Nubia's RedMagic 6 breaks two smartphone records: a 165Hz screen and 18GB of RAM

[midian182]

What just happened? Nubia’s RedMagic 6 series is on the way with specs that make it unique among the current crop of smartphones. Not only does it boast the largest amount of RAM ever seen in a handset—18GB—but the device also has a 165Hz display, another first.

Both the RedMagic 6 and RedMagic 6 Pro boast the latest Qualcomm 888 SoC, 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED screen, and 165Hz refresh rate, the fastest available on any smartphone today. They also feature a single-finger touch sampling rate of up to 500Hz, or up to 360Hz with multitouch for improved gaming responsiveness, 400Hz capacitive shoulder triggers, and a triple-lens rear camera setup: a 64MP main cam, an 8MP ultra-wide shooter, and a 2MP macro camera. Plus the 8MP selfie camera.

The standard model has a 5,050mAh battery with support for 66W charging, taking 38 minutes for a full charge. It’s also got an 18,000rpm internal fan, liquid cooling, and a full glass rear body.

The Pro model replaces the single battery with two cells that total 4,500mAh, allowing 120W charging so the phone can be juiced to 50% in just five minutes or fully charged in 17 minutes. The fan speed gets an increase, too, up to 20,000rpm.

There’s also a transparent “Dao” special edition that comes with a glowing fan and boosts the RAM up to 18GB, a mobile record. We’ve heard that the Asus ROG Phone 5 will come with the same amount, but Nubia’s beaten it to the punch.

Elsewhere, there’s an optional dual-fan, dual-TEC (thermoelectric cooling) clip-on cooler, and software optimized for Tencent apps such as WeChat. The company’s Solar Core gaming software comes preloaded, promising improved game response speeds, FPS, and network latency. The Chinese gaming giant was a collaborator on the phone.

The RedMagic 6 Series is available to order in China now. The basic model starts from 3,799 yuan (about $590), with the Pro model starting from 4,399 yuan (about $680). Those who want the Dao transparent version will pay either 5,599 yuan (around $865) for 16GB/256GB storage, or 6,599 yuan (around $1,120) for 18GB RAM/512GB storage.

An international release is coming. RedMagic will announce global launch plans and prices on March 16th.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/88833-nubia-redmagic-6-breaks-two-smartphone-records-165hz.html

 

[Uncle Al]

Interesting ..... and the price structure is "better"; hopefully more phone makers will follow this one.

 

[Farkinell]

How come the iPhone gets away with 6GB of ram whilst having industry leading performance whilst android is pushing 10, 12 and even 18 in this monstrosity.

Is it all simply down to software optimisation? What are people (or the OS) doing on a phone to warrant that much ram?

 

[Puiu]

How come the iPhone gets away with 6GB of ram whilst having industry leading performance whilst android is pushing 10, 12 and even 18 in this monstrosity.

Is it all simply down to software optimisation? What are people (or the OS) doing on a phone to warrant that much ram?

Not really why it has that much RAM. It's a phone for games. You have no issue with 6GB of RAM on normal Android phones. I actually take issue with Apple being cheap as hell and not offer more RAM on such expensive phones.

 

[Shadowboxer]

How come the iPhone gets away with 6GB of ram whilst having industry leading performance whilst android is pushing 10, 12 and even 18 in this monstrosity.

Is it all simply down to software optimisation? What are people (or the OS) doing on a phone to warrant that much ram?

Apples iOS can dump active applications into ROM if the RAM fills up. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, with applications being able to stay out of active memory or just using a few megabytes whilst not in use. It’s a pretty closely guarded secret at Apple as to how it works.

Android by contrast has to load all apps into active memory. So if you want to keep an app open at where you left it you need enough RAM to hold it there.

It’s lazy and costs consumers money as they are buying devices with far more RAM. I also don’t believe it can be fixed as there are Android devices with either no ROM or very slow ROM.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Way too complicated. We've seen phones with cooling fans and giant RAM allowance. Didn't work then, won't work now.

I actually think it would make more sense to have a phone with a metal back and a liquid "casing filler" which allows the components to transfer the heat to the liquid and then radiate it through the entirety of the metal back (or glass back if it's determined glass would be better at heat dissipation).

 

[MarkHughes]

Apples iOS can dump active applications into ROM if the RAM fills up.

They write to ROM ? Read Only Memory ? Are you sure this is what they do ?

 

[VitalyT]

It’s also got an 18,000rpm internal fan, liquid cooling

In a mobile phone? Ok. That's where I stopped reading.

 

[Toju Mikie]

Apples iOS can dump active applications into ROM if the RAM fills up. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, with applications being able to stay out of active memory or just using a few megabytes whilst not in use. It’s a pretty closely guarded secret at Apple as to how it works.

Android by contrast has to load all apps into active memory. So if you want to keep an app open at where you left it you need enough RAM to hold it there.

It’s lazy and costs consumers money as they are buying devices with far more RAM. I also don’t believe it can be fixed as there are Android devices with either no ROM or very slow ROM.

Personal preference, but to me, the iPhone app management is too aggressive. I've had moments where the phone was doing a file transfer on one app, but then I open a game and the the app doing the file transfer "suspends", or "saves the state" of the app, which will cancel the file transfer anyway, and I have to start it over. At least on my Android phone, I know that the app(s) will still actually run in the background, even though it will slow the phone down and drain the battery a little faster.

The 165hz screen is nice for this phone, but I can't imagine using the full 18 GB of RAM. Maybe there can be an option for the phone to put an entire application on RAM (like a RAM drive or something) for instant load times. That's a way I could see the RAM being used.

 

[DZillaXx]

How come the iPhone gets away with 6GB of ram whilst having industry leading performance whilst android is pushing 10, 12 and even 18 in this monstrosity.

Is it all simply down to software optimisation? What are people (or the OS) doing on a phone to warrant that much ram?

Marketing.

These phones don't need it and really only make the device more expensive. Sadly there isn't many games on both android and iOS worth playing. Why buy a gaming phone when there isn't any games worth playing.

Years ago I hoped we'd see better games come along to the android and ios world, but they are still mostly crap time wasters.

 

[Shadowboxer]

They write to ROM ? Read Only Memory ? Are you sure this is what they do ?

No sorry, they write to storage. Not sure why I put ROM tbf. It works a bit like the Windows page file I hear. I don’t know the systems intimately enough to tell you the difference but I do know that Android has to keep apps in active memory and that’s why they have so much and why when using all that RAM your battery drains faster.

 

[Nobina]

It’s lazy and costs consumers money as they are buying devices with far more RAM. I also don’t believe it can be fixed as there are Android devices with either no ROM or very slow ROM.

It’s lazy and costs consumers money as they are buying devices with far more RAM

Good thing we have Apple then, their devices are cheap due to having less RAM.

 

[Shadowboxer]

Good thing we have Apple then, their devices are cheap due to having less RAM.

Cheap for Apple to make yes!

 

[Shadowboxer]

The 165hz screen is nice for this phone,

Why? I’m not a phone gamer so maybe that’s why. But are you really that responsive with fingers on a touch screen for a high refresh rate to make a difference? What games are people playing to use this?

 

[Toju Mikie]

Why? I’m not a phone gamer so maybe that’s why. But are you really that responsive with fingers on a touch screen for a high refresh rate to make a difference? What games are people playing to use this?

It's more for the smooth scrolling and animations

 

[PenguinJoe]

How come the iPhone gets away with 6GB of ram whilst having industry leading performance whilst android is pushing 10, 12 and even 18 in this monstrosity.

Is it all simply down to software optimisation? What are people (or the OS) doing on a phone to warrant that much ram?

It is a hardcore gaming phone. Hence the hunger for ram and cooling.

 

[Adi6293]

How come the iPhone gets away with 6GB of ram whilst having industry leading performance whilst android is pushing 10, 12 and even 18 in this monstrosity.

Is it all simply down to software optimisation? What are people (or the OS) doing on a phone to warrant that much ram?

This is down to two factors

A: Marketing, bigger number means it "must" be better

B: Apple is cheap and chooses to put less ram into their phones to make more profits

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

I like how the standard version of the phone charges at faster than my laptop, which pulls 65W.

 

[franticfrosty]

Why 18GB, why not 18.5GB

 

[Farkinell]

It is a hardcore gaming phone. Hence the hunger for ram and cooling.

Isn't 'hardcore gaming' and 'phone' a bit of an oxymoron? What apps out there require more ram than most gaming desktops, let alone elaborate cooling?

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Utterly pointless. I cna manage fine ona phone with 3GB of RAM. Surely 8GB would be enough for "le EPIC GAMURZ" phone. 18 is just utterly pointless in a mobile device today.

What work SHOULD be going into is optimization of apps and background processes. Most android phones use stuipid amounts of RAM for basic things like UI. A phone shouldnt be idling with 1.7GB of RAM usage. Optimizing their forks of android would do far mroe to making daily life better then just shoving more ram in.

 

[arrowflash]

Utterly pointless. I cna manage fine ona phone with 3GB of RAM. Surely 8GB would be enough for "le EPIC GAMURZ" phone. 18 is just utterly pointless in a mobile device today.

What work SHOULD be going into is optimization of apps and background processes. Most android phones use stuipid amounts of RAM for basic things like UI. A phone shouldnt be idling with 1.7GB of RAM usage. Optimizing their forks of android would do far mroe to making daily life better then just shoving more ram in.

The ram amount is just for marketing hype, I'd say - by the time it actually becomes useful, the phone will already be long outdated. I'm pretty sure even the most demanding mobile games are optimized for phones with 8 GB ram tops, since the market for phones with more ram is tiny.

How fast is the ram on this phone anyways? For a gaming phone, I think it would make more sense to see 12 GB or 8 GB of blazing fast ram than an insane amount of standard ram.

Also, a phone without physical buttons (other than "capacitive triggers") isn't really a gaming phone in my view. Give me a Sony Xperia clone, please.

 

[Wereweeb]

Apples iOS can dump active applications into ROM if the RAM fills up. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, with applications being able to stay out of active memory or just using a few megabytes whilst not in use. It’s a pretty closely guarded secret at Apple as to how it works.

Android by contrast has to load all apps into active memory. So if you want to keep an app open at where you left it you need enough RAM to hold it there.

It’s lazy and costs consumers money as they are buying devices with far more RAM. I also don’t believe it can be fixed as there are Android devices with either no ROM or very slow ROM.

That's called a Swap partition, and every OS can support one, including Android. ROM is, as the name says, Read-Only Memory, you can't write to it. What you're thinking of is the Flash memory, or storage drive. That, you can write to.

Moving apps to the Swap means it's slower to load them than if you were to keep the apps in memory, so having more RAM is a good thing if you multitask on your phone. I.e. you can market "More RAM = better phone".

As for the original question: "Android phones" offer from 1GB to 18GB of memory, because it's an ecossystem. The typical mid-range phone has 4GB to 8GB, high-end phones typically start from 8GB.

This here is a ridiculous gaming phone, as the title and entire article suggests. So they put 18GB in the phone because... they could. And also, in a sense, they traded that RAM for all this free press.

 

[Wereweeb]

Samsung typically offers flagship phones with 12-16GB because one, well, they can. They once sold smartphones with 600 PPI displays to differentiate themselves. And the extra RAM must cost like, ten quid for them. When the smartphone costs over a thousand dollars, there's no reason not to add that extra RAM and ensure the user rarely has to tap into the slower swap partition. Instead of, you know, cutting corners on your literal Flagship. Thirdly, Samsung has DeX, which means it's much easier to run many apps at once, which means using more RAM.

 

[duckofdeath]

Apples iOS can dump active applications into ROM if the RAM fills up. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, with applications being able to stay out of active memory or just using a few megabytes whilst not in use. It’s a pretty closely guarded secret at Apple as to how it works.

Android by contrast has to load all apps into active memory. So if you want to keep an app open at where you left it you need enough RAM to hold it there.

It’s lazy and costs consumers money as they are buying devices with far more RAM. I also don’t believe it can be fixed as there are Android devices with either no ROM or very slow ROM.

This is, factually incorrect on almost every point. Android, just like any other post 1980's operating system, can move any "active" app to storage as needed. You can even pick and decide which should, can or can't.
The main reason for the need for more RAM is because of higher resolution. Active graphics doesn't work particularly well with memory swapping, for reason unknown to science.
The reason Apple "gets away with" much lower RAM is because they've just dialled that swapping up to 11. For better or worse. The worse is things like, you randomly losing whatever you're writing in one app if you "multitask" to another app.
There are benefits with offering less RAM in a phone. It draws a lot less power and it maximizes profits. The latter part is one of the main drivers for Apple.