Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: playing fast and loose with the term ‘new’

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro: Two-minute review

The title of ‘Best gaming phone’ has arguably never been more up for grabs than it is in 2024. While Asus turned out a solid pair of smartphones with its ROG Phone 8 series, it also took several steps towards the mainstream that arguably diluted the appeal of those devices to gamers.

As the only other company regularly turning out gaming phones, Nubia is best poised to take advantage of this change in priorities from the category leader. The Nubia Red Magic 9 Pro, which was released earlier this year, was something of a bargain, offering top-end performance, built-in fan cooling, and physical controls in a mid-priced package.

Now the Red Magic 9S Pro is here, offering incremental improvements over the 9 Pro for the same price. We could probably just copy and paste our Red Magic 9 Pro review in at this point, and most of what we said about that phone would still be accurate.

There’s a strong argument to be made that this is a needless update, with a nigh-on identical flat-edged design (complete with mappable capacitive trigger buttons), the same 6500mAh battery with 80W wired charging, and the same dual 50MP camera system backed by a 2MP macro sensor.

Even the chip that runs the show is pretty much the same, albeit this ‘Leading Version’ of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is clocked slightly higher than before. There’s either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, depending on the variant you opt for.

To accompany this slightly overclocked component, Nubia has stuck in an upgraded ICE 13.5 cooling system, which adds a new frost cooling gel into the equation.

Unfortunately, Nubia’s decision to stick with the same basic design means the Red Magic 9S Pro has the same flaws as its predecessor. While it’s nice to have an unimpeded 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED display, Nubia’s implementation still means that you get a terrible in-display selfie camera.

You also have to put up with Nubia’s less-than-brilliant custom Android UI. It’s much better than it was only a couple of years ago, but if you’re after an elegant day-to-day experience, you’re better served spending similar money on one of the best mid-range phones on the market.

Despite the lack of anything really new, however, the Red Magic 9S Pro somehow finds itself in a straight shootout with the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro as the best gaming phone on the market. Given its clearer focus on gaming, as well as its superior value proposition, it might just scrape the win.

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: price and availability

• From $649 / £579 / Australian customers can buy from Red Magic’s global store in USD
• Early-bird offer from July 23 to July 30, 2024

The international version of the Red Magic 9S Pro will be available from July 23, 2024. For its first week on sale, an early-bird offer will be running that enables purchasers to secure a $30 / £30 discount.

There will eventually be four color/storage variants on offer, starting with the entry-level Sleet model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $649 / £579. The Cyclone and Snowfall models – both of which ship with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage – cost $799 / £709.

The fourth Frost model won’t hit shops until mid-September 2024, and will be another entry-level option, with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $649 / £579.

That pricing is identical to the Red Magic 9 Pro – all that’s different is the addition of the extra entry-level Frost option.

• Value score: 5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: specs

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: design

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• Gorilla Glass 5 front and back, aluminum frame
• Dead-flat shape
• 520Hz capacitive shoulder buttons
• Dedicated gaming mode switch

With this being an S-series device, the Red Magic 9S Pro looks and feels nigh-on identical to the Red Magic 9 Pro before it. It’s exactly the same size (164 x 76.4 x 8.9mm) and weight (229g), which means you’re dealing with a phone that hits Galaxy S24 Ultra levels of unwieldiness.

This is one of the most angular phones you’re likely to find, with flat surfaces all around. Even the camera module is integrated into the Gorilla Glass 5 back, while the Gorilla Glass 5-coated front doesn’t exhibit so much as the slightest hint of curvature.

The thick, flat frame is formed of aluminum, which gives the phone a solid feel, and this vast rim houses more points of interest than you might be accustomed to. Most of these are located on the right edge, where you’ll find a pair of 520Hz capacitive buttons (with integrated LED lights) that can be mapped to controls in many games.

These buttons flank one of two vents for the integrated cooling fan, a long volume rocker, a nicely tactile circular power button, and a dedicated gaming mode switch that boots the phone into Nubia’s gaming UI.

The top edge of the phone, meanwhile, houses a 3.5mm headphone jack, which I’d suggest is an essential inclusion in any serious gaming phone. The opposite edge houses a USB-C port, but there’s no secondary charging port on the longer side, as we’ve seen on older ROG models (but not, alas, the ROG Phone 8).

Those two shorter edges also house the phone’s stereo speakers, which isn’t the most gaming-friendly of decisions. It’s generally better to have these be front-firing, as it’s too easy to block them with your hands when you’re holding the phone. The output is extremely loud and clear, but it lacks the controlled nuance and depth of more expensive phones.

The rear of the phone adopts the same kind-of-transparent design as the 9 Pro. I say ‘kind-of-transparent’ because if you look closely, precious little of the phone’s inner workings are actually exposed here – there’s a symbol depicting the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ‘Leading Version’ chip and some vaguely circuit board-evoking sections, but only a window showing the cooling fan seems genuine.

The most impressive part of the Red Magic 9S Pro design is on the front, where minimal bezels and the lack of a notch result in a 93.7% screen-to-body ratio. Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily make for the best gaming experience – we’ve already discussed the benefits of front-firing speakers, and it’s always handy to have something to hold onto as well – but it certainly looks impressive.

• Design score: 3.5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: display

• Large 6.8-inch screen
• FHD+ resolution, 120Hz refresh rate
• BOE Q9+ luminescent material
• Under-display selfie camera

Without wishing to sound like a stuck record so early in the review (believe me, there’s more to come), the Red Magic 9S Pro display is identical to that of the Red Magic 9 Pro. That is, it’s a large 6.8-inch OLED screen with a 2480 x 1116 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.

That’s not the fastest screen on a gaming phone – the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro hits 165Hz – but given that relatively few mobile games will even support frame rates of up to 120fps, this is verging on being a non-issue.

Nubia stepped up the vibrancy with the 9 Pro screen, and the 9S Pro benefits from the same BOE Q9+ luminescent material. Translation: the colors are particularly punchy, and those concerned about a faithful video playback experience will want to dial things back to the more muted ‘Soft’ mode.

In peak conditions, this screen is capable of hitting 1600 nits. With auto brightness turned off and the brightness cranked up to the max, I recorded a top brightness of 447 nits – again, very much in keeping with the 9 Pro.

As already mentioned, one of the most striking things about this display is that it’s completely unimpeded by a front-facing camera. Aside from the likes of the Sony Xperia 1 VI, most modern phones lump you with a notch of some kind, but the Red Magic 9S Pro has an in-display selfie camera to preserve that pristine canvas.

• Display score: 4/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: cameras

• 50MP main with OIS this time
• 50MP ultra-wide, 2MP macro
• 16MP in-display selfie camera still terrible
• Up to 8K video

Guess what? Nubia hasn’t changed the Red Magic 9S Pro camera set-up one jot. Which means it remains a secondary concern, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s owned a gaming phone before.

You get the same 50MP Samsung GN5 as we’ve seen in the past few models, which is actually a decent enough component – if not a particularly fresh one. It was the sensor that led the way back in the Galaxy S22 days. This is backed by OIS and a 7P lens, meaning there are seven plastic elements.

The Red Magic 9S Pro turns out reasonably sharp and vibrant shots in good lighting, although Nubia’s color science does punch colors up somewhat. The night mode shots I took didn’t turn out particularly great though, with a weird grainy texture to the skies that suggests a processing issue.

Indeed, these night shots didn’t look as good as the ones I took with the Red Magic 9 Pro earlier in the year, which perhaps points to a software issue. Hopefully, an update will clear this up.

There’s also a 50MP Samsung JN1 ultra-wide sensor here, but it doesn’t turn out particularly good results. There was often a massive disparity in the clarity and tone between these two main sensors, with the ultra-wide turning out much dimmer, murkier snaps.

The video specs are pretty solid, with the phone’s flagship processor enabling up to 8K/30fps, 4K/60fps, or 1080p/240fps. The footage I captured seemed steady enough, though panning around 180 degrees on a sunny day led to some slightly clunky exposure adjustments.

If there’s one big casualty of Nubia’s decision to go with an all-screen front, it’s the 9S Pro’s 16MP under-display selfie camera. Selfie shots are truly abysmal, as they were in previous models. Detail, exposure, and dynamic range are worse than even a modern affordable phone with a regular front-facing camera.

• Camera score: 3/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: camera samples

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Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: performance

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• Slightly faster Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip ‘Leading Version’
• 12GB or 16GB RAM of LPDDR5X RAM
• 256GB or 512GB UFS 4.0 storage
• Some concerning throttling issues

Nubia finds itself in a bit of a tricky position with the 9S Pro, because Qualcomm hasn’t released its customary ‘Plus’ chip update. This means that the fastest chip available remains the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which already powered the Red Magic 9 Pro. Awkward.

The solution, it seems, is to effectively ‘do a Samsung’ and use a slightly overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Nubia calls it the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip ‘Leading Version’, but it’s essentially the same chip with a performance core that runs to 3.4GHz (rather than 3.3GHz) and a GPU that runs to 1GHz (rather than 900Hz).

If that sounds like a minimal upgrade, well, it is. Indeed, with the same 12 or 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM as before, the regular range of CPU and GPU benchmark results I obtained turned out broadly the same as the 9 Pro.

Of course, that still means that the Red Magic 9S Pro is one of the fastest phones on the market. It’s more than capable of running even the most advanced games on top graphical settings at fluid frame rates, though so is any other flagship Android phone or iPhone from the past couple of years.

There is one point of concern here, and it relates to sustained performance. Nubia claims to have improved the 9S Pro’s cooling system, with an ICE 13.5 set-up that renders the phone 1.5 degrees cooler than before.

In practice, however, the Red Magic 9S Pro seems less stable than its predecessor. Running a couple of the 3D Mark Stress Tests (Wild Life and Solar Bay), which are 20 consecutive minute-long intensive GPU workouts, the results were surprisingly variable. They never got much higher than 80%, suggesting a fair degree of throttling is in play.

That’s a decent enough score for a regular phone with only passive cooling, but it’s well short of the high–90s scores I was getting with the 9 Pro. Even the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro can hit the low-’90s, and that phone doesn’t have a built-in cooling fan.

Given the nature of the hardware, this would seem to be either a software issue or a problem with that higher-clocked chip. Hopefully a swift update can fix it, as this isn’t something you want to see in a gaming phone.

• Performance score: 4.5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: software

• Red Magic OS 9.5 on Android 14
• Ugly UI, but it works
• Powerful Game Space dedicated gaming UI

The Red Magic 9S Pro gets Red Magic OS 9.5 layered on top of Android 14, and it offers a broadly familiar experience. From a pretty sticky start, Nubia’s Red Magic OS UI has worked its way to being half way passable. It’s no longer the mess of oversized fan widgets and poorly translated text that it used to be.

Let’s not be in any doubt, though, that this isn’t a particularly appealing UI. The wallpapers have that tiresome ‘gamer’ aesthetic about them – all neon flourishes, metallic surfaces, and sharp angles, like a close-up shot of a Transformer’s clenched bicep.

There’s still a charmless Browser app, which also doubles as a charmless news feed app, and the Booking.com app still comes preinstalled for some reason. Still, none of these tedious elements is exclusive to Nubia’s custom UI these days.

In general use, Red Magic OS 9.5 is just fine to use. The home screen isn’t flooded with too many pointless apps. Even the home-brewed Goper app is justifiable if you’ve invested in one of Nubia’s accessories.

Everything runs smoothly, app switching is snappy, and unlocking the phone is a swift and relatively painless process. I didn’t get any of the sort of glitches that can occasionally be seen in Red Magic UIs, including the previous version.

As always, Nubia’s Game Space UI is a big feature here. Activated by a physical hardware switch on the side of the phone, it serves as a launching point for installed games, as well as a means for customizing fan, CPU, and GPU settings. You can also tweak screen sensitivity settings here, as well as adjusting screen ratios on a game by game basis.

Another aspect of this is an in-game UI, accessible with a drag from the side of the screen, which lets you do things like map those air triggers to particular controls. Being able to assign aim and shoot to specific buttons makes games like Warzone Mobile way better to play.

The Red Magic 9S Pro also supports up to 120fps wireless PC projection, now given the name ‘Z-SmartCast’, though I was unable to put this to the test.

In short, the Red Magic 9S Pro’s software is as clean, stable, and powerful as we’ve seen from Nubia, though there’s still loads of room for improvement. I still far prefer the elegant Asus approach as seen in the ROG Phone 8 Pro, which offers users the choice of a more custom UI or one that’s closer to stock Android.

• Software score: 3.5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: battery life

• 6,500mAh battery
• Clears a full day of intensive use with ease
• Fast 80W wired charging

Nubia is stuck with a 6,500mAh dual-cell battery for the Red Magic 9S Pro, which is just peachy. That’s way larger than your average non-gaming phone battery, and is even more capacious than the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro’s.

Like the Red Magic 9 Pro, this phone has the potential to last two days when used moderately. On one typical day of fairly intensive usage, with 5 hours 30 minutes of screen on time, I was still left with 44% left in the tank.

Naturally, given the phone’s gaming focus, this extra capacity is really intended to get you through a full day even when you indulge in an intensive gaming session or two. The Red Magic 9S Pro is more than up to the task here.

You still get 80W charging straight out of the box, which is another area that hasn’t improved from the 9 Pro. It’s not quite as swift as it might seem, thanks to that larger-than-average battery. I was able to get a full charge in a little over 45 minutes, which is broadly in line with the Asus ROG Phone 8 family.

Unlike the Asus ROG Phone 8, you don’t get wireless charging here. That’s not typically a feature that hardcore gamers are looking for, however. They’re more likely to be pleased by the 9S Pro’s ability to run directly off the wall charger when plugged in, without going through the battery. That’s potentially better for the battery, not to mention mitigating potential heat buildup while gaming.

It would have been nice to have also had that secondary USB-C port on the opposite edge to the Air Triggers, though, which would have made for a more comfortable charge-while-you-play experience.

• Battery score: 5/5

Should I buy the Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: also consider

The Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro is a great-value gaming phone, but there are still some excellent alternatives to consider.

Asus ROG Phone 8
The Asus ROG Phone 8 isn’t as cheap as the Red Magic 9S Pro, but it’s far nicer to use as a phone day-to-day. Besides a more mature design, it’s got wireless charging and a reasonable camera.

Poco F6 Pro
Do you want to pay even less money for your gaming-ready phone? The Poco F6 Pro can run all the latest games very well indeed, but costs about £80 less than the Red Magic 9S Pro, and is more pleasant to use day to day. Mind you, we haven't reviewed it yet.

How I tested the Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro

• Review test period = 1 week
• Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
• Tools used = Geekbench 6, GFXBench, 3DMark, native Android stats, bundled Nubia 80W power adapter

First reviewed: July 2024