RedMagic 5S Review: Gaming Beast

Hey there, Alex here. This is the RedMagic 5S, and in case it wasn’t obvious enough, it’s a gaming phone. Personally, the only other gaming-centric phone I had was the first Razer Phone, so I might not be able to provide the best review in regards to how it stacks up against other gaming phones.

But I do want to at least share my experience with it as a regular consumer who games a little every now and then. So without further ado, let’s get started. As you can see from the way it looks, this is a phone that was designed with gaming in mind.

I’m not just talking about the pattern on the glass back or the logo that lights up. It’s the entire phone from top to bottom. I’ll go through all those things in a bit, but for now I just want to say that it feels really well-built. And even though this silver version isn’t as striking to look at compared to the red and blue version, I still think it looks really nice.

The front of the phone houses a relatively large 6.65” AMOLED display. It’s not the best I’ve seen in terms of contrast, viewing angle or resolution, but it has a class-leading 144Hz refresh rate, so it looks and feels really responsive. That said, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between this and 120Hz.

And because it seems to be a fixed refresh rate, and not all games will support it, I tend to just leave it at 90Hz most of the time for the best balance between performance and battery life. There is a bit of bezel on the top and bottom, but I think they make the phone easier to use while gaming, and there is no camera cutout or a notch that would block any in-game element.

The RedMagic 5S comes with stereo speakers as well, which again is great for gaming. It’s loud, and actually sounds pretty good. There is a headphone jack here as well which is a nice bonus since most Bluetooth earbuds will still have some latency. Performance wise, it’s running the Snapdragon 865 with the fastest RAM and storage in the market today, so performance is great as expected.

The extra gaming related features here are mostly just to improve the thermal performance. On top of the more common stuff like a cooling tube, graphite thermal pad, and whatnot, it has an actual cooling fan as well. This is why you see these air vents at the side of the phone, and why it is not dust and water resistant.

I don’t really have the stamina to game for that long, but so far, I’ve had no issues with heat at all. Another thing that is worth mentioning is this silver strip on the back of the phone. It is there to help transfer even more heat away from the phone when you pair it with the Ice Dock accessory.

So if you need even more cooling, this could be an option. Battery life has actually been pretty decent for me despite the relatively modest 4500mAh battery. With lighter usage at 90Hz refresh rate, I am able to get one and a half days of use out of the phone.

Of course if you game a lot more than I do and use the max refresh rate, it’s probably less than a day of use. It only comes with an 18W charger in the box, but it does support up to 55W charging if you buy a compatible charger. No wireless charging here, but I don’t think it matters for a gaming phone.

Since this is my first RedMagic phone, I wasn’t sure what to expect when it comes to software experience, but I’m happy to report that it’s a mostly pleasant experience. Apart from a few extra features mostly related to gaming, the software is actually surprisingly clean.

Out of the box, these are the only apps that I saw on the phone. They don’t ask you to sign up for a RedMagic account or use their cloud services, and even the default keyboard, is just gboard. The speed and responsiveness of the UI is excellent as well.

I do have a few complaints, but they’re mostly just minor things. Like the slightly weird english translations, having no options to completely turn off the notification LED, and other small little quirks. For me, I just need to install a launcher, and I’ll be happy enough with it.

I’m not really expecting much in terms of software support since it’s my first time using a RedMagic phone, so I’ll have to wait and see. In terms of gaming related features, you’ll find pretty much all of them inside the Game Space feature, which is activated by a physical toggle.

Other than the usual stuff like tweaking performance, blocking notifications, screen recording, and things like that, it also comes with a few features that I think are quite interesting. The first one would be the capacitive shoulder buttons which can be programmed to an on-screen element.

So for games like PUBG or COD mobile, it is actually really useful. It’s also great for emulators as well since some games do require the use of shoulder buttons. For games like Mobile Legends, it’s not the most useful, but I can at least make it a little easier to buy items, or check enemy stats.

The other 2 features I thought were kind of interesting, are the aiming assist feature, which is pretty self explanatory, and the macro feature. The latter gives me the ability to program a certain set of actions, which is useful for games that require a bit of grinding.

However, it seems a little buggy for now and will playback the actions at a much faster speed. So really hoping they will fix this in future updates. Moving on to camera performance, since it’s not related to gaming, there is really nothing outstanding here.

The main camera hardware is decent and tends to produce natural looking exposure and white balance in good lighting. But in low light, it has the tendency to underexpose shots. It has Night mode as well, but using it produces soft looking images. The ultra wide angle camera is strangely only available in Pro mode, and works okay in good lighting.

I normally don’t like sideloading gcam, but in this case I would highly recommend it, because it makes such a huge difference in low light, especially because of Night Sight. Gcam also does a way better job when it comes to taking selfies, with a lot less skin smoothening and aggressive image processing.

That said, because it’s not optimised for the phone, there are situations where it’s not as good as the main camera. In low light, images look a little soft, and autofocus isn’t as reliable. We don’t get any sort of stabilisation for video capture as well.

Anyway, I’ll have a link in the video description with everything I took with the phone, so you guys can see for yourself whether it’s good enough for your needs. At a starting price of 579 USD it’s definitely not the cheapest Snapdragon 865 phone around, and I’ve used cheaper phones with better camera performance.

But because of the extra gaming related features that we get here, the better thermal performance, the nice display, and a solid set of speakers, I think it’s still good value for money. Of course if you don’t game on your phone at all, there are better options out there for sure.

But even as someone who only plays mobile games occasionally, I’ve really enjoyed using the phone. A lot of the features that makes it a good gaming phone also makes it a nice phone for regular usage. Furthermore, if you compare it to other gaming phones in the market, this is actually quite a bit cheaper.