Redmagic 10S Pro gaming phone review: I tested world's most powerful handset
It is a global leader in this category, offering similar specs as the Asus ROG Phone series but at much more affordable prices.
Late last year, Redmagic 10 Pro was the first phone to market with the blazing fast high-end Snapdragon Elite chip that has powered all of the main 2025 Android flagship smartphones.
Now comes Redmagic 10S Pro which is powered by an even more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Leading Version chip and enhanced ICE-X cooling.
The amazing new handset offers stellar features such as a 144Hz no-notch display and a gargantuan 7,050mAh battery with support for up to 80W fast charging.
I've been testing it for several weeks and here are my experiences…
Redmagic 10 Pro was one of the most powerful phones you could buy so the boosts in performance on 10S Pro are relatively minor compared to the jump from the 9 Pro to the 10 Pro.
The Leading Version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite system-on-a-chip (SoC) is responsible for the step up, and this is because it overclocks the CPU and GPU. The two Orion Prime cores now run at 4.47GHz, up from 4.32GHz on the 10 Pro, while the six performance cores are the same. The Adreno 830 GPU, meanwhile, runs at 1.2GHz here, up from 1.1GHz on the predecessor.
The gaming powerhouse now offers configurations with up to 24GB RAM (which is insane for a phone) and 1TB of superfast UFS 4.1 Pro storage. The model I reviewed included 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. The RAM is the latest LPDDR5T, which offers more bandwidth than the LPDDR5X used in the 10 Pro.
In benchmark tests on Geekbench 6, AnTuTu 10 and 3DMark, the 10S Pro scores higher marks than the 10 Pro and all the current competition including big rival Asus ROG Phone 9. On the graphically demanding 3D Wild Life Extreme test, for example, the phone achieves the best score I've seen. The improvements over the 10 Pro are most noticeable when gaming, which is music to the ears of most people who will buy this handset. In everyday use, the phone handles high frame rates and graphics settings in AAA games easily.
Redmagic 10S Pro naturally runs the firm's latest OS based on Android 15 which comes with Google Gemini for an AI-enhanced gaming experience.
One of the key Redmagic features that ordinary flagship smartphones don't give you is designed to ensure you can enjoy marathon gaming sessions without any throttling of performance.
The firm does this with clever cooling systems and on Redmagic 10S Pro it introduces an advanced 10-layer ICE-X cooling architecture featuring Liquid Metal 2.0 with the sort of impressive thermal conductivity you normally find in high-end gaming PCs.
Redmagic had added liquid metal to the 10 Pro. It is an alloy that melts at a low temperature and has high thermal conductivity. It's often used for gaming PCs and laptops and this is because it performs better than a typical thermal compound.
On the 10S Pro there is 30 percent more liquid metal in direct contact with the chip and this guides heat to a vapour chamber that spreads the heat around. On top of this, for gaming you can enable the 23,000rpm fan which sucks in cool air from outside and pulls it over the chipset before expelling warm air out the other side.
Like all of RedMagic's handsets, the 10S Pro includes a suite of gaming optimisation software that lets you adjust settings such as the power consumption of games, the option to force titles to run in vertical or horizontal orientation, and customisable controls that include using shoulder-button-style sensors or a virtual joypad with buttons.
On top of all this you get a 6.85in 1.5K AMOLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate, 2,000 nits of peak brightness, and a super responsive touch sampling rate of up to 2,500Hz and multi-finger 960Hz capabilities. It's one of the best looking screens on any phone currently, gaming or otherwise.
I love how you can personalise the Redmagic 10S Pro fan's RGB lighting with up to 15 colors, adding a distinctive aesthetic to the device's sleek transparent and industrial-looking metal chassis. Redmagic 10S Pro, like its predecessors, is a contender for best smartphone design.
My review unit came with a charging brick that had Chinese plug pins but I tested it with other charging bricks and found it could recharge at the 80W speeds claimed.
The rear camera system includes a 50MP wide angle camera, a 50MP ultrawide and a 2MP camera that the firm said enhances photo quality in certain modes. What I love about the camera's lenses is they are flush with the phone's body and do not have a bump. Only Google Pixel 9a comes close to being as flat as this unique device.
The firm said the phone will get three years of OS upgrades and three years of security updates which, while not matching the likes of Apple and Google, is decent support in the gaming phone arena.
There is no better-spec immersive gaming smartphone experience on the market right now than Redmagic 10S Pro.
Redmagic 10S Pro is on sale at eu.redmagic.gg and costs from €649 (for the 12GB/256GB configuration) up to €999 (for the 24GB/1TB configuration). You can also buy Redmagic 10S Pro on Amazon.
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Irish Daily Mirror
7 days ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
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Irish Examiner
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