ZTE launches Nubia Red Magic gaming smartphone with cooling vents and configurable RGB lighting for CNY 2,499

Less than a week after Xiaomi announced its **first gaming-oriented smartphone** , rivals ZTE has just gone ahead and announced the Nubia Red Magic, a smartphone designed for gamers to the point that it even sports RGB LED lighting on the back. [caption id=“attachment_4439751” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The ZTE Nubia Black Magic smartphone. Image: Nubia[/caption] The Nubia Red Magic looks every bit like smartphone inspired by gaming PCs and laptops. Apart from the LED strip on the back which is also configurable to your choice, it features loads of sharp lines and angles that (supposedly) adds to the gaming aesthetic. If that has not caught your attention yet, the Red Magic also features air vents for extra cooling as well as multiple layers of graphite on the back to help with heat dispersion. Nubia has also added a hardware switch which can be flicked on to push the phone into what it calls ‘performance’ mode. Apart from the eye-catching design, the smartphone also comes packed to the gills in terms of internals. According to a report by GSMArena, the Nubia Red Magic features a 6-inch LTPS display with a resolution of 2160 x 1080p. The display is also protected by NEG Dinorex T2X-1 glass which should help if you do happen to drop your smartphone a lot. Unlike Xiaomi’s Black Shark smartphone, however, the Red Magic runs on an older Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. The phone comes in either 6 or 8 GB RAM variants with either 64 GB and 128 GB of storage depending on the variant you decide to buy. [caption id=“attachment_4439749” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] The Nubia Red Magic features configurable RGB LED lighting. Image: Nubia[/caption] The phone also packs a 24 MP f/1.7 camera on the back as well as a capable 8 MP f/2.0 wide-angle front camera for selfies. To handle extended gaming sessions, the Red Magic gets a 3,800 mAh battery along with fast-charging capabilities. Where gamers would be a little disappointed here is the lack of a stereo speaker setup. The Nubia Red Magic also runs Android Oreo 8.1 built on a new launched designed for the phone called Red Magic launcher. As for availability, the phone will go on sale in China on 26 April with a price tag of CNY 2,499 for the base variant (6GB RAM + 64 GB storage) and CNY 2,999 for the 8GB RAM variant.