Nubia Red Magic Review Part 1: Gaming phone for those on a budget

There’s no denying the fact that standing out from the crowd is getting increasingly difficult for phone manufacturers. With cheap flagships becoming more mainstream and mid-range phones becoming powerful enough for your day-to-day needs, there isn’t much point in shelling out the extra hundred bucks or so of your hard-earned money on premium devices. However, there is one particular group that will simply not settle for cheap: hardcore gamers. Until recently, hardcore gamers were forced to spend 700 bucks on the glorious Razer Phone to fulfill their insatiable desire of endless gaming. But the Razer monopoly on “gaming” phones might end soon. There’s a new kid on the block to watch out for…

Specs

 

SoC	Snapdragon 835
GPU	Adreno 540
RAM	6 or 8GB
Storage	64 or 128GB
Display	6-inch 2160×1080 IPS LCD
Battery	3800 mAh
Water and dust resistance	No
Camera	24MP rear camera (f/1.7 aperture), 8MP front camera (f/2.0 aperture)
Software	Android 8.1 Oreo
Measurements	158.1×74.9×9.5 mm, 185g
Price	About €400 ($460 USD)

Introducing the Nubia Red Magic, a gaming phone for those on a budget. A quick glance over the spec sheet reveals how much of raw horsepower this phone is packing. Some might be a bit disappointed by the fact that it is still touting Qualcomm’s last-gen Snapdragon 835 flagship SoC instead of the newer, presumably more capable offering, Snapdragon 845. However, It’s not like there is much to complain about with the Snapdragon 835. In fact, the Snapdragon 835 was considered as one of the most efficient SoCs last year, so it only makes sense to use it instead of a slightly inferior mid-range option at the same price point. Other than that, the phone seems to check all the boxes for a fully-fledged powerhouse. It packs in 8GB of RAM, 128GB of UFS 2.1 internal storage, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a large 3800 mAh battery in tow. Sadly though, there is no microSD card slot, but only a dual-SIM one.

Design and Display

Right out of the box we are greeted by a couple of bold design cues which show us the demographics of the targeted consumers. A chunky black metal clad shell with red accented slits and a red hexagonal camera cutout located right on the top of the slightly recessed fingerprint scanner, which retains a stretched hexagonal cutout gives this device the gamer aesthetic. As an extra treat, this phone features an RGB light strip too. There is not much else on the market that looks like this. One thing worth noting is that fingerprint cutout on the back might get in the way of some and needs some time to get used to. Nubia has chosen to keep the left side clean while cramming the volume rocker and the power button right below that red-tinted “GameBoost switch” on the right side. While the buttons are not as tactile as those of the OnePlus 5 or the recently released OnePlus 6, they are clicky enough to give a satisfying feel when pressed on (cough, cough… HTC… cough, cough). A headphone jack sits on the top of the phone while a USB-C 2.0 port resides on the bottom, both accompanied with a mic on each side.

On the front, we are greeted by a very standard 6-inch 2160×1080 IPS LCD display. Nubia has adopted the trendy 18:9 aspect ratio that we have come to see on pretty much every smartphone, with not-so-subtle curved corners. Thankfully, the display does not have a notch. However, it doesn’t feature the slimmest bezels—there is a significant chin at the bottom. The side bezels are quite thin though. As expected from a phone in this price range, the screen is not the most impressive aspect of this phone. It gets bright enough under sunlight, reaching brightness levels comparable to that of the OnePlus 5T. The contrast ratio is quite good for an LCD display in this price range. Overall the phone fares well with respect to sunlight legibility. But when compared to the OLED displays of the Samsung flagships or the cheaper OnePlus 5T, there is a noticeable difference in the contrast levels. OLED displays will continue to impress with their inky blacks, making the black on the LCD displays look slightly grey. One area where this display suffers is color accuracy. Generally, colors look a bit on the cold side of the spectrum, with whites bearing a prominent greenish tint. Overall we are looking at a screen that falls right into the “that will do” category, which is understandable given the retail price. With this device being targeted towards gamers, I still think the display should have been given a tad more attention.

Software

Given that Android 9 Pie just came out, it is no surprise to see that this phone ships with Android Oreo instead. To my surprise, Nubia chose to keep things clean and didn’t add any bloatware. The phone boots with a very lean OS which is as close to the vanilla Android experience as it can get. What you do get is a couple of Red Magic wallpapers and an extra “GameBoost switch” sub-menu in the settings app, which offers to block app notifications, block navigation buttons to prevent any possible accidental taps while playing games, and select the lighting pattern of the RGB strip on the back. Another cool feature of this phone’s software is how it manages app notifications when running fullscreen apps. If you are watching a video on YouTube or Netflix in fullscreen mode, the phone will automatically disable the heads-up notifications and switch to the older, less intrusive ticker notifications instead that have been the default way till Android Lollipop, where the status bar would temporarily pop up displaying the notification instead.

The result of such minimal additions is a very fluid user experience with nearly no hiccups at all. The dialer has been a straight exception though, where I noticed a lot of stutters when scrolling through the call history. But other than that, I am yet to see the phone drop any frames anywhere else. I consider the stock Android feel a huge merit of this phone, but unfortunately, it has little to none to talk about. The software is pretty much barebones with zero extra features to make things easier and more intuitive. No fancy off-screen or fingerprint gestures, no option to customize the buttons, even the default launcher lacked any sort of customization beyond organizing the icons. Thankfully you can still double tap the power button to open the camera app. But since this is an Android phone, I consider this to be a non-issue. I quickly got around it by installing Nova Launcher, and a few other 3rd party apps to customize the navigation bar and make use of that rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. This phone is targeted to the somewhat geeky gamers anyway, so I don’t believe they will struggle to make it their own. One thing to bear in mind though, the phone ships with March’s security patch installed, which is rather outdated, and I am yet to be notified of any updates. Those who are too concerned about the security of their phones should look elsewhere, or stay tuned for any of the well-known custom ROMs to support this phone.

Speed and Multitasking

While the Red Magic does not feature the latest SoC from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 835 under the hood is no slouch by any means. It has powered nearly all of last year’s flagships from the likes of LG, HTC, Xiaomi, and many others. Only Samsung and Huawei stood out as the exceptions, sticking to their guns and incorporating their in-house SoCs, with the former still providing a Qualcomm variant in the United States. As suggested by the spec sheet, the Nubia Red Magic passes my not-so-thorough test with flying colors. I could keep as many apps as I want open with none of them getting choked off. It’s safe to say that the Red Magic makes good use of this plentiful RAM configuration. Apps are loaded incredibly fast as well, just as all its Snapdragon 835 powered comrades. From loading Facebook and Chrome to more demanding games like PUBG, it never took too long.

Smoothness

Boasting a flagship-grade spec sheet does not always guarantee a fluid UI. The software governing the hardware lying beneath plays a major role. This is a point that has been proven numerous times with phones from Samsung, LG, and Huawei—OEMs who prefer overlaying a heavy skin in order to add more seemingly convenient features, prone to fall in this trap despite touting a similar spec sheet to that of Google’s Pixel or OnePlus’ offerings. While this segment is more focused on reviewing the Nubia Red Magic’s performance, these graphs and numbers won’t mean that much without comparing the phone to some of its similarly specced rivals. With the aid of an open source tool, I have managed to devise a series of tests to provide a data-driven comparison between the Nubia Red Magic and two other contenders, namely the OnePlus 5T and the Honor View 10. In an attempt to prevent any possible inaccuracies, a more standardized set of tests, UiBench, have been employed. As demonstrated in my previous review of the OnePlus 5T’s performance, the rendered frames will be plotted against the time needed to render each frame on a graph for each test. The horizontal green line represents the 16.7ms barrier, which corresponds to the 60fps frame rate the Android OS natively targets on these 60Hz screens. Generally speaking, the lower the height of the bars, the better. Here are the obtained graphs of the Nubia Red Magic, the OnePlus 5T, and the Honor View 10, respectively.

Nubia Red Magic

OnePlus 5T

Honor View 10

Methodology

• Google Calendar Fling: A quick fling performed in Schedule view in both ways for 3 times in a row as demonstrated here.
• Play Store Fling: A quick fling performed in both ways for 3 times in a row as demonstrated here.
• Touch Latency: The test was initiated in ‘Ball‘ mode and run for 20 seconds.
• Scrollable WebView and Notification Shade: A quick fling was performed in both ways for 3 times in a row in each test respectively in UiBench.
• Every other UiBench test was run for 20 seconds while the data was being collected.
• In the first slideshow, the photos with the “compete” tag refer to the test results of the Nubia Red Magic with the GameBoost switch switched on.

A quick look at the graphs suffice to reach the conclusion that the Red Magic is certainly within the range of top-tier flagships, if not surpassing some of its equally specced contenders. Starting with the Google Calendar and the Play Store fling tests, the Red Magic fares much better than Huawei’s Kirin 970 powered ace and on par with OnePlus’ last year flagship killer. Interestingly, switching on the GameBoost switch on the side does not seem to make much of a difference here. However, in the following UiBench tests, this is not the case at all. Engaging this dedicated gaming mode seems to reduce the time needed to render each frame by around 50%, which is a substantial improvement, to say the least. Even in some of the most challenging tests like the Invalidate and the InvalidateTree tests, switching on the GameBoost switch resulted in a stark difference, with the phone dropping only 20% of the frames it used to drop with the GameBoost switch turned off.

However, for day-to-day usage, I think it is more than safe to say that we should be more concerned about how the Nubia Red Magic fares without switching on the GameBoost switch since this is how the phone acts for most of the time. Compared to its Snapdragon 835 peer, I think there’s only little to complain about. The Nubia Red Magic trails behind the OnePlus 5T ever so slightly, while both devices run circles around the Honor View 10 with the exception of a couple of tests where differences aren’t that noticeable. If you are all about the best performance you can get, then you will find yourself switching on that button on the right side most of the time, though you will be sacrificing a great portion of your battery by doing so.  

These results have sparked my intrigue to uncover what does this GameBoost switch change when turned on in order to significantly improve the performance. By capturing an HTML file using Systrace while running the Touch Latency test, my suspicions were confirmed. Flicking the switch biases most of the threads, more importantly, the Render thread, to be placed on the big cluster instead of favoring the little cluster initially, with only a few occasions where the Render thread is placed on one of the little cores. And instead of cramming the little cluster with as many tasks to process as possible, the phone makes more use of the multicore power it possesses. Those interested in delving into the nitty-gritty stuff can find all the data I gathered and analyzed linked below, as well as a link to cookie-butter, the open-source tool I used to gather the frame rate charts above, with a few enhancements of my own.

Gaming

Normally I would conclude my performance analysis here, proceeding to other aspects of the phone to review. But since this is a phone that heavily takes gaming into consideration, it is only fair to see if it delivers on its promises. I don’t call myself a hardcore mobile gamer, but I tried to be as challenging as I can ever be by installing one of the most popular titles, and that is PUBG. In order to be as stressful as possible, I downloaded this tool to max out all the graphics settings before doing any Ggamebench sessions. Of course, there can’t be a better occasion to light up the RGB light strip on the back than playing an FPS game.

Looking at the attached FPS graphs, we can see that this phone does have a lot of firepower at its disposal, keeping a nearly steady 40fps frame rate throughout the gameplay for a relatively long time, with no major hiccups or any evident stutters. Interestingly enough, switching off the GameBoost switch did not introduce any major regressions either, though it is only a little bit less consistent.

Thermals

As much as peak performance of any device matters, one aspect that often goes under the radar is how much of this peak performance will be sustained on the long run or processing a highly taxing task. Starting with ARM’s Cortex A73 architecture, we have been treated with an immense improvement in sustained performance over its preceding core designs, as witnessed in my previous review of the OnePlus 5T. In this section, I will be running  AnTuTu Benchmark 7.1.0, a fairly resource-intensive compound test, for 10 times with no time intervals in between, recording the score of each run as well as the temperature of the CPU and battery and the battery level after each run using CPU Float. To ensure there is no additional overhead induced by any other apps, all background services have been closed and airplane mode was engaged. The phone was left for enough time to rest before recording the initial metrics.

Looking at the table above, we notice a strange difference in the total score after the first run, compared to the OnePlus 5T which shares the same processor and RAM configuration. Switching on the GameBoost switch on the side though did give a substantial boost to the scores across all 10 runs, albeit at a cost of slightly more battery drain. However, the Nubia Red Magic was able to finish all 10 runs with little to no throttling either way, which is a good thing to boast when gaming is seriously taken into account. CPU and battery temperature increase was nothing out of the ordinary, but still not that much cooler than the OnePlus 5T. This makes me only look at the vents on the top as a cool design cue to reflect on the targeted customers, which I still greatly appreciate. A gaming gadget must look bogus. I have decided to take the opportunity to compare the Snapdragon 835 from Qualcomm with another chipset that adopts a similar core architecture: the Kirin 970. Looking at the scores we notice a strange pattern of inconsistency, with a comparable peak score to that of the OnePlus 5T. But when it comes to temperatures, there is a significant increase in both CPU and battery temperatures, which makes the phone a bit too warm at the end of the test. In fact, this is an issue I noticed most of the time after using the View 10 for a prolonged time.

One area where the Nubia Red Magic blows its contenders out of the water is battery life. While beating the OnePlus 5T was expected with the latter packing a significantly smaller battery, it was a bit of a surprise to see the Honor View 10 losing a lot more juice despite touting a similar battery capacity at 3750 mAh—only 50 mAh short of the Nubia Red Magic’s tanker. Only one conclusion can be made and that is the Kirin 970 is much less efficient than Qualcomm’s last year’s endeavors in the high-end space.

Make sure to stay tuned for the next part of the review, in which I will share my thoughts of the Nubia Red Magic as a regular device. As mentioned above, here is the link to the open source cookie-butter repository I used, as well as the Systrace files captured for those interested.

Feature-Image: GadgetMatch