A headphone jack in 2026. A fan-and-liquid cooling setup. Physical shoulder triggers. Red Magic is still making the phone that mainstream brands stopped making years ago, and honestly, I’m here for it. The Red Magic 12 Pro+ launched in China with the kind of spec sheet that makes regular flagships look a little timid.
A screen with no holes in it
The display is a 6.85-inch BOE X11 OLED at 2,688 x 1,216 pixels, running at 185Hz. Bezels are just 0.96mm thin. There’s no punch-hole camera either, because the selfie sensor, a 16-megapixel OmniVision unit, sits under the panel. Under-display cameras have a history of looking muddy, so I’d want to test this one before cheering. But for gaming, an uninterrupted screen is a real plus.
Performance and gaming extras
Power comes from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, backed by Red Magic’s own RedCore R5 gaming chip and G1 display chip. Memory is LPDDR5T at up to 10,667Mbps, and storage is UFS 4.1 Pro. The neat trick is that the phone can run super-resolution and frame interpolation at the same time, up to 2K and 185Hz, in supported games. That’s a mouthful, but it means sharper, smoother visuals without you fiddling with settings.
The title also mentions an 8,400mAh battery and a liquid-cooling system, which are the headline hardware bits for long sessions. Big cells and serious cooling go together here: a phone that holds its clocks and lasts all evening is worth more than a chart-topping benchmark that throttles after ten minutes.
Everything else you get
- Android 17-based RedMagic OS 12
- Ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint sensor
- 700Hz shoulder triggers
- Dual 1115E linear speakers and three microphones
- X-axis linear motor for haptics
- Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC and an IR blaster
- USB 3.2 Gen 2 and a 3.5mm headphone jack
Cameras are the usual gaming-phone afterthought, though not a bad one. You get a 50-megapixel main camera with optical stabilization and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide. Fine for snapshots. Nobody is buying this for photography.
Price, availability and the Golden Saga
Red Magic also previewed a limited-edition Golden Saga model with 24GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a forged-carbon cooling design. Pricing and the release date haven’t been announced. There’s no confirmed international launch either, so most of us will be looking at imports or a retailer markup again.
Why it matters
Gaming phones are a niche, but they’re where phone makers actually experiment. Cooling, triggers and high-refresh tricks tend to trickle down later. Red Magic keeps pushing hardware that regular brands won’t touch, and the headphone jack alone makes it a rare sight. The weak spot is the global story. A great phone you can’t easily buy is just a nice spec sheet. Still, if it lands in your region, this one deserves a look.