RedMagic 10 Pro Hands-On: Powered Up for Gaming, but a Frustrating Phone

The RedMagic 10 Pro is a $649 gaming phone with higher-end hardware, and it offers a great value in terms of what you get – at least on paper. When I played Dead Cells, I used the phone's gameplay mode to remove the frame cap and toggle higher resolution graphics, and it still played at a solid 90 frames per second. Mortal Kombat Mobile instantly ran at the full 144fps, the highest the screen supports. And while Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is an older title, the Android version controls easily, thanks in part to the responsive 960Hz touch sampling rate -- but I still recommend using a controller. Games like the aforementioned Dead Cells look vibrant and smooth; however, after a few days of testing the RedMagic 10 Pro, it's otherwise largely hit-or-miss in terms of being a good phone.

The RedMagic's beefy specs include a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, whose fast speeds I first tested with the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro. The RedMagic 10 Pro supports 100-watt wired charging speed to power up its giant 7,050-mAh battery, both of which we rarely see in phones that sell in the US. I look forward to testing the phone's battery and recharging speed.

The 10 Pro builds upon the RedMagic 8 series' design including an under-display front-facing camera that provides an uninterrupted 6.85-inch canvas for games and videos. This year's RedMagic phone has a display that supports a 144Hz refresh rate, which should be more than sufficient for smooth animations and scrolling, even if it isn't the highest refresh rate I've seen on a gaming phone. The 2,688x1,216-pixel screen has a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. RedMagic also has an internal cooling fan and a liquid metal cooling system that's normally seen in gaming PCs.

3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark

In the graphics and gaming-centric benchmark test 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, the RedMagic 10 Pro scored comparably to the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro which costs $551 more. The RedMagic also ranked slightly ahead of the Asus in the Geekbench 6.0 CPU benchmark. So clearly RedMagic checks the box in terms of the phone's gaming prowess. It's just the 10 Pro's ability to be a decent phone that leaves me frustrated and disappointed.

Geekbench 6.0 benchmark

In my early testing of the RedMagic 10 Pro, I hit a number of hiccups with the software that tried my patience. Many of these issues are the same ones that I had with prior RedMagic phones. It's frustrating that there hasn't been much improvement.

The most glaring annoyance is the camera software that defaults to applying a watermark to all images, and makes disabling it extremely unintuitive. To turn it off, you need to open up the camera, tap the top-right arrow, then tap "More settings" on the top-left to then discover the watermark toggle. There's also a watermark option to turn off from RedMagic's Game Space menu by turning on its red physical switch, tapping your profile icon and then scrolling down to the option to turn off the "Red magic watermark." These menus also have inconsistent grammatical style, which I just find jarring inside of phone software.

RedMagic also makes a number of changes to the Android experience that I find get in the way. For instance the Google News feed is initially replaced by "Z-Board," which I quickly turned off because it reads to me like built-in advertising even though it bills itself as "Recommended news and service info." It also defaults to its own browser app, but that's easier to change to another option like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

And while it is cool to use a phone that has an uninterrupted screen, the under-display camera takes bad photos. For instance, in this selfie from the 16-megapixel shooter, the background is very washed out, even after I used a microfiber cloth to clean the "lens" section of the screen multiple times. The RedMagic 10 Pro's rear cameras include a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 2-megapixel macro camera.

RedMagic does not have a great record for software and security updates, and that continues with the 10 Pro. The RedMagic 10 Pro will get one major software update, three years of security updates and two "generations" of upgrades to the RedMagic UI. This is very low by 2024 standards. Asus is providing two years of major software updates for its ROG gaming phone, and five years of security updates by comparison. And it's no where close to the seven years of software and security updates that we're now seeing on all of the Google Pixel phones released in 2024 and Samsung's Galaxy S24 line.

Who is the RedMagic 10 Pro for?

The RedMagic 10 Pro is not meant to lure people away from more traditional flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy series. But its lower price point does make it one of the most affordable phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which beats all of the 2024 phones that CNET has tested in terms of sheer gaming performance. Its "all-screen" display makes it a powerful media machine, especially if you connect it to a gaming controller when playing more console-level games on it. The big battery and fast charging speed further raise its appeal as a pocket-size gaming device. For the more ROM-experienced crowd, you could potentially flash this device to suit your needs better than RedMagic's existing software experience. 

The handheld gaming market is also becoming increasingly competitive, which raises more questions around who the best audience for a gaming phone like the RedMagic 10 Pro is, especially when the device's functionality as a phone is its weak point. A Steam Deck -- while too big to fit in one's pocket -- offers direct access to many PC games at a lower price than the RedMagic, even if the Steam Deck itself isn't also a phone. The Asus ROG Phone 9 series is an easier recommendation as both a capable phone and a gaming device, but its starting price is a much higher $1,000. 

But with an early bird sale date of Dec. 12 followed by a general on-sale date of Dec. 18, the RedMagic 10 Pro will be especially notable for being one of the first phones to hit the North American market with the latest Snapdragon processor inside. And perhaps for early adopters that are also gaming enthusiasts, that's enough to jump in. But most people will likely be better off waiting for the first wave of flagship Android phones that will also include this processor, or should perhaps consider the more expensive Asus phone if gaming's a priority alongside a more organized software experience.

First published Dec. 3, 4 a.m. PT.

Update at 9:01 a.m. PT with additional details on the camera, the camera's watermark setting and software support.