Why it matters: The Nubia RedMagic 6 series has already broken two smartphone records with a monstrous 18-gigabytes of RAM and a 165Hz screen with a 360Hz touch sampling rate. Its successor is here to take things up a notch, with improvements in performance, touch responsiveness, as well as a new active cooling system and under-display fingerprint sensor that's harder to fool.
After Asus landed its ROG Phone 5 on the market earlier this year, now it's time for ZTE's Nubia sub-brand to come up with a gaming flagship phone. That device is the RedMagic 6S Pro, and while it doesn't stray too far from the design of the original RedMagic 6, it does come with refinements and new tricks up its sleeve.
At the heart of the new RedMagic 6S Pro is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888+ 5G Mobile Platform, which is more than an overclocked Snapdragon 888 thanks to the integration of a new AI engine that offers 20 percent more performance. The chipset is paired with up to 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5 RAM and 256 gigabytes of UFS 3.1 storage.
However, that's not what makes this phone stand out among the myriad of Android phones available today. One of the unique features is a new ICE 7.0 cooling system that makes use of phase change materials to absorb heat quickly and slowly release it over time. It does this with the help of a small fan that also has RGB lighting if you choose to get a Red Magic 6S Pro with a transparent back.
The 6.8-inch AMOLED display can reach a brightness of up to 700 nits and supports the full DCI-P3 color gamut. It's the same 165Hz panel found on the RedMagic 6 Pro that's capable of 120Hz, 90Hz, and 60Hz modes, but this time the touch digitizer has a sampling rate of 720Hz – double that of the the previous flagship phone.
Nubia has kept the two shoulder triggers that run at a 450Hz touch sampling rate and have a response time of 2.2 milliseconds. There's now a new trigger on the back of the phone, which you can configure custom actions using RedMagic's tools. As of writing, the only games that support shoulder triggers natively are Genshin Impact and LoL: Wild Rift, while only Real Racing, Vainglory, and Dead Trigger 2 can run at the display's full 165Hz refresh rate.
An interesting new trick on the new phone is that the under-display fingerprint reader can also measure your heart rate. However, it's not for health monitoring purposes – the idea is to make it harder to fool the sensor, which is a welcome improvement.
Otherwise, the rest of the features are a carbon copy of what was available on the 6 Pro. The rear camera module features a 64-megapixel main shooter and a depth sensor, while the front camera has a more than adequate 6-megapixel sensor. The international 6S Pro model has a 5,050 mAh battery that can be fully charged in a little over an hour, while the Chinese model has a smaller, 4,500 mAh unit. If you need faster charging, Nubia also sells a 66-watt charger separately.
For those of you hanging on to wired headphones, there's a 3.5 mm audio jack on the top, and the USB-C port on the bottom supports Display Port for hooking up to an external display.
If you're interested in Nubia's latest gaming phone, you won't have to break the bank to get one. There are three configurations with 12 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage for $599/€599/£519, 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage for $699/€699/£609, and a transparent 'Ghost' model for RGB fans that will go for $729/€729/£629.
All three models will come with Android 11-based RedMagic OS 4.0 out-of-the-box, and will start shipping on September 27. There's also a giveaway that you can enter here for a chance to win a top-end configuration along with a Gamesir controller.