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RedMagic 11 Pro: One-minute review
The RedMagic 11 Pro is another low-priced gaming phone from the Nubia-affiliated brand, and one of the fastest phones on the market at launch. It’s the first I’ve tested running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, which is as fast as mobile chipsets get.
Even with RedMagic’s new liquid cooling system, in conjunction with its best cooling fan yet, I remain a little dubious about sustained performance over extended periods, but there’s no doubting the RedMagic 11 Pro runs demanding games beautifully.
That’s aided by the usual RedMagic flourishes like mappable gaming controls and a dedicated gaming interface, accessed through a special hardware switch. It’s the only part of the UI that really impresses, though, as RedMagic OS 11 continues to lack refinement.
Camera quality hasn’t improved to any appreciable degree. This is still a decidedly ordinary photography set-up that can be bested my many mid-range, non-gaming phones, and while the in-display front camera is great for media playback, it takes awful selfies.
While much of this package remains familiar, RedMagic has made some subtle tweaks to improve your quality of life, including proper water (though not dust) resistance, and an even-larger 7,500mAh battery. This thing can run for days, if you’re kind to it. And even if you’re not, it won’t give out before bed time.
80W wired charging isn’t quite as swift as it sounds, courtesy of that unusually huge battery, but it’ll still get you to 100% within an hour. You’ll need to make your peace with the dearth of wireless charging, but that’s hardly unexpected from a gaming phone.
As much as I’d like to see RedMagic evolve its design language for its latest gaming phone, the RedMagic 11 Pro remains a compelling value proposition.
If all you’re after is the most powerful, gaming-ready phone on the market at the most aggressive pricing possible, there’s nothing else that even comes close.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: Price and availability
- Released on November 19, 2025
- Priced from £629 ($749 / €699)
The RedMagic 11 Pro hits shops from November 19, 2025. Pricing will start from £629 ($749 / €699) for the model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and will top out at £879 ($999 / €999) for the 24GB / 1TB model.
This marks a slight price bump over the RedMagic 10S Pro, which started from £579 / $699 back in June. It’s never nice to see prices going up, especially when the RedMagic 11 Pro remains a relatively familiar proposition.
If you transfer your focus away from the RedMagic brand, however, it’s difficult to argue against. This is arguably the most powerful phone on the market at the time of writing, yet it costs about half the launch price of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: Specs
| Header Cell – Column 0 | Header Cell – Column 1 |
|---|---|
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Dimensions: |
163.82 x 76.54 x 8.9mm |
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Weight: |
230g |
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Display: |
6.85-inch Full HD+ (1216 x 2688) up to 144Hz BOE AMOLED |
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Chipset: |
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 |
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RAM: |
12GB / 16GB / 24GB (LPDDR5T) |
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Storage: |
256GB / 512GB / 1TB (UFS 4.1 Pro) |
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OS: |
Android 16 with RedMagic OS 11 |
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Primary camera: |
50MP Samsung OV50E40 1/1.55-inch sensor w/ OIS |
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Ultra-wide camera: |
50MP Samsung OV50D40 1/2.88-inch sensor |
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Macro camera |
2MP |
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Front Camera: |
16MP under-display |
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Battery: |
7,500mAh |
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Charging: |
80W wired |
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Colors: |
Cryo, Nightfreeze, Subzero |
RedMagic 11 Pro review: Design
- New circular ‘liquid cooling’ motif
- IPX8 certified
- Dedicated gaming mode switch and capacitive shoulder buttons
Considering the slight price bump outlined above, you might have assumed that RedMagic had implemented a fresh design with the 11 Pro. You’d be wrong.
It sports the same basic shape and very similar dimensions to previous models. This is a very thick (8.9mm) and heavy (230g) phone with a rear surface that is – somewhat unusually – just as flat as the front. There’s no camera bump whatsoever.
The flat edges of the phone have far more undulations. The right edge is packed full of physical controls, with a dedicated game mode slider joining the usual power and volume controls.
You’ll also find a vent for the phone’s cooling fan, while all of these elements are flanked by RedMagic’s customary capacitive shoulder buttons. The latter can be mapped to game controls for quicker, more assured access.
RedMagic is only guaranteeing an IPX8 rating here. This means that while the phone is appreciably water resistant (the best of any RedMagic gaming phone to date), it’s vulnerable to dust. For dust resistance alone, it’s actually a step back from the IP54-rated 10S Pro.
While the shape of the phone is basically the same as before, RedMagic has tweaked its rear design. There’s a new Time-Space Ring element in the centre, which (in the Nightfreeze and Subzero models) exposes the phone’s fancy new water-cooling system through a transparent piece of toughened glass.
When the phone kicks into its gaming mode, you’ll see little white globules circulating around the ring, emphasizing the flow of the heat-dissipating liquid. I’m not always a fan of RedMagic’s whole gaming aesthetic, but I’ll freely admit to being mesmerized by these gloopy satellites.
RedMagic claims to have improved the sound quality since the RedMagic 10S Pro, with “more powerful bass, clearer sound quality, and a wider soundstage”. That may be so, but it still sounds thin and reedy next to a genuine flagship phone like the iPhone 17 Pro.
One of these speakers isn’t front-firing, too, which isn’t great for gaming. It’s all too easy for your fingers to block the bottom-mounted speaker when you’re holding it in landscape over extended gaming sessions.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: Display
- 6.85-inch OLED display
- 144Hz refresh rate
- 2000 nits peak brightness
The RedMagic 11 Pro uses much the same display as the RedMagic 10S Pro and the RedMagic 10 Pro, so there isn’t a great deal of note to report on here.
This is a nicely sized 6.85-inch OLED, with a decent 1216 x 2688 resolution, often referred to as ‘1.5K’.
It doesn’t get hugely bright, with a peak brightness of 2000 nits, and a maximum High Brightness Mode (HBM) brightness of 1800 nits. Flagship phones can get much brighter, but it remains very usable outdoors nonetheless.
Perhaps the most interesting figure here is 144Hz refresh rate, which is a higher peak refresh rate rate than most phones – even those selling for twice the price.
There aren’t an awful lot of games that support refresh rates above 120Hz. It remains a relatively niche proposition, but it makes much more sense on a gaming phone than on, say, a mid-range phone like the Motorola Edge 40 Pro.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: cameras
- 50MP main camera with OIS, 50MP ultra-wide, 2MP macro
- Poor 16MP in-display selfie camera
The slight feeling of inertia that comes with the RedMagic 11 Pro continues into the camera department. This is exactly the same set-up that we had in the 10S Pro and indeed the 10 Pro.
That means a 50MP, 0.65-inch OmniVision OV50E main sensor with OIS and a 7P lens, a 50MP, 0.35-inch OV50D ultra-wide, and an all-but-pointless 2MP macro camera. There is no dedicated telephoto camera here, driving home the mid-range vibe.
We expect this of gaming phones, which have long chosen the camera as an acceptable area of compromise while cramming in advanced cooling solutions and dedicated gaming controls. They’ve undoubtedly improved their picture-taking skills over the years, but you’re still only getting adequate shots at best.
Detail is solid in well-lit scenes, as you might expect from a pair of 50MP sensors, but the tone can be distractingly different between the wide and ultra-wide. On a sunny day, the difference wasn’t particularly pronounced for me, with a similarly punchy, slightly over-processed look. But on an overcast day my ultra-wide shots took on a sickly yellow tinge.
Night shots taken with the main sensor are perfectly serviceable, with OIS and that flagship chip putting in a shift to perform the necessary computational tricks. Clarity is perfectly passable, though there is a slightly false over-brightened look to such low-light shots.
Zoomed shots obviously need to crop in on that main sensor, which is fine for 2x snaps. Anything beyond that – right up to 10x – turns into a noisy, fuzzy mush.
Sadly, you also get the exact same 16MP front camera as before, which is one of the worst selfie cameras I’ve tried. Tucking this camera underneath the display gets you a gloriously unblemished canvas for gaming and video content, but it also gives you truly terrible selfies, completely lacking in detail and with bad exposure. There just isn’t enough light getting through that screen layer.
RedMagic’s Camera UI isn’t the most pleasant to deal with, either. You still get an obnoxious watermark by default, and selfies continue to run with a horrible beautifying effect out of the box. I also found the camera-switching controls to be occasionally unresponsive, particularly when shooting outside, leading me to wonder if it was affected by the cold.
Video capture is solid, maxing out at 8K and 30fps or 4K/60fps. It’s a shame we don’t get the full 4K/120fps treatment, as you do with the phone’s cousin, the Nubia Z80 Ultra, but that’s more than enough for most people.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: camera samples
RedMagic 11 Pro review: performance
- One of the first phones with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
- 12GB, 16GB, or 24GB of LPDDR5T RAM
- New liquid cooling system
After the RedMagic 10S Pro stalled somewhat with its processor offering, the RedMagic 11 Pro offers genuine, next-generation improvements.
It’s one of the first phones on the market to run on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, and it’s an absolute powerhouse – especially when combined with up to 24GB of the very latest LPDDR5T RAM (my mid-tier model came with a still-strong 16GB). In the gaming world, where raw performance is everything, these enhanced specs alone justify the RedMagic 11 Pro’s existence.
My benchmark tests show the phone to be one of the fastest I’ve ever used. It obliterates the RedMagic 10S Pro – representing the best of the previous Android generation – in both CPU and GPU terms.
In single-score CPU terms, it’s more or less a match for the iPhone 17 Pro, and is about 18 percent faster than the 10S Pro. In multi-core terms, it’s 15 to 16 percent faster than both.
Ahead of launch, the phone was blocked from running the GFXBench suite of tests that I usually run, so we’ll have to add more scientific reflections on GPU performance a little further down the line.
In terms of sustained gaming performance, running our usual extended 3DMark GPU tests suggests that the RedMagic 11 Pro fails to hit the heady heights of consistency that the RedMagic 10 Pro managed. It’s still far more stable across an intensive 20 minute graphical test than on the vast majority of non-gaming phones, however.
It’s possible that this slight stability shortfall is merely a compatibility issue ahead of launch. Alternatively, this could corroborate early reports that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 runs a little hot – heat being the enemy of sustained gaming performance.
RedMagic surely didn’t add a whole PC-style liquid cooling system for nothing. Our initial tests would suggest that it might not be wholly effective at ensuring peak sustained performance, though we’ll have a better idea once we’ve tested more Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phones that don’t pack such an elaborate cooling system.
In practical terms, the RedMagic 11 Pro ran everything I threw at it on top graphical settings with extremely fluid frame rates. GRID Legends is as smooth as you like, while Destiny: Rising can run on Max frame rate (90fps) and Ultra rendering quality (the second highest of four settings) simultaneously – just like the iPhone 17 Pro.
I have some lingering questions about some of the GPU and sustained running results I’ve been getting during the review period, but the proof of this here gaming pudding is in the eating. Or rather, the playing. And games play phenomenally smoothly on the RedMagic 11 Pro.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: software
- One of the clumsier Android UIs
- Dedicated Game Space gaming UI
- Up to 5 years of OS and security updates
When it comes to the RedMagic 11 Pro, all the hardware updates in the world won’t make me happier than the one thing I really wanted – a completely revamped UI. I want a close-to-stock Android UI like the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro.
What I actually get is RedMagic OS 11. Yes, it now sits on top of Google’s latest Android 16 OS. No, it doesn’t massively improve the general experience of using the phone day to day.
The icons and wallpapers remain clumsy and charmless, and there’s still a completely superfluous widget dedicated to turning the fan on and off, even though it’s designed to kick in automatically during gameplay.
To RedMagic’s credit, there are fewer bugs than before, and I didn’t encounter any instances of rogue Chinese text as I have in the past. Once again, however, I got a mysterious app icon labelled ‘Unknown’ on the home screen.
I still got a load of bloatware, too. Even if I un-tick all of the terrible-looking ‘Recommended apps’ at installation, icons will still be placed on the Home Screen across a pair of unwanted folders. Facebook, WPS Office, TikTok, MoboReader, MoboReels, and Booking.com all come preinstalled.
RedMagic itself supplies a duplicate web browser and an app for managing your RedMagic peripherals, should you choose to buy any. Interestingly, the company’s ugly, ad-strewn news and widget screen to the left of the main home screen disappeared during my review period, following a firmware update. It was replaced with the regular Google Feed – a big improvement.
There’s still much to be done to drag RedMagic OS up to the standards of the best Android UIs in the business, but it’s sufficiently fast and fluid, and it’s at least moving in the right direction.
RedMagic continues to promise five years of OS and security updates in the UK and Europe, but only three years everywhere else.
The Game Space UI, meanwhile, remains a powerful (if not wholly intuitive) way to manage your games. Flick the dedicated switch to enter, then add any games to the UI. You can then fine-tune things like screen sensitivity and ratios, and access cheat-like game plug-ins.
You can also bring up an overlay when in games with a lateral swipe, allowing you to play with CPU clock speeds, map those trigger buttons, and more.
RedMagic 11 Pro review: Battery life
- 7,500mAh battery offered two days usage (or more)
- 80W wired charging, but no wireless charging
RedMagic phones always have meaty batteries, but the RedMagic 11 Pro offers the biggest cell yet at 7,500mAh. That’s smaller than the 8,000mAh of the China model, but it remains a solid step up from the RedMagic 10S Pro’s 7,050mAh
It offers a similarly impressive level of stamina, getting you through two days of normal usage with ample room to spare. It’s obviously built to stand up to sterner tasks – gaming in particular – and will get you through a full day even with an hour or two of Genshin Impact mixed in.
Charging is once again up to 80W, and the charging brick that was bundled in with my test model got me from empty to 100% in just short of an hour. That’s far from outstanding, but do remember that we’re talking about a battery capacity that’s about 50% larger than that of your average large phone.
You won’t be able to count on wireless charging here, though. That’s a common omission in this line-up, with RedMagic prioritising extensive cooling systems over luxurious charging alternatives.
It’s an understandable omission, especially for the price of the phone. I’d still like to see RedMagic following Asus’s lead and adding a second USB-C port on the left edge of the phone, though. It’d be a gamer-friendly move that would enable you to more comfortably charge while you play.
Should I buy the RedMagic 11 Pro?
|
Attributes |
Notes |
Rating |
|---|---|---|
|
Design |
It’s big, thick, heavy and gaudy, but it’s also very flat with a striking liquid cooling effect (on some variants). |
3 / 5 |
|
Display |
This screen is big, sharp, and bright enough, with a speedy refresh rate and a complete lack of notch interference. |
4 / 5 |
|
Performance |
One of the first phones to run on a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, it’s incredibly fast – though heat build-up has us slightly doubtful when its comes to sustained performance. |
5 / 5 |
|
Camera |
You don’t expect good cameras on gaming phones. This isn’t good, but it is perfectly adequate for a £600-ish handset. |
3 / 5 |
|
Battery |
This phone has one of the largest batteries around, and it’s good for multi-day use. |
5 / 5 |
|
Software |
RedMagic OS continues to be one of the ugliest custom UIs on the market. It’s smooth and functional, and has all the gaming features you could want, but that’s about all that can be said for it. |
3 / 5 |
|
Value |
All this performance for less than £600? RedMagic continues to punch well above its weight. |
5 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
RedMagic 11 Pro review: also consider
There aren’t many gaming phone alternatives, but these two options offer something a little different.
How I tested the RedMagic 11 Pro
- Review test period = 1 week
- Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, gaming, streaming video, music playback
- Tools used = Geekbench 6, 3DMark, native Android stats, bundled Nubia 80W power adapter
First reviewed: October 2025
Read the full article here
