In typical RedMagic fashion, the company today announced the second of its gaming smartphones for the year, the RedMagic 5S. As we saw last year, this is a somewhat minor revision of the RedMagic 5G, with some spec improvements. Weirdly enough, though, one of improvements isn't the chipset, with RedMagic maintaining the Snapdragon 865 5G chipset from the RedMagic 5G.
However, the company is improving performance in other ways. The company says it's using a new L-shaped cooling pipe, there's 4.3% more ventilation with the fan, and it's the first time a company is using silver as the thermal compound in a smartphone. To add to that, RedMagic is introducing an external cooling accessory, the Ice Dock, which should offer even better cooling.
There are other improvements, including up to 16GB of RAM, whereas previous RedMagic phones maxed out at 12GB. The storage is also upgrading from UFS 3.0 to UFS 3.1, which has some new features that make it faster and more efficient compared to UFS 3.0. The battery size is the same as the RedMagic 5G at 4,500mAh.
RedMagic has also improved the touch triggers on the side of the phone, which have a slightly higher 320Hz touch sampling rate, whereas the RedMagic 5G had a 300Hz sampling rate. The display is still Full HD with a 144Hz refresh rate, so it's essentially the same. Other features include a similar triple-camera setup to the last phone, stereo speakers, "4D Shock" vibration, and an improved game mode.
The phone is available for preorder in China today and it will go on sale August 1. The model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage will be available in a new silver color and cost ¥3,799 (roughly $542.50); a 12GB+256GB model will come in the blue and red Pulse color for ¥4,399 ($628.18), and the 16GB+256GB model will also be available in Pulse for ¥4,999 ($713.86). The Ice Dock will cost ¥179 ($25.56).
The phone will launch in international markets in September, but pricing details weren't announced. For the time being, fans can try to win a unit ahead of time with the company's new RedMagic 5th Space contest.
