nubia Red Magic 7S Pro review

LArge 120Hz OLED with no cutouts

The nubia Red Magic 7S Pro features a large, 6.8-inch AMOLED panel with 10-bit color output and can go up to 120Hz refresh rate. In other words, it should be the same exact panel used in the previous Red Magic 7 Pro handset. This also means that HDR10 content is supported and has HLG certification at hand. For improved gaming experience and responsiveness, the panel supports up to 720Hz touch sampling rate with several fingers. That's pretty fast, although it will likely go unnoticed by inexperienced mobile gamers.

Sadly, despite the advertised 600 nits of maximum brightness, the panel can reach only 449 nits in either manual or auto mode. Even since Red Magic 3, which is the first handset from the series that came into our office, nubia is yet to implement some auto brightness boost. We think 449 nits are not enough for comfortable outdoor use. Even text is pretty hard to read on a bright sunny day.

Color accuracy isn't great either; if you use the default Vivid mode, that is. However, opting for the sRGB color preset will grant you superb color accuracy with average dE2000 of just 1.1. Even whites and grays don't have that blue-ish tinge.

As far as the under-display camera goes, it easily goes unnoticeable in everyday scenarios. You can't see it in menus and apps, especially if you opt for dark themes. You can only spot a tiny cutout under the glass at a certain angle.

HRR control

As before, the automatic refresh rate control needs some additional work. The only scenario in which the system reverts back to 60Hz is when you are watching a full-screen video. Most other phone makers reduce the refresh rate when the screen is idling, and you are not interacting with it.

Most of the apps and all the system menus run at the maximum refresh rate. There could be some exceptions, though, as we tried Instagram and Chrome, for example, and they were locked at 60Hz.

Battery life

The Red Magic 7S Pro draws power from the same 5,000 mAh battery, but we are happy to report a massive improvement in battery life compared to all previous Red Magic versions, not just the 7 Pro. But since there's no change in the display either, we would assume that some under-the-hood changes in the software and the more efficient Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 have contributed the most. We saw a considerable gain in the standby runtimes, which is in line with the Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro.

Screen-on times are substantially better as well. The video and web browsing tests returned good results, although not excellent. Still, our overall score of 110h is worthy of a flagship phone, especially a gaming one.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test is done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns, check out our all-time battery test results chart, where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

The nubia Red Magic 7S Pro for the global market is once again shipping with a 65W charger working over the Power Delivery protocol. That's not to say the device charges slowly, quite the opposite, actually. It's just that the Chinese version is shipping with a speedier 135W brick.

Anyway, the 65W charger pumps up about 97% of the battery back in the first 30 minutes of charging, while a full charge takes 41 minutes. Yep, to a full "charged" state, the handset takes about 11 minutes for the last 3%. That's considerably slower than the previous version of the phone, and we are unsure what's the issue here. There's also the possibility of nubia changing the charging curve for the 7S Pro.

30min charging test (from 0%)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  100%
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  100%
• iQOO 9 Pro
  100%
• iQOO 9
  100%
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  99%
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  97%
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro (66W)
  75%
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  75%
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  71%

Time to full charge (from 0%)

Lower is better

• iQOO 9
  0:16h
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  0:18h
• iQOO 9 Pro
  0:21h
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  0:28h
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  0:38h
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  0:41h
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  0:42h
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro (66W)
  0:53h
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  1:03h

Speakers

The handset features a standard stereo speaker setup with a full-fledged speaker at the bottom and one that doubles as an earpiece at the top. The sound at the top comes from the earpiece grille and the opening at the top side of the frame. And as we already noted in our previous review, the speaker setup's main disadvantage is the imbalance.

The bottom speaker is much louder than the top one. In fact, the latter sounds borderline muffled. Overall loudness has gone down a bit since 7 Pro and is now -24.1 LUFS, which is still quite loud and is enough for "Very Good" score.

Our initial recommendation of keeping the volume a few clicks away from maximum still stands. At higher levels, the highs and mids start to ring, and distortion is easy to notice. Once you turn the volume down a bit, though, the overall quality is great. The sound is full, the bass is apparent, and the vocals are nice and clean for the most part.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.