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The RedMagic 9 Pro is a smartphone designed for gamers, with features like RGB lighting effects, a fan for active cooling, and touch-sensitive shoulder triggers.
But it’s also a phone that pairs high-end specs with an upper mid-range price tag, which could make it attractive for non-gamers as well. The phone launched in China in November, and now a global version is on the way. RedMagic says its new flagship will be available for pre-order worldwide starting December 27, 2023 with prices starting at $649 (or £579 in the UK, €649 in Europe, $13,999 in Mexico, or $4,569 in Brazil.
The starting price is for a model with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB of UFS 4.0 storage, but higher-priced models support up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
All models feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor plus a custom Red Core 2 Pro chip that’s described as a “dedicated gaming chip” that handles things like RGB lighting, haptic feedback, and audio processing.
The phone has a 6.8 inch, 2480 x 1116 pixel, AMOLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, a 960 Hz touch sampling rate, and support for up to 1600 nits peak brightness.
Other features include a 6500 mAh dual-cell battery with support for 80W fast charging, and a cooling system that includes a 22,00 RPM fan as well as “high thermal conductivity gel,” and copper and graphene materials to help dissipate heat and allow the phone’s hardware to run at full speeds for longer without the phone getting too hot to hold.
There are two rear cameras, a Samsung GN5 50MP primary camera with optical image stabilization and a Samsung JN1 ultra-wide camera, along with a 16MP under-display front-facing camera.
Customers in China also have the option of picking up a RedMagic 9 Pro+ with up to 24GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and a 165W charger. But it looks like international customers will be limited to the non-plus model, at least for now.
This phone will be amazing for emulation.
I’m pretty sold on this phone as my next phone. Everything about it looks great. I’m currently on a LG V60 which is still good, but it’s definitely aging fast and now might be a good time to upgrade it to this. I’ve been searching around for awhile for a flagship phone that’s both affordable, better than a Galaxy or iPhone, and has a headphone jack.
The plus model has 24GB of RAM
My goodness that is a lot for a phone. Can Android even take advantage of 24GB of RAM? I guess it could squeeze more performance out of a docked desktop mode situation, but surely not 24GB worth. Sounds good for “future-proofing” but how many Android updates would this thing get?
Well, if people start seeing things like “auto-caption” or “summarize this because I’m too dumb to parse it” or “read this for me because I can’t” or “summarize what I did today because I don’t feel like typing out my obligatory social media posts right now” as “basic features everyone should have”, or camera apps rely on larger and larger diffusion models to squeeze details that weren’t actually captured out of the camera, or people start looking at your funny if your background isn’t blurred in video calls, everything is just going to need more memory.
Oh right, I forgot something important. Since your RAM is used as VRAM, you’re going to be using a lot of it while playing a 3d game.
And this is a phone for games and all. They’re really not trying to market it for neural network use.
“My goodness that is a lot for a phone.”
It’s good for A.I. inference, if that’s your thing. I just read the gsmarena review of this. They make the dubious claim you can get up to 20 tokens/second with inference.
It depends on the model and which program you use. Just saying 20t/s without giving details is questionable. For example, Llamacpp is much faster than Koboldcpp, but I prefer Kobold for it’s UI.
Still. Up to 24GB RAM is pretty impressive for a phone. Too bad that particular model is only available to China customers. But even 16GB would be enough to run 8bit 13B models.