Nubia’s gaming arm, Red Magic, is no stranger to bringing extreme specifications to smartphones. For its next flagship, it is looking to be one of the first to be powered by the Snapdragon 865 Plus.
The Red Magic 5G from earlier in the year was one of the first smartphones to sport a 144hz refresh rate display, a spec that is still a rarity in the market. All of its flagships have historically brought the best possible specifications. For the second half of 2020, it has another gaming powerhouse in the works.
- Red Magic 5G is the world’s first gaming smartphone with a 144Hz display
- Android gaming phones are about to get faster thanks to the Snapdragon 865 Plus
- Nubia Red Magic 5G review
In a surprise announcement, Red Magic took to Weibo to talk about the existence of the Red Magic 5S. Moreover, it was also confirmed that it will be powered by the new Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset. This makes it only the third smartphone to be confirmed with that spec; the others bring the Asus ROG Phone 3 and the Lenovo Legion gaming smartphone. It’s no surprise that it’s the gaming smartphones that are the first adopters.
The Snapdragon 865 Plus is the new flagship chipset from Qualcomm. It is supposed to bring about 10% improvement in terms of processing power and graphics. It implements a 7nm octa-core which takes the clock speed of the Prime core to 3.1Ghz from 2.8, crossing the 3GHz threshold for the first time on smartphones. The rest of the cores remain at the same frequency. Networking capabilities also get a bump with faster download speeds over WiFi.
No other specifications of the Red Magic 5S were shared, but looking at its past, we can expect it to be similar to the Red Magic 5G, bringing a 144Hz AMOLED display, up to 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage and 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Iconic elements such as a fan for ventilation, RGB lighting, shoulder triggers and stereo speakers should also make the cut.
The launch date wasn’t tipped, but it shouldn’t be far now. Considering that Nubia has withdrawn out of India over the course of the last year, we wouldn’t be too optimistic for the Red Magic 5S to launch in India.
