The international model of the RedMagic 9S Pro gaming phone is a light refresh of the RedMagic 9 Pro from earlier this year. But the phone, which RedMagic unveiled Tuesday, has several software features that make it more customizable for Android gamers.
The $649 (£579) RedMagic 9S Pro starts with 12GB of memory and 256GB of storage along with a top-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. RedMagic continues its trend of designing phones for a gaming experience above all else. The 9S Pro has an under-display front-facing camera, meaning there’s no display cutout or notch and the screen is uninterrupted for gaming.
RedMagic says the area of the screen where this camera resides has an enhanced “translucency,” allowing you to snap better selfies than prior RedMagic phones, but photo quality from this kind of camera doesn’t yet match up to a more traditional front-facing camera setup nestled in a notch. Relatedly, the rear cameras with a 50-megapixel main camera don’t sit in a camera bump. Instead they sit flush with the rest of the phone’s body.
To make it easier to game on the 9S Pro, RedMagic introduced a new iteration of its cooling system, which includes a cooling gel alongside an internal fan that runs at 22,000 rpm. In addition to being functional, the fan has RGB lights for a little flair. RedMagic says this setup results in an up to 19.5-degree Celsius drop in CPU core temperature while gaming and an increased cooling efficiency of 20%.
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The RedMagic 9S Pro offers several new ways to customize gameplay, including the ability to set the screen aspect ratio on a game-by-game basis. You can run a game at 4:3 for a more retro experience or at 16:9 for widescreen. You can also force a game to run in a vertical or horizontal orientation, regardless of whether it was truly designed for that screen style. That could be a convenient option, depending on what you’re playing, but it could rearrange important buttons and HUD elements.
And if you happen to lock your phone while running RedMagic’s Game Space launcher — a more game console-style like menu than traditional Android phone home screens — the always-on display will show stats related to your games.
Like with the RedMagic 9 Pro, the 9S runs on the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, has touch-sensitive “shoulder button” style sensors and a display with a 2,000Hz touch sampling rate. That latter spec is notably more sensitive than the 720Hz rate seen on the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro, but both are highly responsive screens that should help when tapping onscreen buttons for certain games.
Also returning from the RedMagic 9 Pro is a 6,500-mAh battery with 80-watt fast charging (which RedMagic says can last for two days), a dual-speaker sound system, a specialized “4D vibration” motor that can be customized for games, a headphone jack and NFC for contactless payments.
While RedMagic’s phones have a reputation for being high-spec monsters at lower prices than flagship phones like Samsung’s Galaxy S24, they typically have some other quirks with their versions of Android. When I’ve reviewed RedMagic phones in the past, I’ve often needed to change the default internet browser since RedMagic chooses one that’s different than Chrome. Or I need to turn off a watermark that’s automatically applied to photos.
These are all quirks that can be easily adjusted, and people who are more adept at customizing Android to their liking with launchers and emulators could get a lot of value out of the kind of hardware that RedMagic includes for the price. While I would need to test out the RedMagic 9S Pro to see if that holds true again, historically it’s not the kind of the phone you’d want to use straight out of the box.
The RedMagic 9S Pro will go on sale at RedMagic’s website starting July 23. It’s available in four colors — sleet, frost, snowfall and cyclone — all of which appear to be different shades of white, gray or black.
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