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Products aimed at hardcore gamers aren’t exactly known for subtlety. Aggressive styling, bright RGB lighting, and bombastic colors are common whether you’re buying a gaming chair, a high-end controller, or even a dedicated gaming phone.
The upcoming Redmagic 12 Pro is no exception. Its rectangular chassis is adorned with decorative elements and a smattering of colorful lights, designed to highlight its built-in liquid cooling. There’s a huge illuminated ring on the back panel, tracing the cooling loop that sits on top of the battery, along with a smaller rectangular shape and light bar next to the camera modules at the top, where the SoC is situated.
Although they do offer dynamic RGB lighting, all the marketing material shows them lit up in bright blue. I’m sure it’s meant to make the phone look high-tech and futuristic, but honestly, it just looks like R2-D2 to me — especially that white model.
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It’s a phone that makes a statement: “the person holding this is a gamer,” and while there’s definitely value in having a device that stands out from the crowd, I can already imagine the kind of looks that I would get pulling this big, flashy bar out of my pocket on the subway.
A console on the go?
It’s a shame, as the rest of the package looks like strong value given the $949 / £799 starting price.
The phone is powered by the latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and up to 16GB of RAM, the same configuration found in the considerably more expensive Motorola Signature 27 and other cutting-edge flagships. The liquid cooling system, which works in tandem with a powerful fan and vapor chamber, should facilitate more reliable and sustained performance than other similarly specced devices.
It’s a great combination given the gaming focus: early hands-on reviews already suggest that this is the fastest-performing Android phone at the moment, allowing for steady frame rates in extremely intensive games like Wuthering Waves at high graphics settings.
You’ll be able to appreciate all of it on the 185Hz refresh rate screen that, while not the biggest or brightest out there (at 6.85 inches and 5,000 nits peak), should deliver butter-smooth motion in supported games.
This is also one of the few new phones to launch with an under-screen selfie camera, so you don’t even need to worry about a camera cutout or punch hole blocking your view and getting in the way of the action.
You’re also getting some physical advantages that aren’t present on other phones, namely physical trigger buttons that can be mapped to in-game inputs, cutting down on the need for an external mobile gamepad.
Then there’s the PC game emulation. The Redmagic 12 Pro comes with built-in software designed for running PC games from your Steam library. Not game streaming — these titles are running directly on the hardware.
And no, the performance isn’t going to be perfect, and battery life will take a serious hit, but testers have already got titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 running relatively smoothly, which feels seriously cutting-edge and is not something that I ever thought I would see on mobile phone hardware. I just wish all of this goodness was packed in a less… attention-grabbing shell.
The Redmagic 12 Pro hits shelves on November 18, with early-bird discount vouchers and free gifts available for those who pre-order now.