I enjoy a good gamer basement as much as the next guy. I’m quite sympathetic to the benefits of RGB in a gaming setup: your space, your games, your color scheme. I don’t mind reviewing the occasional 250,000-pound gaming laptop sporting more colored lights than there are people on this planet.
But this is when we’re talking about PCs. These are things that exist in your house for you alone to enjoy. They enhance your gaming experience exactly the way you want it, at no cost to anyone else. When you bring this kind of setup out into the town square, it serves a slightly different function. RGB lights, in public, are a message, a performance, an aesthetic. Bringing an MSI Titan 18 to Starbucks (I say this as someone who has done that exact thing many times before) is a choice. Yes, it is an aesthetic decision you have every human right to make. On the other hand, some of your fellow Starbucks denizens probably didn’t sign up to drink their flat whites in a nightclub.
Anyway, RedMagic has launched its 12 Pro gaming smartphone, and it’s basically an ROG Strix in mobile form. Like its predecessor, the 11 Pro, it sports a neat liquid cooling system arranged in a transparent loop, as well as a built-in fan and vapor chamber. Unlike its predecessor, the liquid cooling system now features bright, colorful lights that create neat, spotty effects.
That’s not all: there’s a luminescent ring below the main camera, light strips on the shoulder buttons and in various other places, and all of these can be set to illuminate in patterns and fire up for events such as the opening of an app or an incoming call. They also don’t always match, but who needs visual cohesion when there’s literally a light show on our phone?
RedMagic isn’t the only company convinced that the biggest problem in the current global smartphone space is its lack of pretty lights, though it is the first to specifically shove them into the cooling loop. The Infinix GT 50 Pro, announced back in April, has four full “crosshair” light strips flanking its liquid-cooling window, and the iQOO 15 Ultra, from February, has a frankly inappropriately monstrous light strip integrated into its rear camera module.
RedMagic and RGB do go back a ways: you may recall that RedMagic’s original handset launched with a single light strip (pffft, child’s play) in 2018. But this 12 Pro looks more like a miniature gaming PC than any Android phone I’ve seen. The transparent back, the visible coolant, and the RGB lighting all evoke a pocket-sized gaming tower.
RGB of somewhat questionable utility also has a long history in the gaming community. Companies like Corsair and MSI have been putting out bright and colorful gaming hardware for at least the past decade-plus. The former has literally been selling fake RAM sticks since 2018—sticks that don’t actually contain any memory but certainly contain pretty bright lights to spruce up your desktop system.
But phones are a bit of a different beast. For one thing, they’re used in places like C-suite meetings, black-tie weddings, museums, and the subway. For another, you can’t even see the primary light show on the 12 Pro while you’re gaming, given its positioning, but everyone else within a mile of you certainly can. Today’s RGB gaming phones make a statement to those around you—to everyone but you.
I don’t mean to be a hater here; I’m sure some people will buy this phone and absolutely love it. But who? I want names.
