This smartphone has a frankly ludicrous 10GB RAM

You don’t need 8GB RAM in your smartphone, but some manufacturers stick in that much anyway – and the impact on our benchmarks has been negligible, as you can see in our OnePlus 6T review. Nonetheless, it’s a number that can be nudged ever upwards for people who really want to brag, and it’s in that spirit that Chinese manufacturer Nubia has unveiled its Red Magic Mars handset, which packs an absolutely unnecessary 10GB RAM.
 

Sold as a gaming phone, it also packs the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 that nearly every other flagship Android device packs, which means you can expect pretty similar performance. To ensure you don’t push it too hard with the gaming, it includes a vapour-cooling system to prevent overheating… something that’s never been an issue for me, no matter how many games of Threes I play.
 
Still, if you’re the kind of person who cares about ‘proper’ gaming, but still unaccountably believes that the smartphone is the place to do it, then a few extras should make it a bit more appealing than your standard utilitarian smartphone. It has capacitive shoulder buttons, for a start, as well as a motor-based rumbled system and a joystick attachment that can be added to either end of the phone. Taking a leaf from the, uh, ‘eye-catching’ world of gaming laptops, it also has a RGB light strip that responds to action in game.  
The trouble with all of these features is how widely supported they are. It may well be that the Nubia Red Magic Mars phone offers a better way of playing games, but if none are optimised for it then it doesn’t really make much of a difference. And bluntly if you’re not an Apple or maybe a Samsung, then there’s not too much incentive for developers to compensate for your handset’s quirks.

A 1080p LCD screen, 3,800mAh battery and 16MP camera round out the specifications, and it starts shipping in China on 7 December for 2,699 yuan (~£300) for the model with ‘just’ 6GB RAM, 3,199 yuan (~£360) for the 8GB version or 3,999 yuan (~£450) for the 10GB monster. The original Red Magic did sell in the UK online, so it’s possible this updated version should be coming too if you fancy getting your hands on one.