Redmagic gaming smartphones entered the South African market recently, and offer South Africans a viable alternative to mainstream, or traditional, smartphones that we are used to. The difference is that Redmagic costs around the same as their mainstream counterparts, while offering a better bang-for-your-Rand experience, allowing you to take full advantage, and reap all the performance benefits, that you paid for, without artificially limiting your experience.
Recently, there were reports of Samsung throttling the experience of a large variety of applications, ironically attributed to their Game Optimisation Service. Android Authority compiled a report, looking at over 10 000 applications that were affected by the Game Optimisation Service, and essentially it boiled down to the fact that Samsung was limiting the capabilities of applications in order to preserve battery life. Now, it is important to note that Samsung is not the sole perpetrator of this kind of act, as many smartphone manufacturers have implemented this practice over the years, all in the name of claiming high battery life numbers.
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However, Samsung seems to be excluding benchmarking applications from this practice, whereby if you ran an app such as 3DMark, PCMark, and GFXBench, they all came through with phenomenal performance numbers, making a case that the phone is a gaming monster. Korean YouTuber, 네모난꿈, even demonstrated this by changing the 3DMark package name to Genshin Impact – a game that is “optimised” through Samsung’s GOS service – and after running the same benchmark while the service was turned off, the score was significantly lower – less than half, in fact. This resulted in the title running at almost triple the frame rate on the same device.
The throttling also affected non-gaming applications, such as Instagram, Netflix, and TikTok, which lead to frustration from users, as their experience was significantly impacted by this service, which is meant to only identify gaming applications, and utilise the GOS service to reduce temperatures and increase battery life. While it is completely understandable that these manufacturers would want to balance performance with things like battery life and temperatures, there is the argument that users are paying for the performance from their device but are being throttled from accessing it fully. On top of that, it’s more sinister since benchmarking apps are completely excluded from this throttling, meaning that companies have actively made it look like their devices are offering the full performance of the device, when they simply aren’t.
Currently, the GOS service is an app itself – the irony just doesn’t stop – so you can just uninstall it and let your phone run as was intended. However, there is nothing to stop them from adding it into the hardware itself, or hard-coded into the software of the device, in future, meaning that you won’t be able to disable it. This is done because of a simple reason – the hardware in mainstream smartphones is not able to effectively cool the devices when using intense programmes such as gaming. The likes of Apple and Samsung are mainly focused on things like friendly UI, camera technology, and ease-of-use when it comes to IoT (internet of things), because their market demands easy-to-use, long-lasting devices for business and IoT functionality, where gaming is just a side thought.
Enter Redmagic
Enter Redmagic, whose gaming phones are not only ease-of-use, and long-lasting devices for business and IoT applications, but are also built for gaming, because that is what the company intended them for from the very beginning. They were designed with better cooling, and better energy efficiency, in order to offer the same capabilities as mainstream smartphone devices, without having to compromise gaming performance.
Another way to look at it is this: imagine an Apple or Samsung device as a standard, good work-horse business notebook. Yes, it may be able to run some games, but the sacrifices made to run those programmes include specific software to limit the game’s performance, therefore, limiting the experience from the end-user. However, outside of gaming, it is an absolute machine at spreadsheets, calculations, and general IoT functionality. Then you have Redmagic, the gaming notebook, built to be able to run games at their full capacity due to better cooling hardware, which eliminates the need to restrict gaming applications in the first place.
The point is that Redmagic designed their smartphones with gaming at its core, and added the standard smartphone functionality to it, because gaming is more intense than all the other applications it will be required to run, offering a better experience all around. Imagine building a better foundation, built to withstand a more intense workload thrown at it, then adding all the smaller bits to it, rather than the other way around.
The caveat to this, though, is that gaming notebooks are typically more expensive, sometimes almost double the cost of their mainstream counterparts, but that isn’t the case with Redmagic, which makes the world of difference. Redmagic entered the South African market with a series of phones that are priced on par with the likes of Samsung, while offering a better experience, especially for those who do commit a good chunk of time to mobile gaming, or even those who only have access to mobile games as their primary source of gaming.
Recently, I spoke about how the South African market was ready for the likes of Redmagic, because of the fact that our mobile industry has had large revenue growth in the past couple of years, sitting at $107 million as of 2021, and projected growth of $128 million in 2022, and a whopping $216 million by 2026. This proves that while the eastern markets, such as Japan and China have had strong, large mobile markets for quite some time, the western markets are starting to see an upsurge of mobile gaming. This is even bolstered by the fact that most online multiplayer titles are getting mobile versions of their games, such as COD Mobile, Elder Scrolls: Blades, and PUBG Mobile; with Blades showing that we are now even getting fully-fledged action RPGs on mobile.
Along with the higher graphical fidelity and faster refresh rates that mobile games are starting to offer, content absorption such as Netflix and YouTube are also enhanced on gaming phones, such as Redmagic, without the artificial limitations implemented by mainstream smartphone manufacturers. It boils down to the simple fact that Redmagic offers better bang-for-your-Rand, at the end of the day, and you can access all the performance you have paid for, without artificial limitations.
The Redmagic gaming phones are a better choice for those who are serious about their mobile gaming sessions, because of one big, obvious, factor – they are optimised for gaming. Yes, it sounds redundant to say out loud, but Redmagic gaming phones are built for gaming, and don’t implement artificial limitations on their devices, as well offering standard smartphone features along with it, so that you don’t need to worry about things like updates throttling your gaming experience.
Redmagic gaming phones are a recent introduction into the South African gaming market, and they are finally a viable alternative to traditional, or mainstream, smartphone options. Redmagic also offers a better alternative for those who are looking for a more optimised solution for mobile gaming, especially those who are serious about gaming on the go. We have been mostly tied to the likes of Samsung and Apple, along with Huawei, and so on, but Redmagic offers one crucial element that these others don’t – gaming is at the centre of their experience.
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