Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Fastest Phone of 2020!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here, i haven’t worn this shirt in a while, but it’s back in the store shop.mkbhd.com, and this is the nubia red magic 5g. It’S a gaming phone, as you can probably instantly tell just by looking at it and the main kicker feature for this phone. Is it’s the fastest phone in the world and well, it is the fastest phone screen in the world for sure. That’S a fact, but just in general, my overall use and my experience with it. This phone feels faster than galaxy s20. Ultra feels faster than iphone 11 pro feels faster than oneplus 8 pro.
So let’s talk about it. So this is a 600 gaming phone and i guess anytime, the text is sideways right away, you know things are getting serious and the headlining feature is definitely this screen. It’S a huge 6.65 inch, 1080p flat ammo led display, gets plenty. Bright. Has p3 color some reasonable resolution and not amazing bezels, but you’ve seen screens like this before, but what matters most is it has a refresh rate of 144 hertz so right off the bat that’s higher than the standard 60 hertz. A lot of people are used to, and it’s even higher than the 90 and 120 hertz of a lot of the high refresh rate flagships that have come out in the last one to two years. It’S super super super fast and smooth throughout the ui throughout scrolling.
Pulling down notifications every single little animation gaming, everything benefits from this extremely high refresh rate screen well, of course, except battery life, so that is, of course, an awesome spec. Now, if the question is marquez, can you see the difference between 144 hertz phone screen and 120 hertz phone screen? My answer is yes, but it doesn’t not to pat myself too hard on the back here, but that’s like asking a professional driver if they can feel the difference between a porsche 911 and a 911 gt3 rs like someone who’s super calibrated can feel the difference between Those two things but to the regular person they’re, both just extremely fast. So i guess here’s what i will say this is the smoothest feeling phone i’ve ever used, but you notice it way more in the tweaked animations in nubia software than the actual 144 versus 120 hertz difference either way.
I absolutely love it because you know i have a need for speed, but then that translates through to the rest of the user experience with the rest of the maxed out high-end spec sheet as well. Snapdragon 865, 8 gigs of fast lp, ddr5 ram, fast, ufs, 3.0 storage and as a bonus. Since you know this is a gaming phone, you got to do something extreme. There is an active air cooling system through this phone, with an actual moving fan and air vents to keep the temperature down. So that’s those huge holes.
You see on the left and right sides of this phone and if i put this right up to my ear or right on the mic, you can actually hear you can hear the fans inside it turn on and start spinning, which is kind of hilarious. Now. This is cool literally, i guess it’s a little extreme. If anything, you know they’ll probably be able to say now that, because of the extra thermal headroom, their snapdragon 865 will go farther without throttling than another snapdragon 865.
So that’s classic flexing in the gaming space, but there are also some downsides that come with this extreme number. One is this phone has no chance of being water or dust resistant, obviously with huge holes in it. So it’s not and number two their placement of the volume buttons and power button also kind of moves it awkwardly down a little lower on the right hand, side not a huge deal, but it’s true. It’S worth noting and man just what a gamery phone the whole design they lean right into it. It seems like if you’re making a gaming themed phone, whether it’s the razer phone or the rog phone or the black shark phone they’ve, got to have some kind of wild design elements. Rgb is a requirement.
This phone has that, of course, the logo on the back. Glows as a notification, light check being accidentally really good at media, because games are media check. The bezels are, you know, they’re a little bigger on this phone, but you do get a big earpiece, front-facing speaker and a fairly loud bottom speaker that pairs up in stereo to sound, pretty nice, and i think quite loud and good.
Plus there is yes, that’s a headphone jack for that sweet, sweet, zero, latency audio. What you know about that port kids specialized gaming buttons check nubia is giving you these rocker buttons on each shoulder. So if you’re horizontal, which is how you’re gon na game, you can custom map these, and so then you can keep your fingers off the screen and map those to press buttons that are on the screen, and this also comes with a classic special software mode.
That’S turned on by a special red button that makes some cheesy sound effects as soon as you enable it, and this is the gaming mode where you can go crazy, customizing. Those shoulder triggers monitoring your cpu and network speed. Turning on and off the fan, all that stuff, it’s fun, it’s cheesy, it’s it’s gamery, but it’s genuinely useful. If you do game a lot on your phone and to top it all off, there’s also these smart pins that you’ve seen on the side of the phone which will hook up to these optional accessories, including one fifty dollar accessory.
That gives you an additional headphone jack and a hundred gigabit ethernet port. So if you didn’t think they were serious about gaming now that that accessory exists, you know they’re serious about gaming. Now i’ve also said in the past. It feels like a mediocre. Camera is also a requirement on a gaming phone with this one. I was right. This is a this is a serviceable camera. It works.
You know you give it a lot of light and it can take b plus photos that look fine and are perfectly shareable, but anything beyond that it becomes pretty clear. People aren’t buying this phone for the photo quality. This is a perfect example of where megapixels don’t mean everything. You know it is a 64 megapixel camera, but it somehow struggled pretty regularly to capture any sort of meaningful detail or accurate colors in any competitive way at all. So, just you know what you’re getting into the only impressive part to me of this camera was the absolute lack of any shutter lag at all when snapping photos zero. That’S actually more, i guess along the theme of this being the fastest phone i’ve ever used, but i think this shutter is actually a split second faster than the notoriously snappy iphone, thanks to the 300hz touch response on this crazy display, and also one more thing about This camera who’s asking for these two megapixel macro cameras, like is, am i missing something you get the primary camera. You know no ois, it’s not that great quality, but fine. You get a camera sweet, uh, 8 megapixel ultrawide camera is sort of a fun extra. It’S not going to be amazing quality, but ultra wide is a fun thing to have, but then this 2 megapixel dedicated macro camera. On top of that, why this isn’t the first time i’ve seen this either? I genuinely don’t know why i keep seeing it. Maybe they think it’s a cool fun addition, you know macros fun and maybe there’s a crowd out there that is asking for it, but i’m not really sure i’ve seen it. I would have cut this to me.
It seems unnecessary. Okay, a couple other scattered thoughts on this phone. You know it is a gaming phone, so i had to get some gaming in i’ve used asphalt as like my game of choice, um, because i don’t gain much on my phone, but when i did it was awesome. It was super high frame rate, extremely responsive.
I got to use those air triggers. Actually, i don’t think they’re called air triggers, but the shoulder buttons and it all worked. Fine. This in-display, fingerprint reader is also one of the worst i’ve ever used in a phone. Of course, it’ll probably work now that it’s on camera but uh, i called that motorola one and the edge plus in that review the worst i’d ever used in a phone. This is a tie for that.
It’S i’ve never seen so many failures in one underscreen, fingerprint reader, plus it’s really low on the phone. So i definitely like when they’re higher up and still easy to reach. But generally i was, i was disappointed with that fingerprint reader and then i’m not the biggest fan of the aesthetics in their software. But it’s not bad. You know there’s some colors here and there, but it actually behaves close to stock in some places, like the google discover page and the launcher, but it also definitely has some quirks and is behind some of the big dogs like samsung’s, ui and oxygen os, the multitasking For example, doesn’t let me switch between two recent apps in one motion like pretty much every other phone that uses the gestures, uh there’s a weird bug where google photos keeps crashing and i can’t use it, and he also for some reason, can’t dismiss a notification by Swiping to the left, kinda like huawei’s ui, you always have to swipe to the right to get rid of it. There is no wireless charging and no ip rating, like i mentioned, and the vibration motor feels pretty cheap. It’S pretty bad, but all of these things you sort of know that you’re getting into when you buy you know a cheaper mid-tier, 600 nubia gaming phone. All.
That being said, this is still the fastest feeling phone i’ve ever used. So, at the end of the day, my real question with this phone is: okay. Now that we have this, is it worth it to go past 120 hertz on these phone screens, because you know this one: we’ve we’ve gotten all these flagships up to 120. This one goes marginally past 120, but, like you can imagine, it keeps going 144 hertz, 240 hertz and my answer is the law of diminishing returns.
Basically, the payoff from 60 hertz to 120 hertz was huge, but then every step past 120 hertz that we go will feel a smaller and smaller amount of difference. But they will continue to take a bigger and bigger chunk out of your battery. So without yet seeing this mythical 240hz phone – that’s no doubt on the horizon sometime in the future, i’m gon na guess. I’M gon na predict that, just like that 4k sony phone, i reviewed a couple years ago, this 240 hertz phone – this imaginary phone will probably only enable 240 hertz some of the time and when you do, it will probably absolutely crush battery life and just not really Be worth it and probably won’t catch on so just like, we moved up from 360p to 480 to 720 all the way up to a lot of 1080p and 1440p phones and then realized. We don’t need to go to 4k and found our sweet spot. I think, with refresh rate, we’re gon na find a lot of the same thing.
We come up from 60 and there’s a lot of 90 and 120 and we don’t really need to go too far. Extra law of diminishing returns definitely applies. So all that being said still thank you to nubia for making this for us to discover this together and thank you for watching catch. You guys, the next one peace .