REDMAGIC burst onto the scene years ago, but the brand has really started to push the envelope within the last few years, culminating in what is easily its best phone to date with the REDMAGIC 10S Pro. It’s a gaming phone that has everything you could possibly want. Fast charging, a fast processor, exceptional performance, and a long-lasting battery. Of course, the REDMAGIC 10S Pro offers a lot more than just those few traits. Its latest ICE Cooling system, for example, has done a great job at keeping the device at manageable temperatures so that my performance doesn’t drop off a cliff due to excessive heat during long gaming sessions.

Naturally, the shoulder buttons are present, as you’d expect them to be. These help deliver a couple of extra control options for players who want that sort of controller-like feel when playing games. Although they aren’t necessary, they enhance the mobile gaming experience, and it’s really nice to have them in shooters and action games. To top that all off, REDMAGIC doesn’t charge an exorbitant amount to buy into all this.

The base model of the phone retails for $699. That’s well under what ASUS charges for its flagship ROG Phone, which I still love, but there’s no denying that it’s expensive. REDMAGIC, on the other hand, is providing mobile gamers with a device that has a reasonable barrier to entry. In doing so, I firmly believe this is the gaming phone for everyone who wants a gaming phone. You aren’t really giving up much by buying into a less expensive piece of hardware, which isn’t always the case. All of that being said, does the REDMAGIC 10S Pro live up to its expectations? Is it worth your hard-earned money? Let’s dive into this review and answer those questions.

Specs

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Specs

Display
6.85-inch AMOLED

Refresh rate
144Hz

Display Brightness
2,000 nits max brightness

Chipset
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite

RAM
12GB/16GB/24GB

Storage
256GB/512GB/1TB

Dimensions
163.42mm x 76.14mm x 8.9m

Weight
229g

Rear camera
50MP + 50MP + 2MP

Front Camera
16MP

Operating System
REDMAGIC OS 10.5 based on Android 15

Battery
7,050mAh

Charging speed
80W

Ports
USB Type-C 3.2 Gen2, 3.5mm headphone jack

View Device Specs

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Ultimate Review: Hardware and Design

The REDMAGIC 10S Pro is much like the brand’s last two phones when it comes to overall design. That is to say, it hasn’t really changed much. It’s the same boxy slab with slightly rounded corners and an entirely flat back. No camera bump to make the phone wobble if you press it too hard on one side. Which, quite honestly, is very nice. Some might find it less than ideal that the company hasn’t switched things up, but let’s be honest, there’s no need for a new design when the one that already exists is perfectly suitable. REDMAGIC apparently feels this way as well, and I’m glad it didn’t feel the need to give this phone a new design for the sake of giving it a new design.

That being said, not everything is the same. REDMAGIC has made a couple of tiny adjustments that make this phone unique compared to its earlier-released sibling, the REDMAGIC 10 Pro, which we reviewed late last year. These are all minor tweaks that you could easily miss, but they are there. For example, the REDMAGIC branding has been moved from the right to the left edge, and the area surrounding the roman numeral 10 and LED flash has been slightly altered. The aesthetic lines etched on the back of the REDMAGIC 10 Pro are gone as well. These are all, as mentioned, incredibly minor tweaks that you wouldn’t really notice unless you sat both phones side by side and looked at them. Other than that, nothing has changed that is visibly noticeable.

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You still have the volume and power buttons on the right side, along with the slider that opens the Game Space Center. Additionally, you’ll find both ultrasonic shoulder triggers on this side as well. A vent is present on each side to help with airflow when you power on the phone’s cooling fan, and the charging port, as well as one of the two stereo speakers, is on the bottom. On top, you have the other stereo speaker and a 3.5mm headphone jack for the users who still love using wired headphones or earbuds.

Overall, it’s a good design that I find myself having grown accustomed to and have actually started to really like. My only complaint is that because the phone’s back is entirely made of glass, it smudges up and gathers fingerprints extremely easily, and these are not hard to see. In other words, I’m constantly wiping the phone down. The easy way around this is to slap the shell case on it that REDMAGIC tosses in the box with the phone. This has a nice smoked look to it, and it’s actually pretty nice. It’s not very protective, but it prevents the fingerprints from getting all over the glass, and that’s exactly what I was looking for it to do.

Build quality

The build quality of the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is as you’d expect if you’ve handled the 10 Pro: it’s great. No part of this phone feels cheap in any way. And that’s really quite astonishing when compared to phones that cost several hundred dollars more. It’s very clear that REDMAGIC is passionate about designing phones for gamers that look and feel as good as they perform.

While the glass can feel slick at times, if your hands tend to get sweaty during longer gaming sessions, this can easily be avoided with the case I mentioned. The metal frame, on the other hand, feels nice to the touch and rarely gets warm to a point where I would consider it uncomfortable. At the end of the day, the build quality of the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is solid.

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Ultimate Review: Display

The display on the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is nothing short of awesome, period. Thanks to its 144Hz refresh rate, visuals look smooth even during heated, fast-paced moments where you’re zipping around a map or unleashing a flurry of devastating attacks on your enemies. It’s a 6.85-inch screen with a 2,688 x 1,216 resolution and a 95.30% screen-to-body ratio. Essentially, it looks like it’s all display with almost no bezels, which is pretty good-looking when you’re playing games or watching movies.

The screen also gets incredibly bright thanks to its peak brightness of 2,000 nits. While this is most certainly not the brightest screen we’ve seen or used before, it’s still very bright and more than enough to keep you gaming. Even outside on a sunny day, you shouldn’t have much of an issue. Colors look great on this screen as well, gushing with vibrance to the point it almost seems like the colors are going to leap off the screen at you.

I found this to be a highly enjoyable display to interact with while playing games. I think any consumers who are considering this phone for their next device, or as a secondary device for mobile gaming, won’t be disappointed. Also worth mentioning is that because the price is starting at $699, it’s actually a viable option to get this as a secondary phone to use for mobile gaming only.

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Ultimate Review: Performance

Performance on the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is quite obviously going to be good. You likely already know this without reading what I’m going to say. However, I still find it important to go over the finer details for those who care to know just how good the performance is. With the market’s top chipset powering the computing and graphics (we’re talking about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite), there should be no doubt that this phone will perform well when it comes to games or any other task that needs lots of computing and graphics power.

Games run ultra-smooth, even when those games are titles like League of Legends: Wild Rift or Call of Duty: Mobile, where lightning-fast reaction times are an extremely important factor in (sometimes) determining your victory or defeat. It also starts with a baseline of 12GB of RAM, and that feels like plenty for mobile gaming. I tested the 16GB version and had zero issues with memory.

Benchmarks

Aside from playing a bunch of games on this device to see how it holds up over longer sessions with demanding titles, I also ran the REDMAGIC 10S Pro through the benchmark tests we do here for every phone and tablet we review. This includes 3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme Stress test, as well as the Geekbench 6 benchmark. Unsurprisingly, this phone shines in both benchmarks. Absolutely dominating many other devices, though sitting fairly close to those with the same chipset.

Starting with the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the REDMAGIC 10S Pro came out with a best loop score of 6,613 and a lowest loop score of 5,085. It also ended up with a stability of 76.9%. The stability isn’t bad, but it’s certainly not the highest. However, I have yet to enter a scenario where this has mattered. Still, it’s nice to know where the phone stands in this regard.

DeviceGeekbench 6 Single-CoreGeekbench 6 Multi-CoreGeekbench GPUREDMAGIC 10S Pro3,1049,52020,586REDMAGIC 10 Pro3,1299,62119,737Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra3,1289,79318,379

When it comes to Geekbench 6, I ran this device through both the CPU and GPU benchmarks as we do for all devices. For the CPU benchmark, the REDMAGIC 10S Pro had a single-core score of 3,104 and a multi-core score of 9,520. For the GPU benchmark, it had a GPU OpenCL score of 20,586, which is quite high.

Thermals

We also put the phone through a series of thermal tests to see how warm it gets during more common functions like gaming and video recording. We also check the thermals at the end of the Wildlife Extreme Stress Test to see how warm it gets after a longer, incredibly intense, graphically demanding session.

DeviceTemperatureREDMAGIC 10S Pro91REDMAGIC 10 Pro96.7Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra95.1

For the gaming, I booted up Zenless Zone Zero and played it for a little over an hour, then checked the thermals. It came out to exactly 91 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn’t too bad, honestly. It’s worth noting that this is with the cooling fan running. You can turn the fan off at any point if you want, but if you’re going to be playing games that are more graphically demanding, you should leave it on.

DeviceTemperatureREDMAGIC 10S Pro97.1REDMAGIC 10 Pro93.9Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra97.8

For video recording, I set the phone up to record a 4K video, and then I checked it at 10 minutes to see how the temperatures came out after that progression. After 10 minutes, it jumped up to 97.1 degrees.

DeviceTemperatureREDMAGIC 10S Pro127.4REDMAGIC 10 Pro112.6Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra104.1

Lastly, with the Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the temperatures came out quite warm. In fact, too warm. The Wildlife Extreme Stress Test is designed to push the phone to its limits. It runs a very graphically demanding video loop 20 times.

At the end of this test, the phone’s temperature rose all the way 127.4 degrees. This is much too warm to continue holding the phone, to say the least. While it can be done, it won’t be comfortable. Luckily, you’re very rarely, if ever, going to find yourself in a situation where the phone will get this warm. So far, no games have pushed the temperatures this high, not even after several hours. In short, the thermals are excellent, and REDMAGIC once again showcases that it knows what it’s doing here.

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Ultimate Review: Battery Life and Charging

With a gaming phone, you want to know that your device is going to last you as long as possible. Whether it’s because you want to continue gaming for as long as possible, or you simply need a phone for regular phone purposes after those intense gaming sessions. We test the battery life in a couple of ways to see how it stacks up, and I was unsurprised by how well the REDMAGIC 10S Pro performed.

In general daily use, I was able to get about 8 hours or so of screen-on time with the device. That’s with me getting up at about 7am in the morning, and I typically didn’t plug it in until closer to midnight. This also includes the occasional browsing the web, scrolling through Reddit, and playing a couple of hours or more of games on the device.

By the time I was plugging the device in at night, I would still end up with closer to 38% battery. I’m pretty happy with this outcome because it was basically impossible for me to kill this device. It can be done if you did nothing but play mobile games until it shut off. I never found myself with this kind of time, though, and most people won’t too often.

Benchmarks

For starters, we use a 24-hour video on YouTube and stream it on the phone to see how long the battery lasts while streaming video, as this is probably one of the most common things people will use their devices for.

The REDMAGIC 10S Pro lasted for about 25 hours, 42 minutes, and 37 seconds until the battery finally died. This was with the screen brightness all the way up, Bluetooth enabled, and the phone running on Wi-Fi (the REDMAGIC 10S Pro would not connect to my Google Fi SIM, so I couldn’t test mobile data). This is slightly under the battery life of the REDMAGIC 10 Pro during our test, which I found interesting, as it has the same exact battery. As for the charging speed, the REDMAGIC 10S Pro was able to charge up to 100% in 44 minutes and 1 second.

DeviceBattery LifeChargingREDMAGIC 10S Pro25:42:370:44:01REDMAGIC 10 Pro26:51:410:35:49Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra22:03:571:00:14

While slower to charge up completely than the REDMAGIC 10 Pro, this is still incredibly fast to charge, especially when you consider the battery inside this phone is 7,050mAh. You can thank the 80W charger that REDMAGIC includes in the box for this.

All in all, the battery life on the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is not an issue, nor do I think it will be for the majority of users who would buy this phone. So if battery life is one of your main concerns, you can cross it off here and forget about it.

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Ultimate Review: Software

The software experience on the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is, at least from my understanding, exactly the same as it is on the 10 Pro model. Things feel pretty close to a stock Android experience with the occasional, for lack of a better term, bloatware that gets injected into most phones these days. For the REDMAGIC 10S Pro, this is mostly fine. As I find the majority of its little extras pretty nice to have. Like the Game Space Center, for example. This is an excellent piece of custom software that lets you access a variety of settings all centered around the gaming experience, while also letting you launch your games from one place.

You can enter the Game Space Center by pushing the red slider button on the side. You also have the RGB lighting that can be adjusted and tuned for different things. Like a green light for incoming messages or other notifications, and a red light for when playing games. These toggles and associated options can all be found in the settings menu under a dedicated sub-menu for the lighting. You can also toggle the lights from the Game Space Center, although the options will be slightly different.

A piece of software that I wasn’t fond of is the Board screen that pops up when you slide the phone inward from the left edge of the screen. This is the same spot where the Google Discover feed would pop up on a Pixel phone. Board appears to be a similar type of screen, and you can toggle it off in the phone’s settings menu. Unfortunately, there’s no way to replace it with anything without installing a new home launcher.

In terms of usability, the software on the REDMAGIC 10S Pro is easy to get used to, as there aren’t a ton of differences between it and other phones with a slightly altered Android UI experience. Overall, the user experience with the software was buttery smooth, and that’s to be expected with a phone that has these kinds of specs.

REDMAGIC 10S Pro Ultimate Review: Camera

Cameras are often not the foremost thought for phone brands that are making a gaming phone, as a lot of that research and development goes into the performance and other areas. However, REDMAGIC has kind of set itself apart a bit here. It takes pretty decent photos that are better than I ever expected them to be. Not that I expected them to be bad, but I didn’t think they would look this nice.

In the photos that I took, the phone produces some really good colors that aren’t overly saturated in my opinion, and there isn’t a lot of detail or clarity left on the table. Instead, the images ended up keeping a lot of the detail that you can still easily see when zoomed in. This will obviously change a bit after uploading the image, and some of that might be lost in the processing as part of the upload. But on the phone itself, the image quality is quite good.

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The portrait mode photos are also really quite incredible compared to some other phones I’ve tested. For example, I love the ASUS ROG Phones. When it comes to gaming phones, these have always been my favorite, but the portrait mode photos on that phone have not been great. They’ve been ok, but not great. On the REDMAGIC 10S Pro, I was in awe of how good they were. They’re almost, and sometimes better than the portrait mode photos that I get out of my Pixel 8, which is saying something.

You’ll find lots of different options for the camera as well, with several modes to play with if you take a lot of phone pictures. Images can get a little washed out when faced with too bright an area, but this can easily be avoided. The camera doesn’t do as well with photos that are zoomed in too much, as you can see from my attempt to snap a picture of the bird that landed in my backyard.

I didn’t want to scare it off, so I had to stand at the back patio door and zoom in. And this killed a lot of the clarity, unfortunately. Overall, though, the camera on this phone is really good, and unless you’re looking for the absolute best phone camera on planet earth, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with what REDMAGIC has provided.

Should you buy the REDMAGIC 10S Pro?

It’s hard for me to say that, in this current economy, anyone looking for a gaming phone shouldn’t buy the REDMAGIC 10S Pro. Because it’s such a good device and it provides extreme value thanks to its lower base cost. So, I won’t say that. You absolutely should buy this phone because at a starting price of $699, why would you not? The camera is great, the performance is exceptional, and the phone looks good. It also has a huge battery, long battery life, and it charges up very fast. There are almost no downsides here.

Buy the REDMAGIC 10S Pro if:

You want a gaming phone that will provide top-notch performance

You’re looking for incredibly good battery life

You don’t want to spend $1,000+ dollars on a phone

Don’t buy the REDMAGIC 10S Pro if:

You already own the REDMAGIC 10 Pro

You don’t play a lot of mobile games that require high performance

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