Redmagic upgrades its liquid-cooled gaming phone with extra RGBs

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.

The cameras are predictably basic, too: a pair of 50-megapixel rear cameras, one main and one ultrawide, neither with especially large sensors. The best thing about them is their design: completely flush with the phone’s body, sitting underneath the same glass panel that stretches across the rest of the rear.

The other standout spec is the 185Hz refresh rate display, though like most high refresh rate displays, it hits the max speed only during certain compatible games. Redmagic boasts that this is the first 185Hz display to feature an under-display selfie camera too, one of those achievements that’s a record by virtue of its sheer specificity. The 16-megapixel camera here is very difficult to see — it’s much less visible than the iPhone Duo’s under-display camera — but photo quality is limited. It’s good enough for video calls, but selfies look rubbish, and it uses aggressive AI beautification features that as best as I can tell are impossible to turn off, perhaps to help mask how poor the quality is otherwise.

Redmagic isn’t immune to industrywide pricing pressure, so the 12 Pro starts at $949 — a $200 increase on the 11 Pro, and $100 up on May’s 11S Pro — climbing to $1,199 for the top spec. Every version includes both liquid cooling and RGB lights at least, which wasn’t true the last time around. Preorders start November 12th, with shipping from the 18th.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge