling system, but outside of that, I can’t recommend it enough.
- Top-tier gaming performance
- Rapid charging
- Crystal clear display
- Great gaming software features
- Can get warm
- Not much for non-gamers
Of all the brands in the niche gaming phone market, RedMagic might just be one of the most impressive. While the others have slowly started trying to cater to the middle ground, becoming more and more like your run-of-the-mill premium Android, RedMagic’s unwavering dedication is apparent, especially in its latest offering, the RedMagic 9S Pro.
This thing is for gamers, and it doesn’t need an advertising campaign full of teens playing PUBG Mobile to prove it. With its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset powering rip-roaring performance, a collection of finely tuned play-orientated software features, and a crystal clear display that occupies as much of the front of the phone as possible, this thing is more than ready to compete with the best gaming phones on the market. With that in mind, let’s get into the finer details.
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Price and availability
The RedMagic 9S Pro arrives at the price of $649 / £579 for the 12GB of RAM and 256GB of memory Sleet colorway version, or a slightly higher cost of $799 / £709 for the 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage Snowfall and Cyclone designs. For this review, we’re using the Snowfall model.
Early bird pre-orders begin on the official RedMagic site on July 23, with the full release coming on July 31. It’s also worth pointing out that another 12GB+256GB model is coming later this year in the form of the Frost colorway.
Specs
Features and software
As a gaming phone, most of the RedMagic 9S Pro’s selling point features are aimed towards gamers, and as one myself, I can appreciate that. These features all fall under the Game Space umbrella, which you can easily launch with a red switch on the side of the phone. Once you’re in, there’s a plethora of tools at your disposal.
The Game Space opens on its custom launcher, with all your titles ready to go on the left of the screen. From here you can jump into a game or mess with performance and GPU settings, as well as sensitivity, smoothness, and stabilization. Once you’re in a game, you get the Game Space overlay. The options in the overlay vary from simple things, like rotation lock and screen recording, to more complex tools, like key remapping and audio equalization. It’s all-encompassing, and I wracked my brain thinking of anything RedMagic could possibly add to the equation with little success.
My only qualm with Game Space is that it can be a touch overwhelming, especially with all the newly added options. The overlay has so many tools and doodads that I end up spending longer than I should just messing around with things to see what they do. Admittedly, Game Space is an option, not a necessity, when it comes to playing something like Honkai Star Rail, Diablo Immortal, or even Candy Crush, so you still get top-tier performance if you prefer the vanilla experience. Still, it might be nice to have a happy medium that gives you the option to change some crucial settings without all of the added and occasionally confusing extras.
In terms of the operating system, the RedMagic 9S Pro runs the latest version of RedMagic’s custom OS skin of Android 14. It’s a pretty clean UI, and while it’s still not up there with Samsung’s One UI or Apple’s iOS operating systems in terms of ease of use, it’s an improvement on some of the maligned RedMagic skins of the past. As ever, there’s a little bit of bloatware – when will phone brands understand I don’t need Booking.com pre-installed? – but it’s hardly egregious and takes just a couple of minutes to clean up.
Outside of the play-orientated features, the 9S Pro still has plenty to offer that you might expect from a modern smartphone. There’s the security features, with both a fingerprint sensor and facial recognition software for unlocking your phone. You’ve also got the swanky new Z-SmartCast system, allowing you to cast from your phone to a PC monitor at up to 120fps. Outside of that, you’ve got live wallpapers too, which is always a nice touch.
Design
Unlike the latest ASUS Rog phone, which has gone for a more neutral look, the RedMagic 9S Pro still screams “I am a gaming phone” in its design. This might not be popular with neutrals, but I’m a fan of the flat futuristic aesthetic, whether it’s in the silvery Snowfall colorway I’ve got or the Sleet (black), Cyclone (black but different), and Frost (white) alternatives.
When I say futuristic, I really mean it. While the 9S Pro falls into the ‘big old rectangle’ category of smartphones, it’s not a brick. It feels streamlined, in part thanks to the missing camera bump and flat edges. Outside of the subtly curved corners, it’s all straight lines and right angles. You’d think this might make for a slightly uncomfortable form factor, but it doesn’t. It fits nicely into the hand, and those rounded corners I just mentioned go a long way to make it so your hands don’t tire after fifteen minutes of gaming.
Before moving on from the phone’s design, I have to mention the flat shoulder buttons, which are a smart inclusion from RedMagic. If you’re a fan of shooters, these are an absolute godsend, giving you a way to fire at will without obscuring the screen with your finger. The shoulder buttons, as well as the fan, also benefit from some funky RGB lighting, which adds to the gamer aesthetic this thing is so clearly aiming for.
Display
The RedMagic 9S Pro’s display is, as you might expect for a gaming phone or anything that’s going to cost you in excess of $700, stellar. It’s a 120Hz 6.8-inch display that utilizes BOE’s Q9+ luminescent material, something I admittedly have never heard of before, to deliver crystal clear visuals. Importantly, Gorilla Glass 5 protection keeps this glorious display safe – after all, it’s no use having such a pristine screen if it’s going to shatter on even the slightest of impacts.
In terms of brightness, you’re looking at a peak of 1,600 nits, which is plenty bright for gaming indoors. Usually, I’d give this a bit of a better test under sunlight to see if there’s much glare, but you can thank the rainy British summertime for making that impossible this time. Still, I shut all the curtains and turned on all the lights in my house for an artificial brightness test, and even at medium settings, the display is still easily discernable, so you shouldn’t have any issues playing in a well-lit setting.
The 9S Pro also offers a massive amount of screen space, with a 93.7% screen-to-body ratio giving you as much display real estate as possible, obstructed only by the slimmest of bezels around the very edge of the device. Like everything else on the phone, with the exception of a couple of buttons, this display is perfectly flat, so if you’re one of the many who still can’t get on with a curved screen, there are no worries about that here.
Cameras
I’ve come not to expect much from the cameras on gaming-orientated phones, but with the RedMagic 9S Pro, I’m gleefully surprised. This device comes with two cameras on the back, a 50MP main camera complete with optical image stabilization and a 50MP ultrawide. As ever, I’ve used my fluffy wonder boy Floyd as an example of the main camera quality, and as you can see in the image below, the cameras are more than capable.
Admittedly, I’m not much of a photographer, but there’s a real depth to the images you can capture on the 9S Pro, as evidenced by the intricacies in the colors of my pup’s coat. The only images I’ve taken that match that level of detail are from flagship devices like the Honor Magic6 Pro, my current Android of choice, or last year’s Xiaomi 13T Pro. Considering both those devices are very camera-centric, this is a pretty big win for the latest RedMagic gaming phone.
There’s also a 16MP selfie camera, which is fine. Even for a device at this price point, not everything can be perfect, and this front-facing camera isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s more than capable of taking some decent social media-worthy shots, but it’s not going to blow your mind, and the beauty filter changes your face more than you might like. I’m already a pretty thin guy, but the filter made my face thinner, which says something a little troubling about beauty standards and selfie cameras that requires much more nuance than I can go into here.
Performance
As the RedMagic 9S Pro is a gaming phone, we anticipated fantastic performance, and that’s just what we got. The 9S Pro utilizes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, the best available at the time of writing, to run games like Zenless Zone Zero and Diablo Immortal with ease, even at the highest settings. Boost your FPS to the max, stick that refresh rate on 120Hz, and put every in-game graphics option on high – the 9S Pro can handle it.
I could easily run out of superlatives talking about how this thing deals with even the most demanding games, but put simply, the frame rate is smooth, the visuals are defined, and even the audio is especially lush thanks to dual 1115K speakers, which are capable of getting nice and loud. It’s all you can ask for in a bespoke gaming smartphone, and the performance quality lays down a gauntlet within the industry niche that competitors are going to struggle to keep up with.
Not only is this thing capable of any game you throw at it, but it’s got an advanced cooling system to make sure the device doesn’t become too hot to handle in the middle of a round of Fortnite or a boss battle in Honkai Star Rail. Don’t get me wrong, even in spite of the ICE13.5 cooling system, the thing can get a little toastier than you might like, but you can hear the fan pulling its weight and it makes sure the thing never truly overexerts. I should point out that while you can hear the fan, it’s not obnoxiously loud, it just whirrs away in the background and you can easily mask it by turning up the in-game audio a touch.
Battery
Let’s start this section by talking about the charging speeds of the RedMagic 9S Pro, which are frankly ridiculous. Using the 80W charger the phone comes with – I know, a phone coming with its charger, in 2024 no less – you can juice from flat back up to 100% in just over half an hour. Even for a relatively premium phone like the 9S Pro, those are rapid speeds, beating out the ASUS Rog Phone 8 Pro by just under ten minutes, while laying waste to the Samsung Galaxy S24’s one-hour-plus juicing time.
Okay, so the charging speeds are great, but what about the battery life itself? It’s also pretty fantastic. The 6,500mAh battery itself is a bit of a beast and is significantly bigger than that of the ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro, Xiaomi 14, and Honor Magic6 Pro. Of course, a massive battery isn’t worth its salt if it doesn’t hold its charge, but the one inside the 9S Pro does, offering at least two days of juice with sporadic use.
To put the thing to the test, I timed how much battery it uses during a single hour of gameplay with the highest settings, using Hoyoverse’s Zenless Zone Zero as the test subject. In those 60 minutes, the battery reduced from 78% to 54%.
Honestly, that sounds worse than it is. Keep in mind this is the phone running at its highest possible settings – we’re talking 120Hz, 60fps, and with the ‘rise’ performance setting active in the Game Space – and you can make the battery last much longer with more reasonable settings. Even with that said, those numbers equate to around four hours of play at maximum settings, which is more than can be said for even some portable consoles, let alone other smartphones.
Should you buy the RedMagic 9S Pro?
Simply put, if you want the best gaming phone in 2024, you should get the RedMagic 9S Pro. Its futuristic design, top-tier performance, glorious display, and flabbergasting charging speeds offer something that feels properly modern, and I can easily see it becoming my go-to for testing any mobile games in the future. It’s also a fair bit cheaper than its main competition, the ASUS ROG Phone 8, which is always an attractive selling point.
As ever, there are a couple of caveats. This is a gaming phone that doubles down on its gamers-first ethos, so if you’re looking for AI features like you might get with the latest Samsung and Google Pixel phones, you’re not going to find them here. It’s also worth saying that while the cameras you get are more than capable, there’s no macro or telephoto lens, so if you’re something of an amateur smartphone photographer, this might not be the one for you.
Alternatives
If I haven’t sold you on the RedMagic 9S Pro, here are some possible alternatives.
Samsung Galaxy S24
If you want a phone that can handle demanding games and has a little more to offer in terms of fun AI tools, the Samsung Galaxy S24 is an obvious alternative. The S24 benefits from Samsung’s slightly cleaner One UI operating system, as well as seven years of software and security updates, but as you might anticipate, the gaming performance isn’t quite as impressive as it is with the RedMagic. If you want the full lowdown, see our Samsung Galaxy S24 review.
ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro
I’ve made multiple comparisons between the ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro and RedMagic 9S Pro in this review, which makes sense given that they’re the two best gaming phones of 2024 so far. The big difference between the two is that the ROG Phone has an additional 32MP telephoto lens as part of its triple camera set-up. Outside of that, both are fantastic devices for gaming, and it comes down to your opinions on both brands when deciding which to go for. For more details, check out our full ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition review.