Nubia Red Magic Review Part 2: How does it fare as a smartphone?

Last week, we reviewed the Nubia Red Magic’s performance and how well it fared as a dedicated gaming device. But, unlike a Nintendo Switch, it can do much more than gaming. Let’s see how it fares as a smartphone.

Audio

 

You can’t release a gaming smartphone without paying some serious attention to the audio department. And at a minimum, Nubia has done just that. Right off the bat, the Red Magic scores high on the wired headphones experience. Yep, it has got the much-appreciated headphone jack mounted on the top. Not only that, Nubia has chosen to bundle it with a standalone dedicated DAC with DTS-HD support to enrich the whole audio experience. Audiophiles are definitely going to appreciate this phone’s audio capabilities more than I do. Those who have invested in wireless headphones are not left out either. As a standard feature of Android Oreo, all codecs are natively supported, including the much appreciated, top-tier LDAC codec.

As far as the speaker goes, it falls in the “good enough” category. It’s a single mono speaker mounted on the back, which may sound disappointing at first. Surprisingly, it cannot be muffled as easily as you might expect. The speaker resides in one of the red-tinted slits situated on the edge of the bottom left angular curve on the back. While playing in landscape mode, you can easily avoid blocking the speaker while holding the phone in a comfortable position. In fact, I think this position is far more convenient than the traditional position of most mono phone speakers at the bottom. Still, I wouldn’t call it the ideal immersive experience for gaming. Certainly, a front-facing speaker recessed in the bottom bezel would be more suitable, let alone making the earpiece double as another speaker. The speaker itself gets incredibly loud with enough fidelity and rich clarity with very minimal distortion at high volume levels, which could make up for the inconvenience of its placement. Placing the phone on its back will not block the speaker. But, the sound coming out of the speaker might suffer from slight distortion, particularly in the mids and the highs, as the sound resonates. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just something to bear in mind as this may put some people off. It’s not the speaker’s quality to complain about, rather its placement on the back, especially when there is a sizeable chin at the bottom.

Camera

Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of this particular phone’s camera is that cool red hexagonal protruding cutout. And if you look close enough—and stop gazing at that RGB strip for a moment—you will find the glass protecting the LED flash on top is bearing the same hexagonal pattern. Pretty cool and fashionable to say the least. Sadly though, the same cannot be said about the hardware lying beneath. The Nubia Red Magic is rocking a 24MP 1/2.8” Samsung sensor, which translates to a pixel size of 0.9µm, sitting behind a wide f/1.7 lens with PDAF support. No fancy dual-camera setups here, just a single shooter and an LED flash lying on top. Aside from Samsung’s whole ISOCELL branding, I think the word “old-fashioned” perfectly sums up the hardware. Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much from this phone’s camera—gamers tend to turn the blind eye to cameras anyway, or that is what gaming smartphones’ manufacturers think. I doubted the camera would perform well beyond perfect lighting conditions.

But before taking a look at how this phone’s camera perform, let’s have a look first at the camera app. Despite the barren software running on this phone, double pressing the power button still takes us to the default camera app out of the box. The layout is pretty familiar. Swiping horizontally takes you through different camera modes labeled on the bottom slider while at the top you can toggle Flash, timer and HDR modes as well as going through various filters and the camera’s settings. There’s not that much going on in the camera app. It’s pretty simple just as the camera hardware it controls. Maybe the leftmost “Camera Family” mode is the most unfamiliar aspect, which has several other modes with equally weird fancy names.

Despite the unconvincing camera specs, I took the Nubia Red Magic around to see how good this camera is. In daylight, there isn’t much to complain about to my surprise. Decent colors and acceptable details retention left a smile on my face—I won’t lie, this tiny pixel size set the bar really low. But my initial fears were then proved right as soon as I challenged it a little bit. Dynamic range was not so great and it was really difficult for the camera to preserve any fine details. One thing that was a little bit frustrating is the slow process of capturing an HDR photo, where the phone takes a couple of seconds to process the captured photo before permitting me to take another photo. And if I exit the camera app by any means, the captured photo is not saved. I won’t have much problem to wait for a while—I used to install the ported Gcam mod on my OnePlus 3 and it used to take more than just a couple of seconds in some situations. But when you consider the end result, this longer-than-desired wait is far from justified. Blown out highlights, smeared details, you name it. And once the sun goes down, the lacking hardware starts to rear its ugly face.

You can check out all my sample photos in full size here.

Switching to Selfies isn’t really good either. Most of the time it will blow out the sky and clouds behind. Otherwise, the photo will be extremely dark. Overall, there isn’t much to write home about when it comes to shooting stills in less than ideal conditions.

Surprisingly, I have found shooting videos a little bit more enjoyable experience. Shooting 4K videos in plenty of light is very decent with no major artifacts spoiling the footage. Stabilisation isn’t that great though, but that was not a problem for me. Shooting 4K video at night, however, wasn’t that great. The camera often hunts for focus, and once it faces a backlit object or a screen, it just can’t handle it at all.

Battery life

What would be the benefit of all that sheer power if the phone won’t last long enough? That’s certainly a question that Nubia has strongly considered when designing the Red Magic. With a 3800mAh juicer on board, I have had my expectations set high for a very good reason. And I am delighted to say that I wasn’t let down. On light usage, it can easily last the day and still have some juice to spare. And when I slightly pushed it to the ragged edge with a lot of photo shooting and navigation, I still managed to have more than 30% of the battery left by midnight. This is definitely a green light for those who don’t stress their phones too much.

But how does it fare when firing up one of the heavy games? Well, I don’t consider myself a hardcore mobile gamer. But the fact that I was able to get through the day with an hour spent on playing PUBG Mobile with all the settings maxed out is just astounding. An hour of PUBG would drain less than 25% of the battery, which is very impressive indeed. True, you won’t get the best gaming experience with that standard FHD LCD display—no jaw-dropping 120Hz displays here to drool over. But as far as battery life goes, this is not something you should worry about when using this phone, no matter what you throw at it. Oh, and I did have the GameBoost mode switched on while gaming. I imagine you could even squeeze out slightly more juice by switching it off.

The smaller things

Of course, with a price tag of ‘only’ $400 for a gaming smartphone, Nubia must have cut some corners. Among the most notable of them is the vibration motor. I found the haptic feedback a bit displeasing where it feels a bit too sharp, which felt very reminiscent of the similarly priced OnePlus 3. Call quality was quite acceptable for the most part, though signal reception left something to be desired. However, there were no major concerns about the GPS or the WiFi performance.

One more thing to note, this phone’s camera woes won’t be likely worked around by installing the famous Gcam mod. I have gone through a lot of the versions posted here and I am yet to find a variant to work properly with my phone. The only version I managed to get installed on my phone was based on the old Gcam 4.4 and it had its share of issues which were mostly cosmetic. Worth noting that I have not seen any significant improvements that I can share. Still, I haven’t given up on it yet, still experimenting with different settings. But that doesn’t mean that you should get your hopes up, you can’t work around a lacking hardware.

The Verdict

So where does that leave us with the Nubia Red Magic? Well, in my not-so-humble opinion, I think it’s a good deal for what it offers for the price. True, it might not have any cutting edge tech such as a high frame rate display or maybe shoulder buttons. And missing out on things like dual front-facing speakers might put off some people. But it manages to nail the essentials of a good gaming experience. It has a headphone jack, a sizeable battery, exceptional performance that shows in both synthetic and real-world tests, and it even manages to best out its rivals with its superbly designed gaming aesthetic without feeling too chunky. It even features an RGB light strip on the back—I don’t remember any other phone having that on the back. Perhaps the only thing that will leave a sour taste in your mouth is the lacking camera experience. Should Nubia have incorporated a more compelling camera hardware, this phone could have easily been one of the greatest purchases for nearly all consumers. But then this will most likely come with a steep increase in the price.

I would be lying if I said that this is the ultimate gaming device with all its flaws considered. But if you can’t shell out a lot of cash, and you need a good gaming device that happens to take some pics and do phone calls, the Nubia Red Magic is the best fit.

Feature-Image: GadgetMatch