Red magic 3 : Review :the Gaming phone you have been waiting For

The Red Magic 3 is lightning fast, boasts a gorgeous big display, has loud dual speakers, and packs a huge battery. It even has a dedicated gaming switch on the side and an internal fan to keep you gaming for longer. It boasts a truly impressive spec sheet packed into a device that looks as though it just fell out of a space marine’s pocket, but the real magic trick here is that Nubia is offering the Red Magic 3 for just $479.

The Red Magic 3 is big. No, I mean really big. It makes the OnePlus 7 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 look small. It’s tall, it’s wide, and it’s really heavy at 215 grams. The metal construction gives it a solid, durable feel. Because it’s so big it can be tricky to handle. It really requires two hands, but I found it most comfortable to use when gaming, which seems fitting.

Chinese manufacturer Nubia, which started out as a subsidiary of ZTE, has refined the design here, but the Red Magic 3 still looks a lot like the original Red Magic . There’s the same angled, metal back with that LED strip down the middle and red highlights in the corners. There’s a hexagonal lozenge for the fingerprint sensor, but the camera lens above it is pentagonal this time around.

I don’t know exactly when RGB lighting strips and angular metal became an integral part of gaming, but the Red Magic 3 ticks all the boxes. My nine-year-old son thinks it’s the coolest phone he’s ever seen. The highlights aren’t just about the look either, most of them serve as vents for the internal fan and help to keep the temperature down.

Thankfully, Nubia has improved the finish, which we found chipped very easily in the original. The Red Magic 3 seems to be much harder wearing and the black paint job on my review unit still looks perfect after a week, though that anodized metal finish is still on the slippery side.

There’s a USB-C port on the bottom edge and a 3.5mm audio jack up top. The left side is home to a red, textured button that turns the dedicated gaming mode on or off, and there’s a row of pogo pins for accessories, including a dock which I didn’t get to try.

The original Red Magic phone made do with a 6-inch LCD screen with a standard refresh rate, but in the face of phones like the Razer Phone 2 which boasts a display with a 120Hz refresh rate, or the Asus ROG Phone with its 90Hz OLED panel, Nubia has made some improvements. The Red Magic 3 has a whopping 6.65-inch AMOLED screen with a 90Hz refresh rate.

Not only is it the biggest screen we’ve seen in a gaming phone, it’s also really bright. The resolution is 2,340 x 1,080 pixels and it has a modern 19.5:9 aspect ratio. Action is smooth, whether you’re swiping through home screens, blowing away some alien scum in Shadowgun: Legends, or watching Childish Gambino dance through a YouTube video.