It’s no secret that modern Android phones often have unnecessary specifications – I’m looking at you, 108 MP cameras and 4K monitors – and the new Nubia Red Magic 7 Pro brings some more.
This is a new gaming phone from a company that has done quite a bit at this point (hence the “7” in the name), so you would think it would know exactly what gamers need. Well, what they apparently need is more RAM than your average gaming PC.
That’s right, the newly unveiled Red Magic 7 Pro comes in a few configurations, and they top it off with as much as 18GB of RAM. Or, if you want to stick to measly 16GB of RAM, you can go up to 1TB of storage space. That’s a lot.
When I took the phone out of the box and saw the high specifications on the side of the box, I was quite startled. But it was only when I later played on my gaming PC that I really got those specs reversed.
It tops my gaming pc
My gaming PC, built in 2021 to handle advanced gaming, as well as what DaVinci Resolve and Adobe After Effects could throw at it, has ‘only’ 16 GB of RAM.
This was an amount which, when I bought the parts, was sold to me as enough for these intensive processes. And after using the PC for several months, it seems to be enough for games or video production. So 16 GB is just fine for tasks that you would not even do on a smartphone.
The PC ‘only’ also has a 1TB SSD, the same amount of storage space as the Nubia phone goes up to. Admittedly, this was not the best decision on my part, and I just ordered a 6TB HDD, but it shows that the Red Magic 7 Pro also matches my gaming PC in terms of storage space.
Of course, when you move on to the other specs, my gaming PC has the Nubia beat – but even when it comes to RAM, I just do not understand why the phone needs so much.
I must point out that neither the 18GB nor the 1TB models of Red Magic 7 Pro go on sale in the US. But the two versions that are, both have 16GB of RAM – the same as my PC – so my point remains.
Game state
When it comes to mobile gaming, there is a simple fact that undermines a lot of marketing fluff around gaming phones.
Mobile phones are not like consoles; there are not just two or three versions that all players have. There are hundreds of different types of mobile phones, and to ensure that all mobile owners can play games together, most titles are optimized to play on all devices.
You do not need a super powerful mobile to play PUBG, or Call of Duty, or Fortnite or Genshin Impact. Any fairly modern device can do that, but maybe not at the top of graphics capabilities.
This is a curious but valued difference that mobiles have with PCs – many PC developers are happy to just shrug their shoulders and say ‘well, some players can not play our games’, which locks out users who do not has top-end specifications.
Maybe because they are designed as portable and easily accessible, or maybe because mobile developers are trying hard to compete for your attention, any old phone can play all the most popular games.
With that in mind, 18GB of RAM is just completely unnecessary. I would go so far as to say that you really do not need more than 8 GB and some will not even need it.
So why are phone companies, especially Nubia, pushing so hard into additional RAM like this? Well, it’s hard to know for sure, but there’s one reason I can think of: I would not be writing this article if the phone had a normal amount of memory.