The international model of the RedMagic 9S Pro gaming phone unveiled on Tuesday is a mild update to the RedMagic 9 Pro from earlier this year, but the phone comes with several software features that offer more customization options for Android gamers.
The $649 (£579) RedMagic 9S Pro starts with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, along with a top-of-the-line 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 camera, for example, so there’s no hole-punch or notch in the display, and the screen is uninterrupted for gaming.
RedMagic says that the area of the display housing this camera has improved “translucency” to make for better selfies than previous RedMagic phones with the feature, but the photo quality from these types of cameras still can’t match up to handsets with a more traditional notched front-facing camera setup. The rear cameras, consisting of a 50-megapixel main shooter, aren’t housed in a camera bump, and instead sit flush with the rest of the phone’s body.
To make gaming on the 9S Pro easier, RedMagic introduced a new version of its cooling system, which features frost cooling gel alongside an internal fan spinning at 22,000 rpm. In addition to being functional, the fan also features RGB lights for a bit of flair. According to RedMagic, this setup results in a CPU core temperature drop of up to 19.5 degrees Celsius while gaming and an increase in cooling efficiency of 20%.
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The RedMagic 9S Pro is available in frost, sleet, cyclone and snowfall colours.
The RedMagic 9S Pro brings several new ways to customize your gameplay, including the ability to set the aspect ratio on a per-game basis. This means you can run a game at 4:3 for a more retro experience, or 16:9 for widescreen. You can also force a game to run in a vertical or horizontal orientation, whether or not it was actually designed for that screen style. This can be a useful tweak depending on what you’re playing, but it can mean reordering important buttons and HUD elements.
And if you lock your phone while using RedMagic’s Game Space launcher (a menu that looks more like a gaming console than traditional Android phone home screens), the always-on display will show stats about your games.
Like the RedMagic 9 Pro, the 9S is powered by the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, has touch-sensitive “shoulder button”-style sensors, and a display with a 2,000Hz touch sampling rate. The latter spec is considerably more sensitive than the 720Hz rate seen on the Asus ROG Phone 8 ProEnglish: but both are very responsive displays, which should help with tapping on-screen buttons for certain games. Also returning from the RedMagic 9 Pro is a 6,500mAh battery with 80-watt fast charging (which RedMagic says will last 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 are known for being high-spec monsters at lower prices than flagship phones like The Samsung Galaxy S24they usually have some other quirks with their versions of Android. When I reviewed RedMagic phones In the past I often had to change the default internet browser because RedMagic chooses one other than Chrome. Or I had to disable a watermark that is automatically applied to photos.
These are all quirks that are easily fixed, and people who are better at customizing Android to their own tastes with launchers and emulators could find a lot of value in the kind of hardware RedMagic delivers for the price. While I’d have to test the RedMagic 9S Pro to see if that holds true again, it’s not historically the kind of phone you’d want to use straight out of the box.
The RedMagic 9S Pro will be available for purchase on the RedMagic website from July 23rd and will be available in the colours sleet, frost, snowfall and cyclone. These are all different shades of white, grey or black.
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