I know big and shouty gaming phones aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but you still have to appreciate it when a company goes all-in on performance. That’s precisely what Nubia has done with the new Red Magic 6.
The Red Magic’s base model includes a huge, 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a 165Hz refresh rate and a 2400 x 1080 resolution, along with a Snapdragon 888 chip, 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of storage, depending on your config. Nubia even bumped up the Red Magic’s multi-finger touch sampling rate to 360Hz to make sure competitive mobile gamers get the most responsive inputs possible, while also including touch sensitive triggers on the edge of the phone.
Nubia calls the Red Magic’s in-your-face design Mecha Sci-Fi, which sounds about right. The phone looks like it would blend in naturally in a Gundam episode. There’s also a 64-MP main camera augmented by an 8-MP ultra wide cam and a 2-MP macro cam, with Nubia even tossing in an assortment of cyberpunk-inspired filters.
Nubia offers a bunch of software tweaks, like Tencent’s Mobile Game Accelerator and Solar Core Engine, in addition to Red Magic’s RAM Boost and Frame Optimization 2.0 for extra sharp performance. And just in case that’s not enough, Nubia said the Red Magic 6 features a multi-dimensional cooling system that uses 13 temperature sensors, an air duct, thermal gel, graphene, and more to keep the phone from overheating. There’s even a clip-on fan, which seems like overkill to me, but I guess you can never have enough cooling.
Finally, the Red Magic 6 comes with a 5,050 mAh battery, a headphone jack, and 65-watt charging. But again, that’s just the standard model. If you move up to the Red Magic 6 Pro, you get 12GB or 16GB of RAM, a faster cooling fan, 120-watt charging, and bonus aluminum heat plate for, you guessed it, more cooling. Unfortunately, overall capacity on the Red Magic 6 Pro does go down due to that plate, leaving it with a 4,500 mAh power pack.
But the real Mechazord is the Red Magic 6 “Dao” edition, which features a transparent back with an RGB-lit fan and a whopping 18GB of RAM, which is probably more for bragging rights than any sort of tangible performance bump. There’s also some more obvious Tencent branding so you don’t forget who helped collaborate on the device.
The Red Magic 6 is priced between 3,800 yuan (around $585) for the base model and up to 6,600 yuan (around $1,015) for the fully loaded Dao edition with 18GB of RAM. But if you live outside of China and are serious about checking out one, you might want to hold off for another 10 days, as Nubia has a global launch event for the Red Magic 6 scheduled for March 16.