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Red Magic 3 Review: Wait For The Respawn…

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Red Magic 3 Review: Wait For The Respawn…

Gaming smartphones didn't really exist as a category roughly 2 years ago, and were termed as a fad when they did. Companies such as Razer and ASUS inaugurated this segment but their offerings were quintessentially first-generation products and failed to take off. Fast forward to now, and we have a lot more players in this segment, with more rounded packages.

Red Magic is the gaming arm of Nubia, and has solely focused on gaming smartphones when they began operations last year. With the Red Magic 3, they aim to be the most over-the-top gaming smartphone around. Here's what my month-long adventure with the Red Magic 3 was like.

Right out of the box, this phone was love at first sight. I prefer my phones to look unique and interesting, and for a person that changes his phone multiple times a month, no other phone has turned as many heads in public, as the Red Magic 3 did. The design is every bit extra as these images may indicate, with a sharp angular metal chassis with red accents, cooling vents, and a frickin’ RGB strip along the spine. If this doesn’t scream “gamer”, I don’t know what does.

I loved the design and the attention it got me.

That design infatuation slowly began to wear off when I actually began to use the phone. As fancy as the Red Magic 3 looks, the ergonomic experience was sub-par owing to the extreme size and weight of the phone. A 6.7-inch display is already one of the largest ones on smartphones currently, and the sizeable bezels around all the sides, especially the chin and the forehead, gives this phone an extremely large footprint.

The phone is huge!

One-handed usability was boss-level difficult, and each drop will chip off the coat of paint from the cold black metal back. As annoying as the bezels were, they provided a much-needed place to rest my fingers and grip the phone while in landscape orientation. Though, I need to mention that your pinky fingers are going to pain after extended gameplay, holding the 215 grams of the phone.

Being a gaming phone, it makes sense to ship with a huge display, and the Red Magic 3 does that like a boss. We get a 6.7-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 2340 x 1080 (19.5:9 aspect ratio) running at a smooth 90Hz refresh rate. Gamers know the importance of refresh rate over resolution, and the differences are very evident in games that support it. Pokemon Go, for example, which isn’t a very heavy game, runs smoother than any other game I have seen, or on any other phone.


But in terms of panel quality, the Red Magic 3 left me unsatisfied, primary because of the colour rendition. One would expect an OLED display to exhibit saturated colours and deep blacks, but both were not up to the mark. The entire display seemed to have a greenish tint to it, making every bit of content look washed out. In their defence, high refresh rate OLED panels are very difficult to manufacture, and only OnePlus has been able to do a good job with one, on the OnePlus 7 Pro. For a display this big, even the palm rejection could have been a bit better.

The main reason why anyone would be interested in the Red Magic 3 is for the gaming experience. I’m glad to report that the Red Magic 3 is the best smartphone for gaming, period. Let me explain how. The performance by the Snapdragon 855 flagship chipset is known to be a great performer for heavy gaming, but the Red Magic 3 also has a dedicated cooling system and an internal cooling fan (a first for any smartphone). As gimmicky as these may seem, the thermal performance was actually very stable with no apparent throttling. You can actually hear the fan and feel the warm air exhausted from it if you bring your hand close enough to the vent on the right.

The air vent

Moving over performance, the big display is a joy for gaming, with my fingers covering a much smaller portion of the display. The dual stereo front-firing speakers are a rare inclusion in today’s age of bezel-less smartphones, and something that won’t take long to notice. Apart from games such as PUBG where stereo audio makes a difference, simpler tasks like streaming videos will not require you to cup your palm around the speaker as the sound is naturally thrown towards you.

Talking about hardware additions, the Red Magic 3 also has two shoulder buttons on the right side, and lie exactly where your index fingers would rest during gaming. These can be mapped to trigger any action in the game via the Game Space. I expected it to just be for bragging purposes, but I got used to it really fast and it gave me a clear advantage over other players who are stuck with using only two thumbs while I could do four. I really miss this addition each time I play PUBG now.

The right shoulder button

The Game Space can be entered by sliding the red-coloured switch on the top left, from where you can view all your titles, adjust game settings, map the shoulder triggers, change performance modes, toggle RGB lighting, and most importantly, force some games to run at a constant 90Hz instead of varying.

Game Space

Lastly, they’ve done a great job with the haptics and the vibration motor with really powerful feedback during gaming. The best way for me to describe this, using another PUBG reference, would be that getting shot at with a shotgun felt like someone was hammering at the phone from the inside, and the metal was transferring the reverberation through the surface.

Your fingers won't cover the entire display

It is often said that better peraphernalia or gear won’t make you a better gamer, but the Red Magic 3 is a stark outlier to that, and will actually improve your gaming prowess.

There are few phones that can match the Red Magic 3 on the hardware front and the software package can only be termed as half-baked. For starters, it’s a pretty vanilla skin (except for the Game Space) with close to no additions. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like a bad use of such amazing hardware and could have been optimized better. The notification tray cannot be pulled down using gestures which is crucial for a phone this big. Some parts of the UI, especially in the camera seem like they’ve been blindly translated from Chinese and are thus in broken English. Similarly, gestures for navigation would have helped one-handed usability easier, are also nowhere to be found. This is the bit where their inexperience in the smartphone sector was visible.

Navigation buttons

Other things that I’m hoping they fix over time via software updates is the camera performance. Cameras on most gaming phones are an afterthought, and the Red Magic 3 does little to change that axiom. We get a single 48-megapixel f/1.75 sensor on the back, and a 16-megapixel one on the front.


The camera interface seemed lacking basic design sense with even the most basic of toggles being difficult to find. When you actually find them, you will be disappointed by the narrow selection of shooting modes.

Poor dynamic range; the sky was always blown out
Incorrect blue tint
Dynamic range in low light
Macro shots
Soft selfies

The results were pretty average, and rather inconsistent. The shutter lag could make me lose quite a few shots, and the tendency to pull the shutter speed in low light scenarios made for shaky images in low light. There’s no dedicated night mode either.

The camera can also record videos in 8K, but the footage is beyond useless. In perfect lighting conditions, the resultant clips were slow, laggy and had terrible colours, and I think I could count the number of distinct colours in the clip. In regular shooting resolutions, the footage was usable, but the lack of stabilisation, poor shifting between exposure levels and slow focusing made the resultant videos unlike what one would expect from a premium smartphone.

Selfies were also pretty soft in all but the brightest of conditions. The only bit I enjoyed about the camera experience was that the tap to focus marker resembles a crosshair.

Camera interface

The Red Magic 3 has a 5,000 mAh battery, one of the largest ones in this class. The battery life was indicative of that, with light use getting me through two days with over 8 hours of screen-on-time. With heavy use including 2 hours of PUBG, calls, push notifications and loads of social media, I would still achieve over 6 hours of screen-on-time. It’s a beast when it comes to battery backup. Thankfully, the charging times weren’t crazy long as one would imagine for a battery this size. It can go from nil to full in about 100 minutes which is impressive.

Battery stats on days with over 2 hours of PUBG

The Red Magic 3 also has a headphone jack, as all gaming phones should have. Most recent phones are water-resistant at least till a certain level, but I’m worried that the Red Magic 3 won’t be owing to the extra openings and vents all around. The network reception was also below average for me. The fingerprint scanner is heaxagonal in shape, and felt a little too recessed.

Fingerprint scanner

So where does that leave us with this crazy bold “god of gaming” smartphone? As you must have made of this review, there are few phones that can match the Red Magic 3 in terms of muscle or gaming experience. But the good stuff ends about there, and the general consumer may want more than just a gaming machine at a price of INR 35,999. Is that general consumer the target audience of Red Magic? Probably not…

A great gaming phone that excels as a regular phone is as existent as Half Life 3. But how close Red Magic has been able to come to that is commendable, especially considering how young they are. For anyone who’s not a smartphone eSports player, I implore you to wait for the next iteration, which hopefully fixes the shortcomings I mentioned.

Images: Aakash Jhaveri and Dhawal Bhanushali / Mashable India

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