// THE VERGE — HARDWARE & GADGET
Redmagic upgrades its liquid-cooled gaming phone with extra RGBs
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
After introducing true liquid cooling to its gaming phones last year, Redmagic is upping the ante in its 12 Pro by building RGB lights into the transparent cooling loop, too.
And they work! Sort of. The lights do turn on, and they can be set to glow in set patterns, activate for specific apps, or trigger for notifications and calls. The problem is that like last year’s 11 Pro, the cooling system itself uses fluorescent blue liquid, which the lights have to work against. Blue or white lighting just makes it look more blue, green turns out turquoise, and red or orange lights mostly produce colored bubbles swimming in a blue tide.
The liquid-cooling RGBs are joined by a few other lights across the phone, with a small ring below the main camera, a side light that shines out from inside the chassis, and thin strips on the touch-sensitive shoulder buttons. Those don’t have the liquid to work against, so they shine in the intended color and often look quite different from the cooling ring. To complete the inconsistency, there are two strips of visible liquid cooling without RGB lights in the phone’s top-right corner, around and below the Redmagic logo, so those will be blue no matter what. Good luck getting all of this to match.
The liquid cooling itself is improved beyond the lights, with output pressure of 130kPa, 85 percent up on the previous generation. It’s once again joined by both a built-in fan and a vapor chamber, which between them should be enough to keep the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 in check.
It’s joined by 12GB or 16GB of RAM (the 24GB variant is seemingly a victim of RAMageddon) and 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage. The 8,400mAh battery should last a day or two, even while powering those lights and cooling, and the 80W charging is fairly fast. There’s an IP69 rating for water and dust resistance across most of the phone, though that may not count for much since the section around the fan is only IPX8, with no rated dust protection, making for a pretty large weak point. Existing Redmagic users may also be disappointed that the 3.5mm headphone jack has disappeared.