Red Magic 8 Pro Review: Hyper Performance in a Beautiful Body

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While the Red Magic 6 and Red Magic 7 didn’t have much groundbreaking difference in design between them, the Red Magic 8 and the Red Magic 8 Pro definitely does. First and foremost, the body of the phone this time has a symmetrical, more cubic look as opposed to the curved edges of its predecessors. Whether you like this will depend on your preferences, but the phone still looks modern, and the details on the back push it into the realm of the futuristic.

Whichever model you go for, the phone is really beautiful, and it’s more or less built like a tank. It’s made from a combination of aviation-grade aluminum and Gorilla Glass 5 on the front, and a mix of metal and undefined glass on the back. There’s no talk of the body bending, and I have a feeling that, even weighing in at 230 grams, it could survive a few falls without many issues.

For the screen, Red Magic 8 Pro boasts a a 6.8-inch flat panel with a 1116 x 2480 resolution, a 20:9 aspect ratio, and around 400 PPI pixel density. It’s a truly beautiful display that looks really sharp, has a rich color profile and excellent contrast. The brightness might not be on par with some competitors, but it goes up to a maximum of 820 nits, which is pretty good, and certainly bright enough to use the phone outdoors in broad daylight. Furthermore, it’s appeal is once again boosted by a high 120Hz refresh rate which does wonders for both gaming and simple UI navigation.

What’s under the hood is predictably top of the line. You have the super-performing Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Adreno 740 GPU, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. These are flagship grade specs and they translate to amazing performance where you won’t have issues running any apps, games or anything in between. Almost every component is near or at least twice as fast as the previous generation and it means the Red Magic 8 Pro is one of the best performing Android phones currently on the market.  

As for the cameras, this time around you have the 50 MP main camera from Samsung, an 8MP 120-degree ultrawide, and a 2MP GalaxyCore macro camera. The improvement when compared to previous Red Magic phones is most evident in the main snapper which now takes really great daylight images with lots of detail and realistic colors. The other cameras on the back are nothing to write home about and they provide an average experience at best. The selfie camera which is once again under the display is improved over its first itteration but is stil quite underwhelming, especially once the lights go out.

The huge 6000 mAh battery will easily enable a pure around 5-7 hours gaming session, while for a more average use case you can expect almost two full days before needing to recharge. It’s a great result, further boosted by the fact that the included 65 watt charger takes the phone from 0 to a 100% charge in just over 30 minutes.

The gaming centric nature of the phone is further evident in the software. The Red Magic 8 Pro runs a Red Magic 6 OS on top of Android 13. Visually, it’s mostly the same old affair as the previous generations of Red Magic OS with a clean but gamey UI with plenty of customization features. In terms of cosmetics, this entails stuff like widgets, wallpapers and the always on display. There’s of course the Red Magic Game Space and a couple of other surprises that can turn the Red Magic 8 Pro into a literal little gaming console. But for that, as well as more details on the design, cameras and performance – be sure to check out our full video review.