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RedMagic 10S Pro Review: The Most Powerful Smartphone of the Moment

RedMagic 10S Pro Review: The Most Powerful Smartphone of the Moment

After the RedMagic 10 Pro last January and the 10 Air in April, it's the turn of the RedMagic 10S Pro to arrive on the Journal du Geek test benches. Large 144 Hz screen, Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, up to 24 GB of RAM, active fan, dedicated buttons... the brand leaves nothing to be desired to offer a complete and flawless gaming smartphone.

Flawless, really? There are still some points to clarify, particularly on the software part or the camera block, the two weak points noted on the 10 Pro. We tested it for you!

The specifications of the RedMagic 10S Pro

Here's what you'll find under the hood of the RedMagic 10S Pro:

RedMagic 10S Pro
Display-Size: 6.85 inches
-Refresh rate: Up to 144 Hz
-Touch sampling rate: Maximum 2500 Hz (Average 960 Hz)
- Definition: 2688 x 1216 pixels
- Aspect ratio: 20:9
- Type: AMOLED
- Max brightness: 2000 Nits
- Material: Corning® Gorilla® Glass
- Color gamut: 100% DCI-P3
- Color accuracy △E<1
SoC and GPU- Snapdragon 8 Elite
- CPU cores: Oryon
- CPU core frequency up to 4.47 GHz
- GPU: Adreno™
- Red Core R3 Pro
Memory- RAM: 12GB / 16GB / 24GB LPDDR5T
- ROM: 256GB / 512GB / 1TB UFS4.1 Pro

- No microSD
Colors- Matte Black Nightfall, Transparent Silver Moonlight, Transparent Black Dusk
- Material: Metal middle frame + glass back
Camera- Camera rear:
Definition: 50MP+50MP+2MP
Sensor: OV50E40, 1/1.55", 7P F1.88
OV50D40, 1/2.88", 6P F2.0
OIS Optical Image Stabilization
7P Lens

- Front Camera:
Sensor: OV16EQ
Megapixels: 16 MP
Pixel Size: 1.0μm
Aperture: 2.0
Audio- Stereo Speakers
Battery- Battery: 7050 mAh
- Fast Charging: Supports up to 80W
Connectivities- Fingerprint sensor, G-sensor, E-compass, Gyroscope, Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor, Under-display light sensor, Infrared sensor

- 5G
- Dual nano-SIM
- Wi-Fi802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax, Wi-Fi 6
- Bluetooth 5.4
- GPS: L1+L5
- NFC

SoftwareAndroid 15 + REDMAGIC OS 10
Size and Weight- Height: 163.42 mm
- Width: 76.14 mm
- Depth: 8.9 mm
- Weight: 229 g
Introductory price€649 (12 + 256 GB)
€799 (16 + 512 GB)
€999 (24 GB + 1 TB)
Date of AvailabilityJune 17 2025

Three variants are announced by the Chinese brand:

  • 12+256 GB for 649 euros
  • 16+512 GB for 799 euros
  • 24 GB + 1 TB for 999 euros.

In terms of packaging, no surprises, it's the same as on the other smartphones in the 10 range. Inside, you'll find the usual booklets, a transparent silicone case, a USB cable, and an 80 W charger. Yes, that's less than the 100 W of the 10 Pro.

The RedMagic 10S Pro is available from 649 euros and up to 999 euros depending on the version.

Design

The RedMagic 10S Pro looks just like a 10 Pro. It has the same very rectangular format with flat edges, a screen that covers 95.3% of the surface, thin borders and the absence of a front camera (hidden under the screen, a significant comfort when playing a video or a game). So far, nothing seems to suggest its gaming capabilities, just a premium smartphone like the Galaxy S25 Ultra for example. This necessarily comes with generous dimensions (163.42 x 76.14 x 8.9 mm) for a significant weight (229 grams).

RedMagic 10S Pro Review: The Most Powerful Smartphone of the Moment

RedMagic offers three colors: Nightfall, a fairly sober black dress, Moonlight (in light transparency) and Dusk (in dark transparency). If you like slightly industrial designs with exposed screws like on Nothing smartphones, you'll be in luck. It's original while remaining rather discreet compared to gaming phones from previous years. We particularly appreciate the fact that the lenses don't protrude from the rear window.

On the right edge, pardon the expression, but it's a mess. In addition to the traditional volume and power buttons, there are sensitive triggers at each end, but also a red switch (I'll come back to this) and a vent to evacuate the air blown by the fan, which also has its counterpart on the left edge. It's loaded. Good news, however: there is a jack port on the top edge for connecting wired headphones, an option missing from the Air version.

RedMagic 10S Pro Review: The Most Powerful Smartphone of the Moment

Small black spot for a smartphone at this price: it is only IP54 certified, ensuring splash resistance, where the competition generally goes up to immersion (IP67 or more). We imagine that this is a difficult objective to achieve with an active fan that must evacuate the air through an orifice.

Screen and audio

The screen itself remains unchanged. It is therefore the same as on the 10 Pro: an Amoled panel of 2688 x 1216 pixels, a refresh rate of 144 Hz, a sampling rate up to 2500 Hz, a maximum brightness of 2000 nits and a promised coverage of 100% of the DCI-P3 spectrum. These are the characteristics that we found on ultra-premium Androids from a year or two ago, and still on the iPhone 16 Pro this year. Even if we do better today, particularly in terms of protection against breakage and especially in terms of the anti-reflective treatment of the glass, it is clear that this will suit the majority of users, even outdoors.

RedMagic 10S Pro Review: The Most Powerful Smartphone of the Moment

As for the refresh rate, the maximum at 144 Hz is very comfortable, but the absence of LTPO technology reduces the granularity. The screen still seamlessly adjusts to 60, 90, 120, or 144 Hz depending on the content displayed on the screen. An area for improvement for next year!

The audio is provided by two stereo speakers located on the smaller edges. Just having a real speaker on the top is a significant advantage compared to all the competition. They are also DTS-X certified, but we wouldn't expect anything less in 2025 for this price range. In concrete terms, this translates into powerful volume with contained distortion. These are still phone speakers, so don't expect very rich sound, but for the size, it's very good.

Android 15, performance and battery life

In the wake of Android 16's launch, it's no surprise that the RedMagic 10S Pro runs Android 15, topped with the RedMagic OS interface. This remains true to Google's spirit while adding its share of features, customizations, and approximate translations like "Wake-up Google Assistant" to launch Gemini from the power button. It reeks of machine translation, a sign of laziness in the age of LLM.

Geeks won't care about this for long, given the many options available and ingenious ideas. One of the ones we appreciate the most is directly inspired by Samsung: in a menu, simply pull the screen down for the section title to extend across the entire upper half of the display, de facto lowering the clickable content to the lower half. Extremely practical for one-handed navigation on such a diagonal. The magic button (the red switch) can be configured to launch GameSpace, the camera, the torch, face-to-face translation, the voice recorder, or even to change the sound mode. This is an idea popularized by Apple and OnePlus... only better.

On the other hand, there are still too many pre-installed apps for a device at this price. While Facebook, TikTok, and Booking are still acceptable, we could do without Block Blast and MoboReels. Updates are also light: two versions of Android (up to Android 17) and five years of security updates.

It's on the performance side that RedMagic has pushed the knobs to the max. At the heart of the 10S Pro is a Snapdragon 8 Elite (the best SoC currently on Android) supported by the RedCore R3 Pro chip, a gargantuan amount of LPDDR5T RAM, UFS 4.1 Pro storage and a 10-layer cooling system (ICE-X), including a 12000 mm² vapor chamber and a high-speed fan (23000 revolutions per minute). It is quite simply the most powerful Android smartphone currently available.

Great power sometimes means small inconveniences. Here, it's a constant blast of fan to operate at full speed as well as a metal frame that tends to heat up quickly and strongly. Running a benchmark renders the phone completely unusable unless you put on oven mitts. However, these two problems do not occur in everyday use. Even when running Fortnite with all settings maxed out, the game runs consistently at 90 FPS and runs quite acceptably hot (if you accept the constant whirring of the fan). Needless to say, I haven't found any game on the Play Store capable of putting this raw powerhouse to the test, enough to last for many years before being limited.

In terms of battery life, the RedMagic 10S Pro performs with flying colors for traditional use and can last up to two days if you don't push it too hard. However, it's still a gaming smartphone, and the active fan and its super-powerful chip tend to consume power. On Genshin Impact, expect around five hours before the battery dies completely.

Photo and video

A weak point on all RedMagic smartphones, the camera part of the 10S Pro doesn't change the situation. On board, we find the same two OmniVision sensors as on the 10 Air and 10 Pro, namely the OV50E for the wide angle and the OV50D for the ultra wide angle. These are two 50-megapixel sensors capable of pixel-binning to produce 12.5-megapixel images.

RedMagic 10S Pro Review: The Most Powerful Smartphone of the Moment

The verdict is therefore logically the same: the main sensor can create an illusion in broad daylight, but suffers from a few drawbacks that photography enthusiasts will notice at first glance. The contrast is generally not enough to perfectly bring out a subject, strong light sources sometimes create a white veil on the image and the definition could be better given the definition. Suffice to say that the result is sufficient for those wishing to capture a memory, but at an equivalent price, you can obviously find much better. You will therefore have to make a choice between performance and photo quality.

On the ultra-wide-angle side, contrast and definition drop a little more. Purple fringing (a chromatic aberration) is also more frequent, and the corners display a rather unsightly grain that is absent on the wide-angle.

At night, the wide-angle still performs well if it manages to capture a minimum of light, without working wonders. By playing a little with the brightness slider, you can achieve an acceptable result, but you shouldn't count on it too much. The ultra-wide-angle, for its part, lacks too much brightness, and the shots are mediocre at best.

At the front, the integration of the selfie camera under the screen is still magnificent. A strong point visually, but a weak point for optical quality. Even in full sunlight, it is impossible to obtain detailed texture, and a white/gray veil dulls the photos. It has the merit of existing, but RedMagic really didn't bet on it to make you fall in love, as proven by the low-light results which are not usable at all.

But rather form your own opinion with these few examples:

Where to buy it?

The RedMagic 10S Pro is available today from 649 euros (12+256 GB) and up to 999 euros (24 GB + 1 TB).

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