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dsrajawat · 4 years

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With the advent of hyper-casual, cross-platform, multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) and live stream culture, a gaming phone is more relevant than ever before. But from the Nokia N-gage days to recent past, this has been a stumbling pursuit and brushed off as pointless. However, that hasn’t stopped a few brands like Nubia, who are steadfast in their resolve. Accordingly, we have come across “truly” gaming smartphones, like the one in this review, that claim a competitive advantage over their mainstream counterparts.

The Nubia Red Magic 3S was launched in India in the latter half of the year. It might have flown under your radar, partly since 2019 witnessed a glut of quality smartphones. Secondly, this ZTE associate is a fairly lesser-known brand in the country. Nonetheless, when the device came across my hands, I decided to give it a try. In fact, I’ve been putting it to the test since then.

So, if it piques the gamer gene in you to know whether this should be a part of your gaming setup, read along. I’ll be sharing my experience over the course of this review.

But before we delve into details, let’s get the specs out of our way.

Nubia Red Magic 3S Price and Specifications

Model Nubia Red Magic 3S Display 6.65-inches, 1080 x 2340 pixels, 18:9 aspect ratio, AMOLED, 90Hz refresh rate, and HDR support Processor 2.96 GHz Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor with Adreno 640 GPU RAM + Internal Storage 8GB RAM + 128GB internal storage12GB RAM + 256GB internal storage Expandable Memory No Software Android 9 Pie Selfie Camera 16MP (f/2.0 aperture) Rear Camera 48MP (f/1.7 aperture) Battery 5000mAh with 27W fast charging support SIM Dual SIM (Nano + Nano-SIM) Connectivity Dual VoLTE support, Bluetooth v5.0, WiFi 802.11ac, a 3.5mm audio jack, USB-C port, and USB OTG Sensors Proximity, Accelerometer, Compass, Gyroscope, Fingerprint sensor Colors Mecha Silver and Cyber Shade India Price Rs. 35,999/ Rs. 47,999

Nubia Red Magic 3S: Unboxing

Nubia Red Magic 3S ships in a somber yet stylish square box. Inside it, you get a –

The Phone

Charging brick

USB Type-C cable

User Manual

Sim Ejector tool

Nubia Red Magic 3S Review: Design and Build

It’s like the Nubia designers let their imagination run wild and came up with this polarizing look. The design resembles something inspired by the Transformers, the movie franchise. Build-wise, it’s a metallic stout that weighs around 215 grams, which is slippery and a bit unwieldy.

But the make is mused over and it’s more than what meets the eye. The choice of metal over glass means better heat dissipation. Although the convex-shaped base acts as a rocking chair when placed on a surface, it offers a nice hold. Rest, everything from the slightly jutting diamond-shaped rear camera to the air intake grill, fingerprint scanner, RBG strip to the logo feels sauce!

To the right, you get two touch-sensitive triggers, an exhaust vent, volume rockers, and the power button. While the left side has the Game Space switch, SIM-card tray, and the connector for the dock station. Nubia has given both a USB-C socket and a 3.5mm audio jack – things we no longer take for granted.

Now, the fancy elements of the Nubia design DNA might very well throw off a casual user. But, Nubia’s aesthetic choices, for all intents and purposes, do stand out from the crowd.

Nubia Red Magic 3S Review: Display & Audio

Nubia Red Magic display keeps up with the times. The FHD+ AMOLED panel supports the 90Hz refresh rate. The panel measure 6.65-inches diagonally with an 18:9 aspect ratio. There’s HDR support too.

Needless to say, the display is smooth but the higher refresh rate does cut back on the battery life. Now, if you try to bring it down to 60Hz, you wouldn’t find the option right away. Dig deeper into the Game Space settings, there’s an option to toggle between 60 and 90 hertz. But mind you, this is not applied system-wide, which defeats the point.

The screen legibility is fine at 480 nits under both sun and shade. However, while kept in comparison to some of its peers, we felt it could’ve been a wee bit brighter and sharper. Then there were times when the touch wasn’t as responsive as I wanted it to be. The long presses on the home screen or app drawer to open the menu or drag and drop items went undetected. Call it a one-off thing or even a software bug, but it was weird what so ever. Also, it only has support for Widevine L3 which means you can stream Netflix and Prime in 480p resolution only. Oof!

As for the sound, Red Magic sports dual front-firing speakers. The audio output is alright in terms of loudness and texture. The same is true for headphone sound staging. While I was testing the Skullcandy Sesh (review), the output was clearly finer on the OnePlus 7T (review).

Nubia Red Magic 3S Review: Camera

While the industry is pacing to place more and more cameras on their phones, Nubia has stuck to two shooters, one on either side. There’s a 16-megapixel shooter on the front and a 48-megapixel sensor at the back. The camera app is pretty straight forward with an easy to use interface. It comes with a dedicated macro mode, night mode, 48MP mode, and video recording up to 8K (although limited to 15fps), amongst other features.

However, when it comes to real-world performance, the camera pales grossly. The photos lack the detail, texture, and life you expect. In a similar vein, the selfies are gloomy, especially while taken indoor. The faces look overly softened. Lack of OIS means the videos come out jittery. The case is similar when it comes to the Slomo feature. Although it boasts 1920 fps, the result is choppy. Even missing basics like native portrait mode is not appreciated in 2019-20.

Here are some camera samples for your reference –

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Selfie

Night Mode

Nubia Red Magic 3S Review: Gaming & Battery Life

Performance is the strongest suit of Red Magic 3S. After all, it’s a gaming phone. It is engined by a Snapdragon 855+ chipset, coupled with up to 12GB RAM and 256GB ROM. Nubia has slapped stock-ish Android on top. This means a bloat-free and smooth experience. But, on the other hand, some of you might not like the baseline AOSP and find it a lil too bland.

But if you ask me, it was right up my alley. The skin is bloat-free, smooth and responsive. Two things that really irked me were – the persistent ‘SIM1 is HD capable‘ notification and every time I tap mobile data QS tile, it took a moment to respond. Oo Yes, gesture navigation and system-wide dark mode are also heavily missed here. For some weird reason, the given Dark Theme failed to work. Plus, Android 9 feels dated when its peers like Asus ROG Phone 2 (review) are already enqueued for the latest Android 10.

The software also plays a big part in the gaming experience. For instance, the Game Space lets you manage your games in one place. It can be toggled on or off using the hardware switch on the top left corner. You can control the fan cooling speed and other game settings, track the performance, block calls and notifications for a focussed gaming session. You even get an option to customize the RGB LED strip at the back.

Here’s a quick rundown its special gaming features –

4D customizable vibrations, the shoulder triggers, action button, and even the fingerprint reader enhances the control and command over the games.

The light strip (which is BTW customizable) might appeal to anyone who’s a sucker for the RGB light.

A second-generation ICE liquid cooling coupled with an actual fan does a good job in heat dissipation.

ALSO READ: Skullcandy Sesh Review

Nubia Red Magic 3S Review: Verdict

Reviewing a gaming phone is a tad different than judging conventional phones. A gamer values and nitpicks on things that would hardly bother the mainstream audience. I state my case with Nubia’s design philosophy. Although the phone is a safe bet on the performance front, you can’t blame one for wishing a less garish look and better ergonomics. Similarly, Nubia could’ve cooked a polished software experience and given versatile and dependable cameras.

The magic it conjures up whilst gaming is appealing for sure. But if that doesn’t excite you, there is hardly anything worth aspiring. At the starting price of Rs. 35,999, one does have more than “good enough” flagship killers. If you can shell out a bit more, there you have the ROG Phone 2.

Nubia Red Magic 3S Review With the advent of hyper-casual, cross-platform, multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) and live stream culture, a gaming phone is more relevant than ever before.

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simon-frey-eu · 5 years

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Off-line developing during an intercity trip in 2019

As you might imagine from the title, I am at the moment of writing this article sitting in a train from Berlin to Hamburg. For those of you who have never been in Germany...we do have WIFI on the trains here, but contrary to what you might expect it is really bad. (And if it is sometimes fast enough, you get only 200mb of traffic <= Thanks to mac address randomization that can be bypassed)

Wait, what? Bad WIFI on trains in the first world industry nation Germany? Yes, even during my travel on a train in Thailand I had way better WIFI than I ever experienced in the German trains. There are two main factors for that:

Bad mobile network overall...if you leave the bigger cities you most of the time do not even have Edge (yes kids, slower than 2G) or a mobile network connection at all. So sad!

Cheap hardware in the trains. Actually the modems in the trains are standard 3G modems you may also purchase as mobile hot-spot device. Sure they are a bit more powerful, but they are not made for this special use case: Connection to new base stations in at a high ratio. It actually is a quite hard technical challenge to have a modem do this on a high speed train. But we have 2019 ...thinking about sending people to mars...and as we can see in other countries this problem is apparently solved. Maybe some more money would be good invested here.

But enough ranting about the WIFI in here (that is BTW current non existent)

OK sorry one more thought: Looking around me I see a lot of people in nice suites working on there laptops. Imagine them earning 60€/hour and they need double the time for a task, because the WIFI is so weak. Assuming there are 100 (conservative calculation) of such people on a train. So during this single trip from Berlin to Hamburg (2h) there is 60€ * 100 * 2 = 12 000€ of wasted human capital....better not tell that any company paying their employees the train ride and the "work time" during this trip.

Actually this article is about tech

I experience this not the first time, but why am I triggered this time that much, that I decided to write a blog post about this topic? As web developer I am currently working on a live chat project (gramchat.me - please be kind, the landing page would be finished if I actually could work here) where I wanted to finish the landing page & documentation during this trip.

Now I experience myself sitting here and my laptop, normally the device paying my rent, is not more than a dump black box....close to every work flow I have does requires the Internet, I can't work off-line. grrrrr

How could that happen? Normally I am always at places with good WIFI or mobile network (Berlin Big City Life) and so some bad habits sneaked in:

Development work

Google fonts

Payment gateway that needs to be configured

Documentation (How could anyone write software before stackoverflow?)

Package tools for just in time downloading of dependencies

Github Issues and Board for organization

Backend infrastructure is build on AWS lambda (can't test that offline)

Entertainment

Movies are on netflix

Music is on spotify

I read mostly blog posts and web articles (via Hackero ;))

Communication

Telegram/WhatsApp/Email

Information

I am struggling to write this article as non-native speaker as I can't use Google translate

...and so on

Short interruption: Because of other issues I had to change to another (slower) train. This one does not have WIFI at all...so now next level shit.

I sit here and have basically three options what to do:

Compose electronic music with LMMS, what I downloaded a few weeks ago but have no clue how to use it :'D

Code something in Go. Thanks Goland for your awesome build in standard lib documentation!

Write this article ranting about the German train situation and about myself of being so depended on a resource I thought about as natural as air

So here I am writing the article :D

Prevent such a situation in the future

So the biggest fail, is me not being prepared for off-line usage of my devices. So what will I do to prevent this in the future? Technical problems need technical solutions:

Entertainment

Music: Have at least some of my favorite playlists available offline

Movies: Actually I see it not as a big problem not binch-watching for some hours => Keeps me focused on working

Get a off-line "read it later" system. A while ago I used wallabag and will reinstall it on all my devices.

Communication

You actually can not do much about it...so nothing to improve here

If you do not have an off-line usable email and messaging client you should get yourself one. (Telegram has a nice desktop standalone) It is nice to at least be able to search trough archived emails/chats

Information

Off-line dictionary it is

Is there a Firefox/Chrome Plugin that save all the web pages I visit to an off-line storage? So that I can go back in my history and access the pages I visited before...if not I might code one.

Development work

There are a lot different off-line code documentation systems. I did choose zeal as it works on Linux and is standalone (the other ones work in the browser and as I most of the time surf in private mode they would not work for me, as I wipe the local storage at least every few days)

Off-line PHP server => Was actually quite easy. Did you know PHP has a build-in server? php -S localhost:8080

AWS lambda offline testing framework? No clue how to this yet...maybe a good topic for another blogpost

There are actually some clients for github with offline issue support. I will give them a try

Cache/save web resources locally. Maybe a good idea overall..better not include Google as dependency in your project as they will abuse that data you send them with every visitor

There is an (sadly old) StackOverflow dump, that could end up in some tool to search trough it...would be amazing. (but maybe will take a lot of disk space)

Oh girl, another thing came up: I have to show my train ticket, wich is a PDF attached to an email...that I never downloaded. What is going on here...my life goes nuts without Internet. Download your important tickets/documents

So overall this trip showed me how depending I am on the Internet and that I should change that. Please see this post as work in progress as I will update and add off-line tools when I get to know them and have more experience with them.

Overall there is one main learning: Download stuff instead of only opening it in the browser. (Same here with my university pdfs...never did download them for offline use, so no research for me no)

If someone was in this situation him or herself and found out other tools that helped I would love if you share them with me, so that I can introduce them into my stack and update this article.

So now I hope that the Edge Internet connection I have on my mobile Hotspot right now will be enough to upload this article :'D

Wish you an awesome (online) time!

Simon

p.S. Another thing I found: Check what applications are using Internet on your machine, so that if you only have low bandwidth this important resource does not get sucked away by an open Skype or so.

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