nubia Red Magic 7 Pro in for review

The ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro has been enjoying life in China since February, but as of today you can also order it globally. And it’s time to add some hands-on impressions to those specs.

The nubia Red Magic 7 Pro comes in a stocked retail box with a USB cable, a fashionable case, a 65W charger, and a SIM tool. In China the phone gets a 135W charger, along with support for it, which is the only change on the global model.

Like the nubia Red Magic 7, the Pro has a built-in fan. At its spinniest, it makes just 28dB of noise and can drop the CPU temperature by as much as 16 degrees C. It’s part of nubia’s ICE 8.0 cooling solution, which features nine layers, including a Composite Phase Heat Dissipation Material, a new thermally-conductive gel, a vapor chamber, and a graphite sheet.

nubia Red Magic 7 Pro unboxing, built-in fan

Compared to the nubia Red Magic 7, the 7 Pro isn’t drastically different. Our unit ships with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM and then there’s also an Obsidian version with half the storage, but the same amount of RAM.

You get a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip and a 6. 8-inch 1080x2400px display with 120Hz refresh rate (the vanilla 7 does 165Hz). It compensates with a larger 5,000mAh battery.

Compared to the nubia Red Magic 7

The final difference isn’t easily spotted with a naked eye. To show the difference, we had to pull out our macro lens. It’s the 16MP under-display selfie camera, a move away from the conventional 8MP selfie with a cutout on the Red Magic 7.

The camera is nearly invisible when the screen is on or off. You’d need to point the front glass at direct sunlight to spot the sparser array of pixels on top of the hidden lens. The pixels on the camera turn off when it is used to receive more light.

Selfies made with the under-display camera, which prioritizes invisibility, are predictablely bad. These photos lack meaningful detail, and they have poor contrast and definition. The dynamic range is also quite poor. This camera would be used for video calls only. We could also take selfies using the main rear cameras.

Samples from the under-display camera

We’ve already handed the Red Magic 7 Pro to our review team and you can expect them to report back with their findings shortly!