Nubia Red Magic 5G Brings 144Hz Screens, Active Air Cooling To Phones

Gaming smartphones are made to be super fast and super powerful, even compared to smartphones that do have exactly the same specs. Whether you buy into that hype or not, one thing is sure, your phone will run hot when gaming intensively. That's true for any smartphone, even the regular premium ones, but gaming phones do have one advantage. Since they don't have to look handsome and classy, they can get away with putting an air-cooling fan inside just like the new nubia Red Magic 5G.

Thermal throttling has become a real problem for smartphone makers as processors get more and more powerful while phones get thinner and thinner. Most of the solutions, short of putting vents everywhere, involves lots of thermal paste and advanced copper cooling. Some, like the ASUS ROG Phone, even tried to use external fans to little effect.

That's what makes nubia's solution both interesting and odd. Imagine a small spinning fan inside the phone to drive cool air in and hot air out. That's exactly what the Red Magic 5G proposes and nubia boasts it results in cooling the phone by as much as 18 degrees Celsius, both while in heavy use and while charging at a fast 55W rate.

The Red Magic 5G does make other claims, like a 144Hz fast refresh rate that is admittedly an achievement for a 6.65-inch FHD+ AMOLED panel. It pairs that with a 240Hz touch response rate to make it feel even faster. Add the Snapdragon 865 processor, 5G support, 16GB RAM at most, and UFS 3.1 storage, and you definitely have the makings of a hot gaming phone, figuratively and literally.

As is typical with Chinese flagships, the price will probably floor you. The nubia Red Magic 5G starts at 3,799 RMB ($540) for 8GB RAM and 128GB storage all the way up to only 4,999 RMB ($710) for the top 16GB RAM and 256GB ROM combination. And as is typical with Chinese flagships, availability in the US is going to be in question.