The beefiest gaming phone around

Introduction

The RedMagic 11S Pro is touted to be the ultimate version of the brand’s latest flagship phone.

A lot of things haven’t changed from the standard RedMagic 11 Pro, with the same dual 50MP camera array, a large 6.85-inch 144Hz AMOLED screen and hefty 7500mAh battery with 80W charging support. 

RedMagic seems to have pushed the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC that’s inside this phone a little by overclocking it against the version you’ll find in modern flagships such as the Oppo Find X9 Ultra, which should theoretically make it one of the best gaming phones we’ve tested. 

Plus, its £709/$849 starting price seems rather reasonable for a phone this powerful with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

I’ve been putting the 11S Pro through its paces for the last week or so to see how it fares.

Design

• Blockier, gamer-centric look
• Excellent physical controls
• Yes, it has RGB lighting

Devices designed more for gaming than anything else often have a funny look to them, and the 11S Pro is no different. Its look doesn’t deviate much from older RedMagic devices, with a blockier and almost more aggressive look than sleeker flagship handsets.

The key elements from the standard RedMagic 11 Pro model have been retained, such as its squared-off, blockier design, while the liquid-cooling window on the 11 Pro also lets you peep at the liquid being pumped around the phone. 

Likewise, there’s all manner of lighting across the phone for added gamer flair, such as a light-up RedMagic logo on the rear, plus the phone’s active cooling fan has a smattering of RGB when in use. Each area can be customised to display a different colour, and you can make these LEDs pulsate along with the sound from the phone, pulse and strobe in different patterns, or just stay on all the time, which is neat.

The 11S Pro is available in two colourways, with the black and blue Nightfreeze colour I have here, plus a Subzero option that trades the black for white and silver for a little more style, and a different finish.

This phone excels with the physical controls that set it apart from more standard phones, coming with a pair of touch triggers for proper controller-like use alongside the usual power and volume keys. There is also a red toggle for RedMagic’s Game Space mode so you can game without interruptions. On the top side, you’ve even got a 3.5mm headphone jack.

RedMagic rates the 11S Pro to have IPX8 water resistance, putting it some way behind other choices – it provides resistance against submersion in water, although no rating for dust ingress, likely due to that fan.

Screen

• 6.85-inch 144Hz 1216×2688 AMOLED
• 1800 nits peak brightness
• Sharp and responsive for games, navigation and more

RedMagic says it’s upgraded the screen for the 11S Pro against the 10S Pro by outfitting this new handset with a BOE X10 AMOLED screen. It’s a large 6.85-inch panel with a 1216×2688 resolution for solid detail that’s bright, sharp, and responsive, making it ideal for a gaming device such as this one.

The key thing with this panel is its maximum refresh rate of 144Hz, putting it a touch above the 120Hz we see on lots of other phones, giving it a wonderfully smooth and responsive feel for everything from gaming to general navigation. You can turn this down to 120Hz or 60Hz in the phone’s menus if you want to, or leave it in its default variable form.

Otherwise, the 11S Pro’s screen is plenty bright, with a peak figure of 1800 nits, making it plenty bright for indoor and outdoor use, and even on the bright summer days over the recent UK May Bank Holiday weekend, the panel stood up well.

The ultrasonic fingerprint sensor under the screen is responsive, and doesn’t suffer from the same issue as other Xiaomi or Honor phones I’ve tested, where it’s mounted quite far down the screen.

Cameras

• 50MP 1/1.55-inch main snapper
• 50MP ultrawide
• Okay image quality, but only at the wide end

Let’s face it – you aren’t buying a phone as beefy as the 11S Pro for its camera system, although for a device that costs as much as it does, I’d expect a good degree of image quality.

This RedMagic handset features a similar setup to the standard 11 Pro, with a pair of 50MP lenses on the rear of the device – a 50MP main sensor with a 1/1.55-inch sensor, with a stabilised lens, plus a 50MP ultrawide. There isn’t a dedicated telephoto or zoom lens.

In general here, images out of the main sensor and with the ultrawide are pleasant enough, with reasonable colours and solid resolution of finer details at the wider end of the focal range. Colours tend to be sharpened up and a little brighter than they appear in the real world, though – a sign RedMagic is trying a little harder with its processing for a more ‘pleasing’ image in my view.

With this in mind, pixel-peeping reveals that the exposure of things such as the blue of a sky or the green leaves on trees can lack a little pop, while the lack of a dedicated telephoto lens means you won’t want to zoom in beyond 2x or so.

Even going up to the 5x range revealed a massive fall-off of quality, while the less about the maximum 10x digital zoom end, the better. Likewise, low light performance at the wide end is better than when zoomed in too much, with resultant images being grainy and lacking in detail.

The 16MP selfie snapper on the front is okay for casual snaps of yourself, although it left me looking a little washed out and smoothed over, unlike other handsets with much stronger detail retention and better colours.

Performance

• Flagship class performance
• Immense 3D results for gaming
• Upgraded active cooling system

RedMagic has upgraded the power station inside the 11S Pro against the older 10S Pro to bring it on par with the standard 11 Pro model – it’s outfitted with the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC, albeit the Leading Version with higher clock speeds, which means some especially beefy performance that’s befitting of a top-end gaming phone.

Performance here is a touch stronger than that of other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-powered flagships, such as the Oppo Find X9 Ultra, in our synthetic benchmark tests, perhaps owing to the clever liquid cooling and active fan combo that’s been further optimised against older RedMagic handsets with a larger vapour chamber, upgraded liquid metal and a very fast fan.

3D performance is especially strong, with this handset blitzing the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test with scores above the usual suspects of flagship phones, with a score that’s pushing 8000 points. The only thing that’s a little odd is that, in spite of using the same chip, the score here is somewhat lower than the standard RedMagic 11 Pro.

As much as synthetic benchmarking is only one side of the story, it translates well to real-world performance, with the 11S Pro offering remarkably brisk performance in the likes of Wuthering Waves and COD Mobile, which can bring lesser handsets to their knees. It’s more a question of what this phone can’t run than what’s possible with the flagship grunt inside.

With added touches such as the touch triggers on the side and as much power internally as the 11S Pro has, this feels like a proper gaming phone, rather than a phone that has enough power to play games, and I imagine all this will come in handy for folks wanting to push their phone into the emulation space.

You can spec the 11S Pro with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, providing more than enough headroom for the intensive gaming this phone is designed for. The higher capacity is reserved for more storage, with 512GB available at the top-end.

Software & AI

• RedMagic OS 11, based on Android 16
• Oodles of gaming features
• Some crud pre-installed

My general gripe with a lot of these lesser-known manufacturers is that they can tend to stuff their phones full of needless crud in terms of apps, system settings and functions you’re never going to use. With the 11S Pro, I was pleasantly surprised in some respects.

It runs RedMagic OS 11, which is the brand’s highly customised Android 16 variant that’s packed to the nines with an array of gaming features, such is the positioning of this phone.

The little red slider switch on the right side of the phone brings up RedMagic’s Game Space, which acts as a console-like dashboard where you can boot up your installed games. While you’re in games, there’s a feature-rich overlay for optimising performance, screen recording, preventing accidental touches and such. 

One of the 11S Pro’s more unique features is the Mora digital assistant that’s likely to be perfect for the weebs in the audience. It’s the brand’s animated waifu mascot that you can do everything from chat to with their AI chatbot function, or leave sitting on your home screen, where they’ll make comments about the phone’s battery percentage, for instance.

Apart from this, this is a more run-of-the-mill Android device, with all of Google’s usual AI powers, such as Circle To Search, Gemini integration and the like, and with the 144Hz screen in tow, RedMagic OS 11 felt slick and zippy.

That being said, things aren’t entirely perfect. There is some guff pre-installed, such as the Booking.com and Facebook apps, alongside a modicum of games I didn’t ask for, although it’s easy enough to clean the OS up to get it to how you want it to be.

Battery Life

• 7500mAh battery
• 80W wired charging
• 80W wireless charging

This latest handset boasts one of the largest batteries I’ve seen on a modern smartphone, packing in a capacious 7500mAh capacity cell that, in theory, should put a lot of modern flagships to shame. It’s also a slight upgrade over the 7050mAh capacity cell in the old 10S Pro.

This worked out to around eight hours of screen-on time at a higher brightness level for my reasonably intensive day of multi-tasking for social media scrolling, streaming music through Roon Arc or Tidal, taking photos and sorting some work through Google Docs, not least because of how bright it is outside in the merry month of May in the UK at the time of writing.

For a more scientific test, a cursory run of the PCMark Work V3.0 battery test at 50% brightness worked out to around 12 hours of use. This isn’t ground-breaking, but it is still enough juice to get you through a working day or two with the handset with little fuss.

RedMagic ships an 80W wall plug with the 11S Pro, although it was European-flavoured, which meant I couldn’t use it to test the phone’s charging speeds. Instead, I used my usual 66W 6A Honor adapter, which was still brisk in its speeds, taking 30 minutes to get the phone back to 50 percent and 61 minutes to get back to full charge. It can also do 80W over wireless charging, assuming you’ve got a high-enough wattage RedMagic adapter, which I don’t.

Should you buy it?