Speaker 1: This is the red magic seven gaming phone. And it's overkill in nearly every way, except for its $629 price. It's also a glimpse of future features. You'll see on Samsung phones and the iPhone. Everything about the red magic seven is designed to get as much graphics, performance and frame rate out of Android games. As you can possibly get. The 6 29 model starts with 128 gigs of storage paired with up to 12 gigs of Ram. The review unit I've been testing is 7 99 [00:00:30] and comes with 256 gigs of space and 18 gigs of Ram. And this is our first hint of overkill on the red magic to give you some perspective, the 800 galaxy S 22 has eight gigs of Ram.
Speaker 1: The phone includes the latest Snapdragon eight gen one chip, which is the same as what we see in the galaxy S 22 line and the one plus 10 pro. But the headline feature is the 6.8 inch Alet screen, which has a refresh rate of [00:01:00] up to 165 Hertz. That's actually the same as last year's red magic six, but is still blisteringly smooth and games I play that could take advantage of that. Like the mortal combat mobile game look, great phones like the galaxy S 22 ultra and iPhone 13 pro have displays that top out at 120 Hertz. For years. We've seen phones at various prices moving away from standard 60 Hertz screens. You could find 90 Hertz screens on phones, price as low as $250 like with the galaxy [00:01:30] eight, 13 5g, but 120 Hertz screens are still largely reserved for phones costing 500 or more.
Speaker 1: The red magic combination of 165 Hertz display and a $629 price tag hint at a future where even faster refresh rates screens can end up on even more phones, no matter the price. While this gaming phone showcases, it's 165 Hertz refresh rate. There are just a far fewer games that actually support anything beyond 120 or 160 frames. [00:02:00] It is a feature that is hard to see as a tangible benefit. Even a 90 Hertz display provides benefits like smoother text scrolling and animations when reading articles and moving between apps 165 Hertz is frankly beyond at least my I's ability to perceive smoothness, but with phones like the thousand dollars Moto edge plus already bringing 144 Hertz into a non gaming phone, it seems pretty likely that 165 Hertz could be what we see in future phones in years to come. If more phones adopt these [00:02:30] faster refresh rates, then there will eventually be more games in software that support them too.
Speaker 1: The red magic seven also touts a speedy touch responsiveness on its screen specifying that has a 720 Hertz multi finger touch sampling rate. Those are their words. What that 720 Hertz means is the screen is very responsive to taps while playing games. And that is a feature that could potentially have benefits beyond gaming. During my testing, I tried out both locally downloaded [00:03:00] games and game streaming over the stadia cloud service cloud gaming in general is notorious for lag under wifi and especially cellular connections. But the red magic's responsive screen created a noticeable improvement for logging all of my inputs. I was able to almost create combos in mortal 11 and while I'm still having issues with a fairly early level of marbles, Avengers controlling the Hulk, using the touchscreen on a cloud streaming version of the game. Wasn't one of them as more responsive screens, continue development, [00:03:30] perhaps they would also help with handwriting or drawing on a phone which outside of phones built for a specific stylist can still be rather challenging.
Speaker 1: And other than speed, I think how the red magic seven handles power, not graphics power like literal electricity could be something other phone makers should consider for flagship phones going forward. The red magic seven includes a 65 wat G fast charger in the box of the phone. It's not only a very fast charger. It's roughly the same size as my 19 wat [00:04:00] charging brick that I originally got with my pixel three, using the charger. I was able to recharge the phone from 0% to 98% in just over 30 minutes, which is partly pulled off using a dual 4,500 milligram per hour double cell battery. A similar technique is also used in the one plus 10 pro, which also charges at 65 Watts in the us. And as fast as 80 Watts in the international model, the phones charger also can bypass the battery to power the phone, which would also be nice to see come to [00:04:30] other phones, especially when your battery is otherwise dead.
Speaker 1: And you don't wanna wait it to charge up to three to 5% to use in the case of the red magic, it allows the phone to also keep the battery cool and extend its batteries lifespan by letting it run off the charger instead when available. So how do these benefits match up with the rest of the red magic seven phone, starting with my gaming tests while you can launch games like any other Android phone, the red magic includes a hardware switch in the top left that launches a gaming specific launcher. [00:05:00] Some games are automatically added to here when you download them. But if it misses a few games, you can also add them directly. When the red magic recognizes you were launching a game, the phone automatically starts its built in cooling fan and launches a number of software enhancements and a little stats window that shows you data like how many frames per second.
Speaker 1: The game is actually running at. You can also swipe in from the corners of the screen to select from different power modes and to change the refresh rate. There are also features for recording your gameplay [00:05:30] and then sharing to discord or other messaging apps. The side of the red magic also has a touch sensitive area that can act like a shoulder button and you can configure those buttons to tap a specific section of the screen for you. For example, an apex legends mobile, I set it up to shoot apex legends includes a variety of graphics and frame rate options. So I went ahead and cranked them up and the phone didn't appear to chug at all. Despite warnings provided by the game that the phone may need be paired up with a cooling system. This gaming performance [00:06:00] was consistent across other games. I tried, although more casual games, expectedly peaked at 60 frames per second.
Speaker 1: Like in me cart, depending on what you're playing the phone really could start heating up. In addition to using the cooling fan, which other gaming phones also have, the red magic includes a case in the box. So you don't have to hold the phone directly. The fan also kicks on while you're charging the phone to help keep things cool during its fast charging. I also liked how the fan of my review unit has a rainbow lighting [00:06:30] effect, which doesn't help with cooling things down, but it's still a nice touch. Other highlights are the dual stereo speakers, which were helpful when my hand covered one of the speakers while playing also the inclusion of a headphone Jack is always notable. The phone includes a 64 megapixel main rear camera, an eight megapixel ultra wide camera and a two megapixel depth sensor camera on the front is an eight megapixel camera.
Speaker 1: The rear cameras are fine and include a night mode for photography and video, cording it up to eight K resolution [00:07:00] at 30 frames per second, along with 4k at 60 frames per second, both the phone being so gaming focused, this likely isn't going to be the device to get, if you're hoping to take lots and lots of photos and video, I am surprised that the front facing camera though, isn't net 13 or 60 megapixels though, to help with live streaming. And perhaps this is one of the ways that the phone gets to its price. The phone runs on red magic OS 5.0, which is based on Android 12. This take on Android 12. Isn't my favorite. It initially places, all [00:07:30] of its apps on the home screen like iOS, but a few quick setting changes can bring back the app drawer. If you'd rather have that in place that said, I wouldn't be surprised if people who do get this phone, just load up their favorite Android launcher.
Speaker 1: Instead the launcher also defaults to the next word web browser, which again can be easily flipped, Chrome Firefox or any other browser that you prefer for most phone fans, devices like the red magic seven are a showcase of where the phone industry currently is. The phone is absolutely overkill from [00:08:00] the 165 Hertz refresh rate to the extra responsive touchscreen and all the different power options available for gaming. Yet, as long as some of these features didn't require a cooling fan, many of them could show up in future devices from apple, Samsung, Google, and others. If you wanna learn more about the red magic seven, check out my review on scene at LinkedIn the description. And would you want a gaming phone or are there features in this phone you would want in your next phone? Talk to me about that in the comments and for more guides like these, like, and subscribe [00:08:30] to CNET on YouTube.
