Tencent-branded RedMagic gaming phone with 165Hz display launched

RedMagic, the gaming brand of the ZTE Nubia subdivision, has launched a new smartphone in collaboration with Chinese tech and gaming giant Tencent. The RedMagic 6 and 6 Pro are high-end devices available to order now in China, with a global launch later this month.

The RedMagic 6 features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, active fan cooling, and a 6.8-inch 1080p OLED display with a 165Hz refresh rate, making it the phone’s most popular display. fastest on the market today. RedMagic also claims a single-finger touch sample rate of up to 500Hz, or up to 360Hz with multitouch. The side-touch capacitive “shoulder triggers”, on the other hand, are sampled up to 400 Hz.

The RedMagic 6 Pro is mostly identical, but it comes with up to 18GB of RAM and has a faster 120W charging system which RedMagic says can fully charge the 4,500mAh battery in just 17 minutes. The non-Pro 6 has a bigger 5050mAh battery but a slower 66W system that takes 38 minutes for a full charge.

The Tencent collaboration is quite unusual. RedMagic claims the phone’s software is optimized for Tencent apps like WeChat and QQ, with 50% faster read and write speeds. Tencent’s Solar Core gaming software is also preloaded, and the company promises to improve game response speed, frame rates, and network latency.

The RedMagic 6 starts at 3,799 yuan (~ $ 585) for a model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, but you can pay almost twice as much for a fully loaded 18GB / 512GB RedMagic 6 Pro – it’ll cost 6,599 yuan (~ $ 1,020). World prices will likely be different, however; RedMagic will announce international release plans on March 16.