RedMagic phones have historically been great at gaming but not much else, and it doesn’t look like things will change with Series 6. ZTE, the parent company behind the Nubia gaming brand, has partnered with Tencent to build a special Chinese edition of the latest phones in the lineup. The companies have taken the stage in China to unveil some details on the two new handsets ahead of the global launch event on March 16.
The Tencent RedMagic 6 and the RedMagic 6 Pro are mostly identical. They share the same exterior design that screams “gaming” thanks to its RGB lighting and complex textures. They both sport active cooling and the same Snapdragon 888 processor, and they both have a 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED screen with an eye-watering refresh rate of 165Hz (complemented by a multi-touch sampling rate of up to 360Hz). The difference lies in the details: The regular RedMagic 6 “only” has 8GB of RAM while the Pro variant has 12. Strangely enough, the Pro has a smaller 4,500mAh dual-cell battery while the regular version comes with 5050mAh. But the dual-cell nature allows for much faster charging at up to 120W, while the RedMagic 6 reaches a max speed of 66W.
Like their predecessors, the new RedMagic phones do their best to make gaming an absolute bliss. There are the signature hardware 400Hz shoulder triggers and a headphone jack, allowing you to stay charged up while using your wired headset. And on the software side, RedMagic promises up to 100 in-depth game adaptions for its RedMagic OS 4.0 based on Android 11. Some intelligent CPU, GPU, and memory scheduling features are supposed to shorten loading times, and there is a RAM boost compression technology that’s advertised as making 12GB of memory behave like 18.
For now, RedMagic hasn’t shared any pictures of the front of the phones or details on the cameras other than that we can expect a triple-sensor array on the back. But given that most people probably won’t buy these phones for their camera performance, we probably don’t have to expect any stellar hardware specifications or software tweaks.
The RedMagic 6 comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage and starts at ¥3,799 (~$585) while the RedMagic 6 Pro has 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage and will be available for ¥4,399 (~$675), though global prices will almost certainly be different. The phones are already available for pre-order in China and will ship starting March 11, just a few days ahead of the global March 16 event. We’ll likely learn a lot more about the RedMagic 6 lineup and how (and if) it will differ from the Chinese variants then, so stay tuned.
