nubia Red Magic 8 Pro review

Gorgeous 6.8-inch, 120Hz display

The display is definitely a highlight of the Red Magic 8 Pro. It's a spacious 6.8-inch flat panel with an 1116 x 2480 pixel resolution, 20:9 aspect ratio and around 400 ppi, which looks really sharp.

Let's start with brightness first. Nubia advertises 1300 nits of peak brightness for the panel, which could very well be true. In our testing, we measured 548 nits on the slider. The Red Magic 8 Pro has a brightness boost toggle, which resulted in a max of 821 nits. While not industry-leading, that's pretty good, and in practice, the Red Magic 8 Pro is bright enough to comfortably use outdoors.

The Red Magic 8 Pro has no shortage of color modes, with a total of five at its disposal. Vivid and Normal modes aim for the DCI-P3 color space and cover it nicely. Normal is a bit more color-accurate, while Vivid aims to deliver more OLED "pop" and noticeably has more saturated primary channels. The Natural preset aims for the narrowed sRGB color space. It covers it well enough and is decently color-accurate.

Display color modes

However, if you really want the best possible color accuracy in either DCI-P3 or sRGB, you should opt for one of the two appropriately named modes. With just slight white point tuning, both are perfectly accurate toward their respective color spaces.

The Red Magic 8 Pro lacks any official HDR certification, which is kind of a shame given the capabilities of its display and the fact that it is a 10-bit panel. On a decoder level, the phone reports support for both HDR10 and HLG and no support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. We are happy to report that the highest Widevine L1 certification is on board and that services like Netflix were more than happy to offer FullHD streams to saturate the phone's resolution.

HDR decoding • DRM • Netflix playback capabilities

On a side note, we did have to sideload the Netflix APK since the Red Magic 8 Pro appears to not be whitelisted in the Google Play store by the developers at the time of writing the review. Hopefully, that will change when the phone launches.

High refresh rate handling

The Red Magic 8 Pro has a 120Hz refresh rate. The panel can work in one of three refresh rate modes - 60Hz, 90Hz or 120Hz. Rather intuitively, these are also the names of the three refresh rate modes available in the settings menu.

Refresh rate settings

60Hz mode is self-explanatory, while 90Hz and 120Hz modes act like "limiters", which is to say that 90Hz or 120Hz, respectively, will be the highest refresh rate the phone runs at. Generally, the OS enables the high refresh rate mode for as long as you are interacting with the phone. Leave the phone alone for a couple of seconds, and the refresh rate drops to 60Hz - a simple, effective and widespread approach to handling refresh rates nowadays.

The Red Magic 8 Pro also appears to detect full-screen video playback, which also drops the refresh rate down to 60Hz to conserve energy. Most apps and the phone UI generally run at the high refresh rate mode as long as you are interacting with them.

Red Magic 8 Pro running in high refresh rate mode

Gaming behavior is slightly different. When the Red Magic 8 Pro detects that you have launched a game, typically, it kicks on the cooling fan, pins the display refresh rate to the maximum value you have set in settings, and keeps it there for as long as the game is running. So even if you don't interact with the phone for a few seconds, the refresh rate won't suddenly drop down to 60Hz. That's exactly the kind of behavior we would like to see.

High refresh rate gaming works great

We tried a few games that we know can render at over 60fps, and all of them worked great on the Red Magic 8 Pro. High refresh rate gaming generally works great and as expected on the phone.

Battery life

The Red Magic 8 Pro has a large 6,000 mAh battery at its disposal. That and a modern 4nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which should be very well optimized and efficient.

Indeed, the phone scored an excellent 131 hours of battery endurance in our proprietary test. It managed great numbers all around, including for on-screen and off-screen tests.

We have absolutely no complaints in the battery department. The Red Magic 8 Pro handles itself admirably, even under sustained synthetic or gaming loads for prolonged periods of time. You can rely on it for great battery life.

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 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

For charging, our international Red Magic 8 Pro unit supports up to 65W charging of its eight-cell 6,000 mAh battery. The charger it ships with is a 65W USB Power delivery unit, rated at outputs of 5V@3A, 9V@3A, 15V@3A and 20V@3.25A. The keen-eyed among you might have noticed that 5V output is not a standard voltage for Power Delivery. That is achieved using Programmable Power Supply (PPS), which the charger is rated for at outputs of 5V-11V@5A and 5V-20V@3.25A. That is pretty specific, so you might want to hold on to your factory charger to get the highest possible charging speeds on the Red Magic 8 Pro.

The review documentation we received alongside the Red Magic 8 Pro also mentions Qualcomm Quick Charge 5 support on the phone, but we doubt that it can deliver anywhere near the max 65W of juice.

It is interesting to note that by default, the Red Magic 8 Pro is set up to enable its built-in fan when you connect the charger. It's a nice touch, though with its fairly-reasonably 65W, our international variant never actually got overly hot during charging. Plus, having the fan on or off doesn't seem to affect the actual charging speed.

The Red Magic 8 Pro is a pretty speedy charger. It went from dead all the way up to 56% in just 15 minutes with its bundled 65W charger. Thirty minutes resulted in almost a full charge and brought the battery up to 92%. A full charge took just 37 minutes in total - well under the 43 minutes number nubia is advertising. So, top marks for charging speed overall.

Speakers

The Reg Magic 8 Pro has two full-featured five-magnet speakers. One at the bottom facing down and another one at the top. The latter doubles as an earpiece and has openings both facing up and forward. Nubia has also worked with DTS to bring DTS:X Ultra audio optimization to the Red Magic 8 Pro.

These speakers offer excellent performance. We measured loudness at 24.1 LUFS - exactly what the Black Magic 7S Pro scored and a little quieter than the 7 Pro. Still a good enough showing to earn a "Very Good" score.

Like its predecessor, the Red Magic 7 Pro can get screechy and distorted at max volume. 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.