It’s no secret that modern Android phones often pack unnecessary specs – I’m looking at you, 108MP cameras and 4K displays – and the new Nubia Red Magic 7 Pro brings more.
This is a new gaming phone from a company that has made several at this point (hence the ‘7’ in the name), so you might think it would know exactly what gamers have need. Well, what they apparently need is more RAM than your average gaming PC.
That’s right, the recently unveiled Red Magic 7 Pro is available in a few configurations, and they cap out at 18GB of RAM. Or, if you want to stick with a paltry 16GB of RAM, you can go up to 1TB of storage space. It’s a lot.
When I took the phone out of the box and saw the high specs on the side of the box, I was quite surprised. But it wasn’t until I was playing on my gaming PC later that I really tweaked those specs.
It exceeds my gaming PC
My gaming PC, built in 2021 to be able to handle high-end games, plus anything DaVinci Resolve and Adobe After Effects might throw at it, has “only” 16GB of RAM.
This was an amount that when I purchased the parts was sold to me as sufficient for these intensive processes. And, after using the PC for months, that seems good enough for gaming or making videos. So 16GB is great for tasks you wouldn’t even do on a smartphone.
The PC also has a 1TB SSD, the same amount of storage space as the Nubia phone. Granted, it wasn’t the best decision on my part, and I just ordered a 6TB hard drive, but it shows that the Red Magic 7 Pro matches my gaming PC for storage space as well.
Obviously, when you switch to the other specs, my gaming PC has Nubia pace – but even when it comes to RAM, I just don’t understand why the phone needs it so badly.
I should point out that neither the 18GB nor 1TB models of Red Magic 7 Pro are for sale in the US. But both versions which both have 16GB of RAM – the same as my PC – so my point remains.
The state of the game
When it comes to mobile gaming, there’s one simple fact that undermines a lot of the marketing fluff around gaming phones.
Cell phones are not like consoles; there are not just two or three versions that all players have. There are hundreds of different types of cell phones, and to ensure that all cell phone owners can play games together, most titles are optimized to play on all devices.
You don’t need a super powerful mobile to play PUBG, or Call of Duty, or Fortnite, or Genshin Impact. Any fairly modern device can do this, but maybe not in the best graphics options.
It’s a curious, but appreciated, difference that mobile has with PC – many PC developers are happy to just shrug their shoulders and say “well, some players can’t play our game”, excluding users who don’t have the top-end specs.
Maybe because they’re designed to be portable and easily accessible, or maybe because mobile developers are vying for your attention, any old phone can play all the most popular games. .
With that in mind, 18GB of RAM is just plain unnecessary. I’d go so far as to say you don’t really need more than 8GB, and some won’t even need that.
So why are phone companies, especially Nubia, pushing so hard on extra RAM like this? Well, it’s hard to know for sure, but there’s a reason I can think of: I wouldn’t write this article if the phone had a normal amount of memory.
