The REDMAGIC series of smartphones are made for gaming. They’re aimed towards a premium, high-end gaming market for smartphones. But what if there’s a budget version of this type of gaming smartphones? Well, that’s why the new Nubia Neo 5 Max padphone was launched.
This is a humongous phone with a huge screen, triggers on both corners that we can remap in games, and also magnificent speakers too. Yes, it shares a lot of the REDMAGIC DNA. So, is this phone good?
Design
Let’s start off with the design of this phone. It’s massive, and also unapologetic with its gamer aesthetics. It’s clearly inspired by the REDMAGIC Astra tablet as there’s a strip at the side that imitates a see-through look. Even one of the would-be camera bumps became a window to look at the innards of the phone – though this chip doesn’t actually mean anything.
The eye symbol also has an RGB backlight and we can select up to 5 colours with a few different lighting modes, and the word “max” will only light up in white.
Now, I have to highlight one thing – while the phone looks amazing, the back is actually made out of glossy plastic – so it will get fingerprint stains quite easily.
Display
As for the display, this is a 7.5-inch IPS LCD screen with a resolution of 2664×1280 pixels and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. This display actually does have true DC dimming too – so zero flickering.
Despite being an IPS LCD screen, the screen can go up to 939 nits at most and down to around 5 nits at minimum.
We only have one color profile on this phone – and it can cover a pretty good color gamut coverage with fairly vivid colors, while the ΔE number is very low across the board. Great stuff, especially for such a big screen.
Specs and gaming performance
Then, how’s the gaming experience of this phone? It comes packed with the MediaTek Dimensity 7100 chipset – and yes, it’s rather new, but it’s not that powerful. Considering everything that we’ve talked about so far, I decided to test shooter games like Delta Force because this phone does have a collaboration with that game. I manage to get a lot of quick shots thanks to the snappy and responsive triggers without lifting my thumbs off the screen. The FPS number though… not that good, as the MediaTek Dimensity 7100 struggles to keep up.
COD Mobile is better here the frame rate is higher and more consistent. Yet thanks to the triggers, I actually had a great time playing the game with the touchscreen and the trigger instead of using a wireless controller like I always do.
I also tried out Fortnite and that worked well too – especially with the triggers. That’s the reason why I tried all these games – those triggers are catered towards shooter games that require quick and fast response. And I enjoyed every bit of it. I just wish that nubia used a more powerful chipset – like even the Dimensity 7400 would’ve been better.
Battery life
How about the battery life then? Well, not bad, actually. This massive phone has a massive battery too – 7,100mAh to be exact. No idea what’s the Wh value since it is not published anywhere.
Either way, this massive phone can last for around 21 hours in our standardized battery life test with the lights turned off. All things considered – especially that massive screen with a rather high resolution, this is actually very good. It can definitely last through one full day without any issues even with some gaming involved.
Charging speed
As for the charging speed, it comes with a 45W charger in the box with a right-angled cable so that it gets out of the way when we want to use bypass charging while gaming at the same time. Using this included charger, the phone takes around 90 minutes to charge from 15% to completion. At this part of the graph, we can see that the temperature is fluctuating up and down, which caused the charging speed to be throttled.
Switching over to our USB-PD PPS charger, the phone takes in at most 27W and it actually takes less time to charge because the temperature is lower overall, taking in around an hour to charge from 15% to completion. Actually really good, and that means we don’t have to rely on their own charger to get fast charging.
Special features
This phone also has a lot of special features like the ones we find on REDMAGIC phones. For the nubia Neo 5 Max in particular, it runs on MyOS on top of Android 16 – and it’s basically stock Android with their own features sprinkled on top. As what we’ve mentioned earlier, we have the Light Strip settings, the shoulder trigger settings, and also some extra utilities like the Game Center to manage all the games.
Most of the features are found in games via the toolbar, and we’ve talked about these features in another video – so watch it at the top right corner there. Bypass charging is also found here, and it’s called “Charge Separation”. I didn’t expect this budget gaming phone to be so well-made.
A few more things to mention
Few more things to highlight here – in the box, we have a piece of tempered glass screen protector included for this phone, including a matte hard shell case as well. Pretty neat.
The nubia Neo 5 Max itself has a USB 2.0 port at the bottom, dual SIM card slots, and that’s about it. Here is no audio jack which I think is sorely needed for a gaming phone.
By the way, the speakers on this phone is also amazing as they both fire to the sides, like a REDMAGIC phone too. And they sound rather good.
Should you buy the nubia Neo 5 Max?
So then, should you buy the nubia Neo 5 Max? I think if you like shooter games like PUBG Mobile, COD Mobile, Delta Force, Fortnite – all of that, then yes, this phone is literally made for those games.
As for the price – here they are alongside other promotional details:
- Price
- 8GB + 256GB @ RM1,399
- 8GB + 512GB @ Coming Soon (September 2026)
- Early Bird Promotion (17 August – 16 September 2026)
- RM1,299 + FREE nubia Cooler (while stocks last)
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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